GeoSpock Wins Liverpool Mayor’s ‘Smart Cities Realized’ Transport Challenge

GeoSpock Wins Liverpool Mayor’s ‘Smart Cities Realized’ Transport Challenge

Data visualization company awarded proof-of-concept project for Smart Transport Liverpool

Cambridge, UK, 23 October 2018: GeoSpock® – the extreme-scale, data integration company that provides analytics, builds insight, and enables predictions across space and time – today announced that it has secured the Smart Transport Award as part of the Liverpool Major’s Challenges for Smart Cities Realized.

Harnessing geospatial data enables cities to work smarter, GeoSpock’s solution proposes improvements to the mobility of Liverpool’s citizens, while also significantly reducing the city’s environmental footprint. The platform allows the input of historical and current statistics, as well as the subsequent tracking and analysis of these disparate datasets. Meeting the Transport Challenge’s sustainability criteria, GeoSpock’s solution will deliver tangible results to the identified issues and provide additional opportunities beyond the scope of the project. The prize for the most innovative submission is a proof-of-concept project for Smart Transport Liverpool and formal partnership with the city council, which GeoSpock will commence immediately.

The event was just one component of The International Business Festival, which saw the coming together of a number of global smart cities to share ideas, review technologies, and provide significant opportunities for the future in a market that is predicted to top over $2.4 trillion in 2025. Ideas were presented to a panel of experts, including Deputy Mayor of Liverpool Ann O’Byrne, Dr Jonathan Reichental, Cllr James Noakes, Professor Paul Morrissey, and Carl Piva. GeoSpock was awarded its winning status after delivering a crucial understanding of local blockers and demonstrating an effective solution that can be applied to the real world.

The data visualization company is fast establishing itself as the de facto processing engine at the heart of next-generation smart infrastructure – including smart cities and the Internet of Everything (IoE). The company is also powering future mobility applications, such as the management of autonomous vehicle fleets, by working with businesses across the automotive, telecoms, mobility, media, and retail sectors.

Richard Baker, CEO at GeoSpock, comments: “We are delighted to win the Smart Cities Realized, Smart Transport Challenge. Location Intelligence as a Service is fast becoming an important part of smart city development and this award is testament to the GeoSpock team’s innovation. We are looking forward to developing our relationship with Liverpool City Council and helping their smart city vision become a reality.”

Kate Hilyard joins Healx to drive the integration of AI with drug discovery for rare diseases

A senior pharma executive, with extensive drug discovery expertise, Kate’s appointment underlines Healx’s mission to combine deep pharmacological expertise with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and active patient engagement to give sufferers of rare disease a better quality of life.

At Healx, Kate will be lead strategy implementation to drive business growth enabling Healx to deliver rare disease treatments at scale through AI and cutting-edge technologies. Her industry experience adds to that of co-founder Dr David Brown, the inventor of Viagra and ex-Global Head of Drug Discovery at Roche, and the Healx drug discovery team. The Company’s massively parallel approach to drug discovery combines its unique AI technologies with one of the largest collections of insights from rare disease patient groups.

Welcoming Kate to the Company, Tim Guilliams, Healx’s co-founder and CEO said: “Kate brings a wealth of experience to Healx and her appointment is a real coup. Having started Healx with an artificial intelligence and patient care focus, Kate’s appointment broadens our senior expertise with further deep rare disease research knowhow and will be core to our goal of transforming the lives of patients, using our AI to find treatments based on existing drugs. Kate will help shape the next company milestones as we grow our world-class talent and demonstrate our ambition to transform the lives of rare disease patients.”

Kate’s track record of scientific and business leadership includes over 25 years’ drug discovery experience in the pharma and biotech sector, with a decade finding new treatments for rare diseases.  She joins from Charles River where she was Corporate Vice President Discovery, leading and integrating multiple sites in the UK, EU and US working with a global client base.  Previously she has held senior leadership roles at BioFocus DPI Ltd (which was acquired by Charles River) and Cambridge Antibody Technology (now part of MedImmune), having commenced her industry career at Roche. She gained her PhD in molecular immunology from Oxford University and her early academic career includes postdoctoral research in human biology at Oxford and Harvard Universities.

Commenting on her appointment, Kate Hilyard, COO, Healx said: “The unmet medical need for patients with rare diseases cannot be met using the traditional drug discovery and development approach. A radical shift away from blockbuster drugs towards more personalised treatments and patient-centric approaches is required. Using AI to discover new therapies has already been shown to be transformative in terms of time and money spent on clinical trials and Healx is at the forefront of changing drug discovery using AI. It is exciting to be joining the ambitious Healx team at this pivotal time, to use my extensive experience of transforming drug discovery organisations to make a difference to rare disease patient lives.”

In July, Healx announced that it had raised £10 million in a Series A financing which will be used to more than double Healx’s diverse and multi-disciplinary team of software engineers, data scientists, pharmacologists and drug development experts and to expand its world class artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Its Healnet AI platform facilitates highly parallelized, automated, large scale drug discovery that drastically reduces time and cost to discovery compared to traditional processes and can cut medicine development time by up to 80%.

