By Hamza Faisal

A Denver company that coats materials one atom-thin layer at a time is about to get a NASDAQ ticker. Forge Nano has closed its merger with the Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners II blank-check company, and the combined company, Forge Nano Holdings, expects its stock and warrants to begin trading on NASDAQ on October 22 under the symbols NANO and NANOW.

The deal, which shareholders of Archimedes II (NASDAQ: ATII) approved at an extraordinary general meeting on October 16, was completed on October 21, the company announced. Forge Nano says going public will speed up its push across two markets it calls critical: semiconductor manufacturing equipment for AI-era chipmaking, and advanced battery materials for commercial and defense uses.

A decade of building at the atomic level

Forge Nano has spent more than ten years developing its proprietary platform, Atomic Armor, an atomic layer deposition (ALD) technology that improves materials and products through precise, nanoscale surface coatings. The company says the technology is moving into commercial semiconductor manufacturing, advanced batteries, and other critical applications.

"Becoming a publicly traded company represents an important milestone for Forge Nano and the team that has spent more than a decade building this company," said Paul Lichty, the company's chief executive officer. "We founded Forge Nano around the belief that controlling materials at the atomic level could fundamentally improve how the world's most important technologies are made."

Heavy redemptions, but the stock surged anyway

The merger did not come without drama. Regulatory filings show that about 22.2 million ATII public shares were redeemed at roughly $10.73 each — about $238.4 million — leaving only around $8.4 million in the SPAC's trust account before closing. Still, investors piled in on the news: ATII shares closed October 21 at $9.81, up 36.82%, with reports putting the combined company's market value at more than $1.6 billion.

BTIG served as lead capital markets advisor and PIPE placement agent on the deal, with Cohen & Company Capital Markets also advising. Forge Nano Holdings is scheduled to ring the NASDAQ opening bell on October 28.

Why the timing matters

The listing lands at a moment when chipmakers are racing to build ever more complex architectures for artificial intelligence — exactly the kind of manufacturing where Forge Nano says its ALD coatings matter. The company points to a Taiwan manufacturing expansion, coatings that reach 1,000-to-1 high-aspect-ratio structures on wafers, an expanded relationship with Samsung SDI, and a North Carolina gigafactory groundbreaking as signs of momentum.

For a company whose whole business is about controlling the atomic level, going public is a bet that the AI hardware boom will keep rewarding the quietest layer of the stack.

By Hamza Faisal