Landa has orders for 400 Nanographic presses and chairman Benny Landa is poised to embark upon a fundraising round for the venture, valuing it at up to $1bn, according to a report in the Israeli financial press.

Calcalist, the Israeli economic newspaper, said that Landa would be in London next week to meet with banks about underwriting the financing round, which is understood to involve raising between $150m-$200m (￡93m-￡124m) for Landa Corporation, which owns Landa Digital Printing.

This equates to a notional market capitalisation of between $800m to $1bn, said Calcalist.

The funds will be used to finalise product development and set up manufacturing facilities for the firm’s own-brand presses, its NanoInk and the special blankets required. 

Komori is Landa’s partner for the sheetfed press chassis and paper transport, but the web presses will be made in-house due to the unique web transport system.

At launch, Landa said the first commercial machines would be installed "in the latter half of 2013".

Up until now Landa has financed the venture using his own fortune. The report said he preferred to keep the business private, hence the money will be raised from private and institutional investors rather than by floating the company.

When Drupa closed its doors in May Landa declined to reveal exactly how many letters of intent had been signed for presses using the revolutionary printing technology, and would only say that "hundreds" of deposits of €10,000 had been taken. The figure of 400 obtained by Calcalist puts a potential value of around $1bn on Landa’s order backlog.

However, it is not necessarily the case that every deposit will be for a Landa own-label press, even though one in every three deposits was for Landa’s B1-format sheetfed model, the S10.

At Drupa Benny Landa told PrintWeek that some of the LOIs could result in machines being shipped by Komori, Manroland and Heidelberg, the press manufacturers who have signed up to use the technology as part of Landa’s vision to make Nanography ubiquitous. "We can deliver it ourselves or we can pass the LOI on to a partner," Landa said at the time.

In recent weeks Landa Digital Printing has stepped up its promotional activity, with executives at the company speaking at a host of industry events.

Landa Corporation has not made any public comment on the report, and was unavailable for additional comment at the time of writing.