PervasID receives £1.6 million investment to progress RFID technology

PervasID has completed a Series A investment and received an Innovate UK grant to progress RFID technology developed at the University of Cambridge.

PervasID, an award-winning RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology provider, today announces that it has secured £1.6 million in Series A funding. The technology, which was pioneered at the University of Cambridge and achieves more than 99 percent tag detection, was also awarded £240,000 from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.

Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, has backed the technology, along with Parkwalk, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Martlet, the investment arm of the Marshall of Cambridge Group. PervasID will use the additional funds to grow its delivery team, expand its reach into the healthcare, retail and industrial sectors, and provide essential innovation for its products.

PervasID was founded in 2011 by Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan, Dr Michael Crisp, Professor Ian White and Professor Richard Penty. The company, which is based at St John’s Innovation Centre, Cambridge, has developed a passive RFID technology that enables highly reliable reading of standard passive RFID tags.

Since receiving its first round of funding in 2016, PervasID has expanded its product offering and now has over 30 corporate customers who use the patented technology, which achieves almost 100 per cent detection. The technology provides location information in a wide area read zone and can scale up to service larger areas, such as shops and warehouses, in order to provide better stock visibility. It can also integrate with existing alarm systems to alert of theft, making it, in the words of one of PervasID’s major tier one retail customers, “arguably the best and the only solution up to the challenge facing modern retailing.”

Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan, co-founder and CEO comments, “We are very pleased to have successfully closed this funding round which will help us innovate and develop our product further. The investment we have received from local investors is a particularly proud moment for us as they are backing technology that has been pioneered at the University of Cambridge. This highlights the importance of supporting research and development at these institutions.”

He continues, “Along with the Innovate UK grant, this funding will help us expand our team and therefore our expertise, which will allow us to continue to innovate our product offering in the future.”

Dr Elaine Loukes, Investment Director at Cambridge Enterprise, comments: “We are delighted to continue to support the company. With its expanded range of products and market applications, many customers are recognising the benefits of the PervasID technology.”

Moray Wright, CEO, Parkwalk adds, “Parkwalk is delighted to have invested in this globally-leading RFID technology that will enable customers around the world to monitor their assets in real time. The fundamental research behind the technology is ground breaking and opens new opportunities for passive RFID in a range of markets.”

Andrew Williamson, Investment Director at Cambridge Innovation Capital, comments “PervasID’s high accuracy RFID sensor technology addresses an unmet need in the retail, healthcare and industrial sectors. We are excited by advances to PervasID’s technology and the growth of their team since CIC made our initial investment in 2016.”

Peter Cowley, Investment Director at Martlet, the investment arm of Marshall of Cambridge Group and very active technology angel investor comments, “We’re pleased to be backing another innovative Cambridge technology start-up that offers a technical advantage over existing RFID tracking solutions, providing much better performance at lower cost. With my background in developing and selling RFID solutions across multiple sectors for over two decades, I will be able to support the company in delivering value to customers and achieving its growth plans.”   

SyndicateRoom CEO scoops CEO Excellence Award

Goncalo Vasconcelos, CEO of SyndicateRoom, has been awarded a Global CEO Excellence Award for 'Best Online Investments CEO 2018'.

Now in its second year, the Global CEO Excellence Awards has returned to recognise the outstanding achievements made by leading CEOs from across the world. The awards reveal the CEOs responsible for driving change while successfully managing the day-to-day operations within an organisation, and are more than just role models for their employees and can operate as motivators and innovators, with the vision and drive to take an enterprise to the next level.

SyndicateRoom has also been nominated for a Growth Investor Award with the Intelligent Partnership, for Best Investment Platform. After an intense judging process, the six finalists for the category were recently announced. Winners will be confirmed over the next few weeks, and celebrated at an awards ceremony this November.

SyndicateRoom are Alumni of ideaSpace West.

SyndicateRoom is an online equity crowdfunding platform that allows its members to co-invest in high-growth companies with experienced investors including some of the most prominent Business Angels in the UK.

Repositive strengthens senior management team for new growth phase

Repositive, a Cambridge UK technology startup bidding to help accelerate cancer drug discovery, has hired three senior executives to ready the business for its next phase of growth.

Established in 2014 as a social enterprise, Repositive has grown its headcount by 50 per cent in the last 12 months and now numbers 38 people. The company has created a secure platform that helps increase discovery, access to and sharing of genomic research data for the benefit of patients.
 
Repositive has created two products based on its platform through which communities of researchers and data providers can connect and share previously hard to access data and models, to support research studies.

The three new senior hires are Ave Wrigley as chief technology officer; Robert Thong as chief business officer; and Julian Coe, chief finance and operating officer.

Wrigley, has over 20 years’ experience running technology departments across a wide variety of disciplines – including ecommerce and digital marketing, data-driven marketing insights and multimedia content management – and will help Repositive focus on scalable delivery and maximising the benefits of the platforms for researchers and data providers.

