HARTFORD, Conn. — July 23, 2007 —LiquidPiston today announced that it closed its first venture capital investment round with Adams Capital Management and Northwater Capital. The company is developing a new Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) that exploits heretofore untapped thermodynamic design space in one of the industrial age’s oldest and largest markets.

A runner up in MIT’s 2004 Entrepreneurship Competition, LiquidPiston has come a long way from its early beginnings in inventor Nik Shkolnik’s garage. Earlier this year, the company announced a $70,000 Phase I grant from the Army Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The father-son team led by immigrant physicist Nikolay and his son Alexander Shkolnik, a graduate student in MIT’s department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, will use this latest $1.25 million seed round of venture capital to build and test a working prototype.

“The potential of this technology is tremendous, and the interest we are seeing from both the public and private sectors is very encouraging,” said Dr. Ed Crow, retired senior vice president of Pratt & Whitney and an advisor to LiquidPiston. “With this latest round of investment, LiquidPiston is on its way to achieving its goal of revolutionizing the $250 billion market for internal combustion engines.”

With an architecture that is inherently scaleable from lawnmowers to locomotives and efficiencies that may someday put the 100 mile per gallon automobile within reach, LiquidPiston hopes to breathe new life into the ICE business, which is coming under increasing pressure due to both environmental and energy security concerns. Founder Nik Shkolnik noted, “Most of this technology could have been manufactured in the 1920’s, but our new engine would have been impossible to design without today’s advanced computer-aided simulation and design tools.”

Aside from significant improvements in fuel efficiency, LiquidPiston’s approach to ICE design has the potential to result in a substantially higher power-to-weight ratio, fewer moving parts leading to higher reliability and lower maintenance costs, and significantly lower emissions. The company expects to demonstrate a working prototype in the next 18 to 24 months.