Frequently asked questions.

Holograms, labels and printed codes sit on the surface and are applied after the product is made, so they can be bought, peeled, copied or moved to a fake. Intelligent Material is a crystal grown to a precise recipe and added while the product is made: into the ink, plastic, fiber, adhesive or metal itself. There is nothing to peel off, and the reader checks more than one property of the crystal, so look-alike materials that glow the same color still fail.

Each crystal is grown to a recipe using a liquid-state synthesis that produces uniform sub-micron crystals, protected by 21 U.S. patents including a composition-of-matter patent on the crystals themselves. Readers ask several questions at once (which colors come back, how long the glow lasts, how it changes with light intensity) and exactly which questions a program uses stays private. A counterfeiter would have to match all of them, in the right material, at the right concentration. For item-level identity, LightMap™ adds a random pattern that cannot be planned or printed twice, even by us.

Inks and varnishes for gravure, intaglio, offset, flexo, screen and inkjet printing; plastics through masterbatch (including LDPE, HDPE, PP, PET, PC, ABS, COC, PVC and more); fibers and security threads; films and labels; adhesives; glass and polymer vials; and metals, including aluminum and, in development, gold. Anything that can hold a fine, inert powder is a candidate: paper, glass, ceramics, rubber, wax, paints, even cement.

The crystals are inorganic, chemically inert and used at parts-per-million loadings. They are already used in medical packaging, including the seal adhesive of sterile surgical packs at about 0.001%, and in pharmaceutical vials, caps and labels. Suitability for a specific drug-product or food-contact use is assessed program by program with your regulatory team. Safety Data Sheets (SDS) and Technical Data Sheets (TDS) are available under NDA. Always follow the SDS.

Yes. The material protects billions of G7 banknotes, secured 3 billion surgical-supply units in 2025, and protects 5 million tons of fiber. It is on the bottling line of a major American spirits producer, in the alloys of one of the world's two largest rolled-aluminum producers, and in development with one of the world's largest eyewear makers.

Usually not. The crystal arrives as one more ingredient: in a masterbatch, a ready-mixed ink or varnish, or a fiber process ingredient you already buy. On a printing line it can run in a standard HP45 thermal inkjet cartridge or a continuous, UV-cured non-contact printer, with no new station and the line at full speed.

About four months from the first meeting to launch. Discovery and fit assessment take a week or two; feasibility testing on samples of your own material takes 3–6 weeks; a pilot on your line takes 1–3 months; then production rollout. You decide after each step whether to go on.

A working session with our scientists to define what you need to prove, where, and who will check it, followed by a written fit assessment that recommends the crystal and detection method. The next step is feasibility testing on samples of your own ink, plastic, fiber or adhesive.

Yes. Our materials are supplied to customer facilities in North America, South America, Europe and Asia, and protect currency for G7 central banks.

Yes. Readers shine light on the product and measure what comes back. Nothing is cut, dissolved or prepared, and the same unit can be checked again and again through its life.

NovaVera supplies it. A smartphone app confirms the crystal and reads the unit's QR code; a handheld forensic reader identifies and quantifies the crystal; inline readers and cameras work on the production line, at receiving and in the lab. Each program uses the readers that fit the people doing the checking.

No. A reader confirms the crystal on the spot, offline. With LightMap™, the item's own crystal fingerprint is signed and printed in its barcode, so even item-level checks need no server. When you want it, the same reads can also feed your serialization and track-and-trace systems.

It works alongside them. Serialization verifies the packaging record; Intelligent Material verifies the physical product and its packaging. Our QR and data-matrix codes link to tracking software with parent-child labels and duplicate-scan warnings, and deployment documentation is structured to align with the frameworks your program follows.