Robert Thong brings almost 30 years of experience in leadership and commercial roles in B2B enterprises in the life sciences sector. Thong is a recognised authority on the biopharma R & D externalisation trend, a published author on biopharma R & D partnerships and also a guest lecturer on R & D alliances at institutions including the University of Cambridge and University College London. 

Julian Coe is an experienced finance director who has previously supported large health companies – such as LGC Genomics and Ieso Digital Health – with creating business plans, developing finance models and securing funding.

Coe said: “Repositive has incredible potential and I am determined to use my experience to help the company raise the funding it needs and to scale its operations to execute its growth plan. 

“Precision medicine is the future but its development requires biomedical researchers to have immediate access to a much greater volume of more pertinent genomic data. Repositive is making waves in the research world by providing this advanced search capability.

“We now have an incredibly strong team and we are confident that, in the next six months, we will be the world’s single largest source of translational cancer models for researchers.”

Repositive’s first data-sharing product, Discover, was launched in 2016 to enable researchers globally to locate any human genomic data that is already publicly available but is often not, for a number of reasons, easily located or accessible.

Discover now indexes over one million datasets from more than 50 data sources, and is forming the basis of Repositive’s contribution to the NIH Data Commons initiative.

Responding to demand from biopharma and biotech companies, Repositive has also developed a second product based on its secure platform, which is poised to become the world’s largest marketplace and community for translational cancer models. 

Repositive’s Cancer Models provides commercial oncology researchers with a holistic, searchable, comparable view of existing cancer models across the globe, whilst providing Contract Research Organisations – providers of cancer models – with a tool to market, showcase and manage their model inventory.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Julian Coe

DefiniGEN strengthens Board with appointment of Professor Sir John Savill

DefiniGEN, the world leader in human iPSC differentiation and disease modelling, announces the appointment of Professor Sir John Savill as a Non-Executive Director of the Board.

Sir John will bring his expertise in translational science to DefiniGEN enabling the company to accelerate the development of new products and services which can improve the efficiency and economics of drug development.

Sir John Savill was previously the Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the UK. Within this role he was responsible to UK Parliament for expenditure of approximately £800 million per year as MRC’s Accounting Officer. Alongside the MRC role, Savill was also Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. As a renowned expert in research and innovation, Sir John will aid DefiniGEN in further developing its partnerships with the pharmaceutical and biomedical communities.

Dr Marcus Yeo, Chief Executive Officer, commented: “I am delighted to welcome John to the DefiniGEN board. With his extensive experience as a highly-regarded clinician and scientist I am confident that John will prove to be highly valuable as DefiniGEN continues to grow internationally in key markets.”

Sir John Savill stated: “DefiniGEN is one of the UK’s most innovative translational science companies providing valuable tools for biomedical research. I’m delighted to join the board at this important stage in the company’s development.”

DefiniGEN provides human liver cells for preclinical drug development and disease modelling applications using human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell hIPSC technology.

Featurespace joins the 'Sunday Times' Hiscox Tech Track 100

Featurespace has been ranked among the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 league table, which ranks Britain’s private technology, media and telecoms companies with the fastest-growing sales.

The list, which was published in the Sunday Times yesterday (Sunday 9 September), ranks Featurespace as one of the fastest growing companies in the UK.  

Featurespace, which has been ranked 85 in the list, is the World leading provider of Adaptive Behavioral Analytics software for fraud and risk management. Their innovative application of machine learning technology provides a holistic solution to tackle new and known fraud attacks and is now protecting customer transactions for some of the largest banks, payment processors and companies across the world. 

The 2018 Tech Track 100 companies overall achieved average sales growth over three years of 101% a year to reach a combined total of £3.3bn. They employ 19,300 staff, having added 14,000 employees to their combined workforce over the period.

Featurespace is one of just five companies headquartered in Cambridgeshire (compared to six last year) to make the list. Between them, they have grown their sales by an average of 105% a year over three years to a total of £138m, and together they now employ over 1,000 people.

This year Featurespace aims to increase it's workforce to meet rising customer demand, with more than 100 new positions in London and Cambridge UK, and Atlanta GA - the home of it's US headquarters which opened in late 2017. 

Featurespace's fraud prevention software has won a number of exciting awards and nominations over the last 12 months, including The Queen's Award for Enterprise Innovation, The Women in IT Excellence Awards, FS Tech Awards - Anti-fraud Solution of the Year and a Gold Stevie at the American Business Awards. The company has also been ranked in the Deloitte Fast 50 two years running, as well as the FT100, Future Fifty, FinTech50 and European Business Awards 'Ones to Watch'.

To read more information, click here.

Featurespace™ is the world-leader in Adaptive Behavioural Analytics and creator of the ARIC™ platform, a machine learning software system developed out of the University of Cambridge. 

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, and Atlanta, US with additional offices in London, UK, and New York, US. Featurespace has deployed ARIC to organisations that have services or products deployed in over 180 countries.

