CheMastery

What: CheMastery uses robotics to automate the currently slow, manual processes associated with in formulating chemicals in laboratories.

Why we are excited: An estimated £650 billion of small batch speciality chemicals are manufactured globally each year yet chemistry work is currently highly manual, inaccurate and time consuming. CheMastery are building natural language processing software to standardise and enhance chemical recipes and a robot to execute these recipes automatically.  The Company has signed pilots with four of the most significant UK chemical manufacturers: Pfizer, Key Organics, Cats Eyes and Charnwood Molecular.

RAD Propulsion

What: RAD technology are building electrical engines for the marine industry as it transitions away from fossil fuel power.

Why we are excited: Globally, approximately £10 billion is spent on marine diesel propulsion devices each year. Despite the industry’s inevitable switch to electrical alternatives, current solutions are not up to scratch: their hardware is not fit for commercial applications, and their software lacks real-time monitoring and data collection. The Company’s founders, who previously exited a marine automation business for over $95 million, are correcting this by creating a fully integrated “Tesla” experience for boats. RAD propulsion is already selling its solution to leading boat-builders such a RS Boats and Hydrex.

Altered Carbon

What: Altered Carbon is digitising the sense of smell, effectively shrinking the capabilities of a powerful mass-spectrometer to the size of a microchip, allowing complex scent profiles to be detected quickly, conveniently and cheaply.

Why we are excited: Airborne chemical scents provide advance warning for costly problems, such as food spoiling, disease or fire, well in advance of visual detection. Altered Carbon have built a patented sensor akin to a sniffer dog’s nose which can detect these chemical scents quickly and cheaply. The company’s beachhead market is food waste prevention, where an estimated £1 trillion can be saved each year by predicting spoilage. Altered Carbon’s products are currently being trialled by Philtrum Group, Fragro, Avara and B-Hive.

Earswitch

What: Earswitch have built a new form of computer interface, allowing electronic devices to be controlledby muscle movements in a person’s inner ear, via earbuds.

Why we are excited: Computers have been controlled by mice or track pads for the last 50 years. Earswitch’s patented technology will give the additional capability for humans to control computers by head and ear movements. At a smaller, medical level, this has fantastic implications for sufferers of Motor Neuron Disease, but at a larger scale, the Company’s technology provides enormous additional capability in gaming and spatial computing, by way of the 970 million earbud headphone units sold each year. 

Fish Friendly Hydro

What: Fish Friendly Hydropower builds floating hydro-turbines which are easy to install and avoid the need for permits from the Environment Agency.

Why we are excited: There are over a million weirs and mills in Europe which contain power that could be used to generate the clean electricity needed to transition from fossil fuels, but are not due to regulatory restrictions. Fish Friendly solves this problem with their environmentally-friendly solution and has a rapid customer payback period.

BladeBUG

What: BladeBUG builds robots to automate the inspection and maintenance of wind turbines, increasing turbine uptime and reducing the risk to workers.

Why we are excited: As the offshore wind industry is grows, so does the need to provide maintenance for turbines, not least because wind turbine downtime can cost as much as £30,000 per day in lost revenue. The wind turbine inspection market alone is forecast to be £7.5 billion by 2025, and yet a shortfall of 500,000 workers capable of carrying out these tasks is also predicted. BladeBUG’s highly mobile solution bridges this gap. The company is currently working with major wind power operators WindPower Lab, Mistras, and Force Technology to scale the deployment of its solution.

Bot-Hive

What: Bot-Hive is a provider of flexible automation systems, allowing customers to adopt these technologies in an easy and cost effective manner.

Why we are excited: Adopting automotive systems can radically improve the productivity and therefore profitability of a business, however the process of designing and commissioning automation systems is often complicated and expensive, particularly for production systems than need to be frequently re-configured. Bot-Hive is reducing this complexity by building the knowledge and APIs needed to link these complex systems together. Their systems are currently being trialled by Games Workshop and the Hut Group.  

Marble

What: Marble builds long-range drones for use in the maritime surveillance missions.

Why we are excited: As a result of smuggling, piracy and illegal fishing, approximately £3.2 billion is spent each year on maritime surveillance. This is typically performed by boats which have limited range, or drone equipment which is often cost prohibitive. By contrast, Marble has innovated a low cost, electric solution which now demonstrates the range and speed of drones 4-times bigger and costing 200-times more. The Company has ongoing trials in the Turks & Caicos Islands and is one of the few drone companies to have been certified for Beyond Line of Sight flight in the UK.

Zelim

What: Zelim are automating the process of search-and-rescue to save lives at sea.

Why we are excited: Offshore rescue is still carried out relatively primitively: man-over-board cases are spotted at sea by eye and typically rescued by ropes. Zelim have created a computer vision system to automatically locate casualties at sea; a retrofittable man-over-board conveyor belt to automate rescue; and is developing a fully autonomous rescue craft. The company’s solution targets the 80,000 ships legally required to carry a fast rescue craft as well as operators in the wind-farm sector, some of which have provided the Company with letters of intent to buy.

Footnotes:

[1] Knowledge Intensive status was introduced as an addition to the Enterprise Investment Scheme by HMRC in 2017.

[2] Knowledge Intensive qualifying companies can raise up to £20 million of tax-advantaged investments over their lifetime (as opposed to the standard limit of £12 million). Furthermore they can raise these funds over a ten-year period (rather than the standard limit of seven years).

[3] Each company expects to be classified as Knowledge Intensive but compliance is not guaranteed.