LONGMONT - InPhase Technologies Inc., a Longmont-based company developing holographic disk data-storage technology, has laid off its 60 employees after the company simply ran out of money.

Officials with the nine-year-old company said they are in the midst of raising additional capital to restructure and put the company back together as soon as they can.

"Ultimately, the company didn't have enough money to keep it going, but the reality is that the company has made significant progress to make a viable commercial product," said Bart Stuck, an investor of InPhase since its inception in December 2000.

The company was founded as a Lucent Technologies venture, spun out of Bell Labs research, with the goal of being the first company to bring holographic data-storage technology to market. Stuck, who also worked at Bell Labs and now heads up the East Coast-based Signal Lake Management LLC, invested in and helped InPhase raise money.

Stuck said InPhase raised about $100 million over the past nine years to develop and advance the technology. The company's Tapestry 300r holographic storage drives have a capacity of 300 gigabytes; equivalent to 460 CDs or 64 DVDs. InPhase was working to make the product more commercially viable.

Stuck said if InPhase can be restructured and return, it will remain in Longmont.

"It's where the talent pool is for disk drives," he said.

Similar to CD and DVD storage, InPhase's technology uses lasers to write data onto a disk. But with holographic storage, a lot more data can be written at one location on the disk, each at a slightly different angle. Each layer of data has its own unique angle, so much like a holographic image, when the viewing angle is changed, so does the image of data.