Arecor secures £6m investment for clinical development of its diabetes portfolio

Arecor Ltd, the UK-based leader in developing superior biopharmaceuticals through the application of an innovative formulation technology platform, today announces that it has secured £6 million of investment from new and existing investors for the clinical development of the Company’s speciality pharma portfolio of proprietary diabetes products.

Investment will accelerate the delivery of significantly improved therapeutic treatments and quality of life for people living with diabetes

This £6 million equity investment into Arecor was led by leading UK institutional investors, Calculus Capital, Downing Ventures, and Albion Capital with significant participation from Arecor’s existing investors. BioScience Managers Limited, the international healthcare investment firm, advised Downing Ventures.

Arecor’s next-generation diabetes product pipeline represents exciting new progress in the field of diabetes that will enable important new treatment regimens and offer greater control of blood glucose to diabetes patients, which is key to improving outcomes and quality of life. 

This pipeline includes:-

• Proprietary formulations of insulin analogues that are ultra-rapid acting and more closely match a healthy body’s physiological response to blood glucose, leading to better blood glucose (sugar) control - currently a significant challenge

• Highly concentrated rapid acting insulin optimised for the next generation of body-worn miniaturised delivery devices, including the artificial pancreas

• Stable aqueous ready to use glucagon used in an emergency to treat severe hypoglycaemia and enabling future use in bi-hormonal artificial pancreas systems

These programmes will be progressed through development to demonstrate improved product profiles and health outcomes in human clinical trials.  In addition to these clinical programmes, the investment will allow Arecor to progress its pre-clinical pipeline of diabetes combination products, as well as a range of additional superior biotherapeutics addressing critical unmet needs in key disease areas.

The management of diabetes is one of the major global health challenges.  Indeed, the International Diabetes Federation (“IDF”) estimates that there are nearly half a billion (425 million) people currently living with diabetes around the world* and the IDF further estimates that if the global direct and indirect healthcare costs from diabetes are included, the economic impact of diabetes exceeds $1trillion**.

The improved products, therapeutic pathways and personalised control that Arecor’s products can enable, will make a significant contribution to addressing this challenge.   Arecor will be taking its product portfolio into clinical development itself, however, the Company will ultimately look to partner with specialist diabetes companies for late stage clinical studies and global market access.

The Company, which was originally based on unique protein chemistry technology and insights spun out from Unilever, has refined and developed these into the ArestatTM formulation technology platform. This platform has been used extensively to improve the solution properties of numerous protein, anti-body, vaccine and peptide formulations both in collaboration with pharmaceutical partners, as well as for Arecor’s own pipeline.  Arecor has established a proven track record in applying this technology platform to deliver superior biopharmaceutical product profiles across a broad range of therapeutic areas.

Dr Sarah Howell, Chief Executive Officer at Arecor, commented: “We are delighted to have secured the investment that we need to progress our lead diabetes programmes through the key stages of clinical development.  With diabetes reaching epidemic proportions worldwide and with close to half a billion people living with the condition today, the opportunity of advancing our diabetes products into human clinical trials and their potential to significantly improve the treatment of this debilitating disease, represents a very exciting and ground-breaking proposition."

Alexander Crawford, Investment Director, Calculus Capital, added: “Arecor is applying its unique and highly regarded reformulation technology which will help transform the growing diabetes market. As lead investor, we believe this is an exciting new phase from Arecor in the development of their technology and strong growth potential.”

Dr Christoph Ruedig, Partner, Albion Capital, said: “We have followed Arecor for some time and are excited by the societal value of its fast onset, short duration action insulin. Its technology is highly differentiated and the Company is leading the sector in the area of stabilising liquid formulations for injectable drugs. We look forward to working with the strong leadership team to bring this extraordinary proposition to fruition and in doing so, aid many diabetic patients across the UK and beyond.”

Richard Lewis, Investment Director, Downing Ventures, concluded: “As an investment opportunity, Arecor combines a solid and high margin technology business alongside a proprietary product offering that fulfils major unmet medical need.  As a result, we believe that the diabetes pipeline should successfully attract quality international commercial partners. “

*  International Diabetes Federation. IDF Diabetes Atlas, 8th edition. International Diabetes Federation, 2017. Available at: http://www.diabetesatlas.org/

** Bommer C., Heesemann E., Sagalova V., et al. The global economic burden of diabetes in adults aged 20-79 years: a cost-of-illness study. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol 2017; 5: 423-30.

About ArestatTM

Arecor has significant experience and a proven track record in applying the ArestatTM formulation technology platform to deliver superior biopharmaceutical product profiles across a broad range of proteins, peptides and vaccines.

About Arecor’s Patent Portfolio

Arecor’s technology is protected by 21 patent families, including 23 granted patents.  Arecor has been exploiting its technology in partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, successfully developing superior product profiles, including stable high-concentration antibodies with low viscosity, reformulations of lyophilised or freeze-dried products into stable liquids or stable vaccines that can be used outside the cold chain.

Undo appoints Barry Morris as CEO to lead growth phase

Undo, a pioneer in the development of new software execution record and replay technology, has announced the appointment of Barry Morris as its new CEO with immediate effect.

