UK startup Applied Graphene Materials (AGM) caught some headlines a couple weeks back when it became the first graphene startup to go public on a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange.

Graphene is a synthesized carbon based material that has generated excitement inside and outside of the laboratory because it has a few distinguishing characteristics. The material is extremely thin—a single two dimensional layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb layout. More importantly it’s an excellent conductor of electricity, extremely strong, and effectively transparent, creating good light absorption characteristics.

If you’re thinking that it would be a great material from which to prototype a next generation solar panel, you’re not alone. In the past few years, lab after lab has penned papers examining how carbon nanotubes, built from graphene, could be leveraged to fabricate thin film solar cells. A year ago a Stanford lab actually produced an “all-carbon solar cell” from graphene, including the electrodes.

We are still very much in the laboratory stage for this technology, evidenced by the awful efficiency characteristics of the graphene solar cells that have come out of labs in the last year. Many labs have, however, have argued that because carbon is stable at very high temperatures, all-carbon solar cells might find a niche home in environments with physical stress or extreme temperatures.

If anything right now the view on graphene’s applications is very broad. Because graphene can conduct light and electricity—the traits that make it so interesting to solar cell makers—it’s received general interest. With its conductivity characteristics, it’s being looked at as a material for capacitors, for building more efficient and faster microchips, touch screens, and LEDs.

The LED application is particularly interesting because one issue LEDs have dealt with is the self-heating problem. Adding graphene oxide to LEDs allows LEDs to operate brighter since the material effectively dissipates extra heat. The other interesting lab application for graphene and LEDs has been the fact that graphene is flexible, meaning we might see a material that could be bendable and light emitting.

The current global market for graphene is effectively zero. So why did Applied Graphene rush to IPO? Well, for starters the company needed capital because it wants to scale production. Right now graphene is very difficult to produce at scale. AGM says the company will use IPO proceeds to scale production from 1 ton per year to 8 tons and that eventually it could get to 50 tons per year.

If anything, AGM is actually fearful that the graphene market could move quickly and it wants a jump on the competition. Major companies, including Lockheed Martin and Samsung, hold hundreds of patents that are graphene related. Lockheed Margin actually has patents that would use graphene to desalinate water and a prototype plant is planned for 2015.

2015 is the year that one analyst has pegged as the first year where graphene could garner any real revenue, a measly $67 million. Though the report did estimate that by 2020 the market could be worth just under $700 million with a CAGR of 58.7 percent.

Like with any new field or material, there is both inevitable hype and deep skepticism. In the last decade we’ve seen this trend play out in nanotechnology, whose hype a decade ago even managed to spawn a VC firm dedicated solely to nanotech until the bubble burst on nanotech investing in the mid-2000s.

Graphene is itself an outgrowth of nanoscience, spurred by the 2004 paper by Geim and Novoselov on the synthesis of monolayer graphene (in 2010 they were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work on graphene).

With AGM going public, the expectation is that a market will materialize for graphene. We’ll see if this actually happens. But with some promising new applications for graphene in the laboratory stage, and after years of hype, nanotechnology might just get its moment in the sun. Though it’s unlikely going to be a result of building machines out of nano particles. But rather as a result of producing new materials that could improve the performance characteristics of existing products on the market.