Morris will take over the role from co-founder DrGreg Law, who has to date been performing a dual CEO/CTO role. Law will now dedicate his time and focus to operating as Undo’s CTO, developing Undo’s technical capabilities in line with evolving customer demand.

Morris has swapped one Cambridge for another, moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts based NuoDB, to operate out of Undo’s Cambridge UK headquarters. A serial entrepreneur, Morris founded NuoDB in 2008 and most recently served as its Executive Chairman.

With over 25 years’ experience working in enterprise software and database systems, he is a prodigious company builder, scaling start-ups and publicly held companies alike. Morris, who was CEO of distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) specialists IONA Technologies between 2000 and 2003, built the company up to $180m in revenues and a $2bn valuation.

Law commented, “We have achieved our early stage goals. With the industry-changing technology we have built, the customers we have signed up and the funding we have secured, it is time to move to the next stage of the plan, with an A-player to lead the company in its high-growth phase.

“Despite a really strong short list of candidates, the result of a worldwide executive search, we were unanimous in our agreement about who the right person to lead the company should be, and that’s Barry.”

Morris added, “Greg and the team at Undo have built incredible foundations for the company, with technology that was thought by many to be an impossibility, and an enviable customer list including IBM, SAP and Micro Focus. My focus will be on the next evolution of the company, as we strengthen our positioning in strategically important markets like the US and Europe.”

“There is a substantial opportunity for Undo right now.  All businesses are becoming highly dependent on software reliability, and Undo uniquely delivers reliability solutions across the software lifecycle. The industry wave of investment in continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) is part of a drive for software quality, but the absence of a modern software reliability platform remains a pervasive challenge in these environments. Undo is perfectly and uniquely positioned to address this challenge.”

Undo has grown rapidly in recent years, growing headcount to 40, with a world-class engineering team in Cambridge and an experienced enterprise sales organisation in San Francisco. In July, the company announced that it had secured $14 million in series B funding, and has to date, raised over $20 million in venture funding from leading venture capitalists.

Law concluded, “We reached the size and complexity where it was impossible for one person to be both CEO and CTO. It’s a fantastic coup for the company to bring in someone with Barry’s international experience of putting innovative companies firmly on the map, raising finances, and building sustainable revenue streams.”

About Undo

Long thought of as the holy grail of software development, Undo has developed program execution record and replay technology that allows some of the world’s largest companies to quickly diagnose software failures which couldn’t previously be addressed. By introducing this record & replay technology as a new standard for software failure diagnosis and debugging, application vendors can safeguard their client relationships, limit reputational damage and protect their bottom-line.

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with an office in San Francisco, Undo is going from strength to strength. Founded as a bootstrapped start-up in 2005 by Greg Law and Julian Smith, the company received its first external capital investment in 2012, and has continued to attract the interest of angel investors and venture capitalists throughout its journey.

Undo’s products are used by thousands of software engineers to solve complex, real-world problems for leading technology companies, from Electronic Design Automation vendors to enterprise database software manufacturers. Today, customers include global players such as SAP, Cadence Design Systems, Mentor Graphics, and Micro Focus.

CCS welcomes Ontix to lead programme for Metnet 12Gbps unlicensed 60GHz mmWave backhaul

Cambridge Communication Systems (CCS) Limited is pleased to announce that telecoms infrastructure provider Ontix has joined CCS’s Lead Customer Programme for the introduction of the CCS Metnet 12Gbps unlicensed 60GHz mmWave access and backhaul solution.

Ontix will begin Proof of Concept activities in central London from Q4 this year.

Ontix plans to leverage the neutral host mesh network connected to fibre and provide high-performance backhaul services – powered by the Metnet 12Gbps 60GHz system – for small cells deployed on these assets by multiple mobile operators. 

Antony Tomlinson, CEO of Ontix, comments: “We embraced this opportunity to join CCS’s lead customer programme and work hand-in-hand with our trusted and chosen partner for the mesh network, as this will provide our team with the earliest access and closest collaboration on a key launch implementation of the Metnet 60GHz solution.  We plan to provide a neutral host transport network in central London delivering carrier-grade services to our customers, and our selection of CCS as our mesh network vendor is a primary factor in this bid-winning approach. ”

CCS CEO Steve Greaves adds: “We are delighted to welcome Ontix to the CCS lead customer programme for Metnet 60GHz as it begins work on this ambitious neutral host network in London.  Ontix will be working alongside CCS through the introductory phases of the Metnet 60GHz system, and will now benefit from priority access to the latest features and enhanced capabilities as the network expands.”

Metnet 60GHz is the latest advance in the CCS Metnet product line, and extends the award-winning Metnet self-organising mesh capability already proven at 26/28GHz into the unlicensed band at 60GHz.  Delivering carrier-grade services in an unlicensed band is a challenge perfectly suited to Metnet and the 3D SON™ capability of Metnet 60GHz, which manages interference across three dimensions – space, time and frequency.

The ultra-high capacity 12Gbps multipoint system is the first element in CCS’s new software-defined Mesh network architecture, with multiple Metnet 60GHz nodes operating as a centrally managed SDN-capable networking switch.

About CCS

CCS (Cambridge Communication Systems) is the creator of Metnet – the world’s only self-organising microwave backhaul for small cell, Next Generation Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), CCTV and fibre extension applications.

In major live deployments from Asia to North America, Metnet is powering networks to mmWave 5G performance – intuitively, scalably, flexibly and cost-effectively.

Delivering high capacity, ultra-low latency and ultra-fast deployment, Metnet is optimised for performance edge and multigigabit.

Metnet’s proven capability is trusted at the heart of some of the world’s most demanding and data-heavy networks, including a pre-5G network for Telefonica O2 in London, at the heart of the world’s largest financial centre.

With a unique self-organising mesh solution for realising 5G – and beyond – CCS’s innovation and vision is connecting the 5G world.

Eagle Genomics lands co-sell status as part of Microsoft for Startups Programme

Eagle Genomics joins a specialised group of high-growth startups, earning co-sell status as part of Microsoft’s new programme to collaborate on intensive joint sales and go-to-market initiatives.

The Cambridge-based genomics company graduated from the newly launched Microsoft ScaleUp programme that helps qualified tech companies accelerate enterprise sales by providing resources to prepare, market and sell with access to Microsoft’s Global Salesforce.

Eagle Genomics’ ground-breaking knowledge discovery platform the e[automateddatascientist] utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze complex genomic and microbiomic data at scale, delivering new insight and allowing enterprise brands to assess the viability, efficacy and safety of products.

The platform augments research to assess enterprise products through a better understanding of their impact on the microbiome. Insight gained enables rapid assessment of product potential, accelerates market entry and mitigates early risk. Eagle Genomics aims to serve trillion-dollar markets in food, consumer and health markets using the power and scalability of Microsoft Azure combined with AI Cognitive Services to enable the digital reinvention of life sciences R&D.

Charlotte Yarkoni, Microsoft’s Corporate VP, Growth and Ecosystems commented at the February 2018 launch of Microsoft for Startups, “We are committing $500 million over the next two years to offer joint sales engagements with startups, along with access to our technology…Microsoft is partnering with founders and investors to help propel their growth.”

Warwick Hill, MD of Microsoft for Startups, Western Europe added: “Eagle Genomics is set to transform the way global brands make scientific based decisions about the impact and power of their products. Eagle Genomics are the market leaders in delivering data driven insights for enterprises interacting with the most complex “virtual” organ - the microbiome.”

Eagle supplies quality outsourced bioinformatics solutions. We combine cloud computing and Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) expertise with a track record in building scalable, efficient genomics analysis workflows using both commercial and open source software. Our services have added value to R&D processes and reduced time to market at many global life sciences companies including big pharma, crop science, personal hygiene and animal health.

Featurespace team shortlisted in 6 categories ahead of Women in IT Excellence Awards 2018

Four members of the Featurespace team have been shortlisted for the Hero of the Year award, while CEO Martina King has received nominations for both Role Model of the Year and Woman of the Year.

The Women in IT Excellence Awards, led by Computing News, highlights the entrepreneurs, innovators, leaders and pioneers building the infrastructure of the future. Winners will be announced in November at a ceremony hosted by tech journalist Holly Brockwell, who is best known for founding the female-written, female-focused tech site Gadgette.

Representing Featurespace in the Hero of the Year Category are: 

• Lucy Griffin, Senior Data Scientist, Featurespace
• Megan Leoni, Graduate Data Scientist, Featurespace
• Milena Jonkisz, Customer Support Engineer, Featurespace
• Reka Burmeister, Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, Quality Assurance, Featurespace

In addition, CEO, Martina King, has been shortlisted for both Role Model of the Year and Woman of the Year awards. 

Commenting on the shortlist, Martina King, Featurespace CEO said, 'We're thrilled to have this recognition of the highly skilled team we have built at Featurespace. I am proud to have so many of the remarkable women on our team celebrated through this award, all of whom are experts who go above and beyond to ensure our customers recieve the best possible product and service.'

Want to know more? Lucy was recently interviewed for our Life at Featurespace blog - see what a career in Data Science at Featurespace looks like and read her advice for others considering this career path here.

Featurespace™ is the world-leader in Adaptive Behavioural Analytics and creator of the ARIC™ platform, a machine learning software system developed out of the University of Cambridge. 

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, and Atlanta, US with additional offices in London, UK, and New York, US. Featurespace has deployed ARIC to organisations that have services or products deployed in over 180 countries.

Apple chooses Cambridge company as a 'rising European gaming star'

Cambridge software company Virtual Arts has today been selected by Apple as one of its five 'rising European gaming stars'.

The company, which focuses on mobile Augmented and Virtual Reality, is one of the European studios Apple believes is making some of the most interesting new games on the App Store. According to Apple, Virtual Arts' debut game, Lightstream Racer (see images below), is "really clever - it generates a futuristic racing track around you in AR. From there, you race - staying steady on the throttle while spinning yourself around to keep track of the action."

Virtual Arts, based at St John's Innovation Centre, was founded in September 2016 and boasts impressive credentials - its growing development team includes former ARM, Sony and Disney talent.  And it has several new projects in the pipeline. CEO and co-founder Nizar Romdan says: "We have three AR projects in early stage development: an AR app based on a witch, an edutainment AR app and a local multiplayer shooter AR game."

Virtual Arts is building a leading state of the art virtual, augmented and mixed reality interactive content and technology company in Cambridge, UK

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: A battle of innovation waged with start-ups in tech, science and AI

https://www.compelo.com/oxford-vs-cambridge-tech/

A host of start-ups from both cities are competing in the ongoing battle of Oxford vs Cambridge tech, as the two historic rivals continue to serve as a bedrock for innovation in the UK

From the lecture halls to the boat race, two of Britain’s most historic cities have been rivals for centuries – now the narrative of the ongoing battle is Oxford vs Cambridge tech.

Away from the universities and the River Thames, the lab has become one of the most important arenas in their perpetual contest, with innovative tech start-ups pouring out of both cities thick and fast.

In terms of sheer numbers, Cambridge is ahead with 353 new start-ups in 2017 compared to Oxford’s 232, while it also registered 30,219 digital jobs to its rival’s 26,327 in the same year.

But quantity isn’t the only metric by which you measure innovation, and both cities and their surrounding areas are home to a variety of companies looking to redefine our relationship with technology.

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: Featurespace

Founded in Cambridge in 2008, Featurespace uses adaptive behavioural analytics technology to track and predict online fraud.

It built the world’s first adaptive behavioural analytics engine – its ARIC platform – after betting company Betfair asked the company to build a system that could outwit fraudsters by thinking like a person.

Its portfolio expanded from there and now provides various online data services to companies such as UK bookmaker William Hill.

It is also growing rapidly in the banking and payments industry catering to payments processors Worldpay and Mexico-based Mercadotecnia Ideas y Tecnologia.

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: Sophos

Based in Abingdon-on-Thames, just outside Oxford, software security company Sophos was founded in 1985 and now counts itself among the FTSE 250 index with more than 3,000 employees and a 2018 revenue of $769m (£606m).

Primarily catering to the software and hardware security needs of mid-sized businesses, the company has gradually branched out now to provide consumer anti-virus protection.

This product came under fire in 2011, however, when English white-hat hacker Tavis Ormandy uncovered several vulnerabilities.

Sophos responded by arguing that in order to exploit these, a hacker would need company-specific code which is not externally accessible.

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: Focal Point Positioning

Focal Point Positioning is a Cambridge start-up working on satellite positioning systems to aid the development of GPS technology on devices such as smartphones and wearable tech.

Its creations include a software upgrade to GPS chips, which can solve complex navigational challenges such as pinpointing your position indoors and in dense urban environments.

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: BioCarbon Engineering

Based in Oxford, start-up BioCarbon Engineering manufactures automated drones that can plant at least one billion trees a year as part of the company’s effort to rebuild global ecosystems.

The company has its sights on planting 500 billion trees by 2060, and provides analytics and planting solutions for various eco-system restoration projects.

It received $2.5m (£2m) in funding early last year from investment and advisory firm Systemiq.

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: Darktrace

Originating in Cambridge, global artificial intelligence company Darktrace has grown rapidly since its 2013 launch and now has more than 30 offices with over 650 employees around the world.

Kings College, one of Cambridge university’s colleges (Credit: Jane Shelby Richardson at Duke University)

Its flagship product, the Darktrace Enterprise Immune System, uses machine learning to autonomously detect and respond to cyber threats in real time.

The company also uses its AI technology to counter cyber threats against cloud platforms, including the Salesforce cloud and Amazon Web Services.

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: Oxford Nanopore Technologies

Headquartered in the Oxford Science Park, Oxford Nanopore Technologies aims to simplify biological analysis whether for use in scientific research, education or a range of real-world applications.

Its MinION product does just that, serving as the world’s world’s first and only nanopore DNA sequencer, which scans skin for nano-sized holes in order to provide health-based information.

The company was founded in 2005 and has since grown to employ more than 350 people off the back of £451m worth of collective funding.

Oxford vs Cambridge tech:  FiveAI

FiveAI is based in Cambridge but has offices in Oxford, London, Bristol, Edinburgh and Millbrook, and is attempting to become the first company to deliver fully autonomous shared transport.

Its vision is to give city residents access to a driverless car-sharing platform, which can be used on demand to improve urban life by making it more convenient – while reducing pollution by getting more people into a single vehicle.

The company’s system is currently under development and is planned to be trialled in London in late 2019 to early 2020.

FiveAI hopes to launch a driverless car-sharing service in London in 2019

Oxford vs Cambridge tech: Oxbotica

Oxbotica is Oxford’s answer to FiveAI, and is working on various systems learn from the surrounding environment and share this data with each other so as to improve over time.

Its autonomous control system, Selenium, is applicable to multiple types of vehicle including cars, cargo pods, forklifts and even Mars Rovers.

The company also uses a cloud-based operating system that co-ordinates its various autonomous vehicles.

Healx raises $10m as investors back AI to find rare disease treatments faster

Viagra inventor and Cambridge graduate use AI to cut medicine development time by 80%

Cambridge, UK – 26th July, 2018 – Healx (https://healx.io), the Cambridge (UK) technology company developing breakthrough treatments for rare diseases, today announced a $10 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital, Europe’s leading early-stage venture investor. Existing investors, Jonathan Milner and Amadeus Capital Partners also participated in the round.

There are 7,000 known rare diseases that affect 350 million people worldwide. 1 in 20 people on the planet suffer from a rare disease – in aggregate, rare diseases are not rare. Yet 95% of rare diseases still do not have an approved treatment. Rare disease patients and families have been let down by a broken traditional pharma model that is dependent on and focuses on blockbuster drugs.

Healx’s mission is to reverse this by using Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep pharmacological expertise and extensive patient engagement to give sufferers of rare disease a better quality of life. Healx’s massively parallel approach combines cutting edge technology with one of the largest collections of insights from rare disease patient groups. The company was founded in 2014 by Dr Tim Guilliams, a Bio-Chemical Engineer and founder of the Cambridge Rare Disease Network, Dr David Brown, the inventor of Viagra and ex-Global Head of Drug Discovery at Roche and Dr Andreas Bender, a lecturer and researcher at Cambridge University’s Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics.

“Healx has a simple but profound goal: To transform the lives of rare disease patients. Our technology helps us find treatments where none currently exist,” explained co-founder and CEO, Tim Guilliams.“Our proven approach is to start from existing drugs and apply artificial intelligence to niche disease populations, working with patient groups to accelerate treatment development. Our success comes from our world-class multi-disciplinary team of experts, leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques to cut the discovery-to-treatment time from years to months.”

Healx’s technology has already been used successfully, including most recently in collaboration with FRAXA, the patient group for the Fragile-X Syndrome. A drug for Fragile-X that was discovered by Healx’s platform was ready for the clinic in less than 15 months, cutting typical drug development timelines by 80% and doing so at a substantially reduced cost.

At the heart of Healx, is HealNet, one of the world’s most comprehensive knowledgebases for rare disease, mapping over one billion unique disease, patient and drug interactions. HealNet was built and is maintained using a variety of machine learning methods applied to a wide range of data types from both publicly available and exclusive sources including scientific literature, patents, clinical trials, disease symptoms, drug targets, multi-omic data and underlying chemical structures. HealNet facilitates highly parallelized, automated, large scale drug discovery that drastically reduces time and cost to discovery compared to traditional processes.

Dr Matt Might, Rare Disease Parent, Professor of Internal Medicine, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute, University of Alabama, said: “What is exciting about Healx is the enormous potential of HealNet. While other companies have built one-off AI systems to analyse a smaller number of fixed datasets as part of a broader drug discovery process, Healx is building a long-term platform that is capable of incorporating data from every conceivable source and using that to build an overall understanding of patients, diseases and drugs. The company has already shown the fruits of this asset for a number of diseases and this next round of funding will allow them to apply it to a significantly larger number of diseases.”

Equally important to Healx’s success to date has been its treatment strategy. While the technology could be used for the development of new therapies, the company has so far focused on finding new uses for existing drugs and their application in potential combination therapies. Applying this strategy within the context of rare disease has allowed Healx to further improve speed to market – existing drugs require fewer and less complex trials and the Orphan Drug Act was designed to encourage research and development of therapies for rare disease.

The $10m investment will be used to more than double Healx’s diverse and multi-disciplinary team of software engineers, data scientists, pharmacologists and drug development experts from the rich cross-disciplinary Cambridge ecosystem and to expand its world class artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Balderton’s Suranga Chandratillake will be joining the Board alongside Shaun Grady (Global Vice-President Business Development Operations, AstraZeneca), Dr Hermann Hauser (Co-Founder of Amadeus Capital Partners), Dr Jonathan Milner (Founder and ex-CEO of Abcam, LON:ABC, and Founder of the Milner Institute for Therapeutics).

David Brown, PhD, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Ex-Global Head of Drug Discovery, Roche, and Co-Inventor of Viagra, added, “The traditional drug discovery process takes 10 to 15 years at a cost of $2 billion per new drug and with a failure rate of 95 per cent – it’s broken, it’s slow, it’s high failure, and it’s not economic for rare diseases. However, today’s technology can change that and help 350 million under-served rare disease patients. Healx is showing that we can massively transform the rate of discovery of new medicines, reducing timelines and costs.”

Suranga Chandratillake, Partner at Balderton Capital, explained: “Historically, the pharmaceutical industry has focused on what is the same about everyone, building blockbuster drugs that affect large groups of people. The future of medicine will focus on what is different about everyone, personalising treatment and taking the individual into context. The first frontier of this exciting new direction for medicine is rare disease and the only way it can be solved is by using automation to deliver a step-change in the volume of discovery that is possible. Healx’s HealNet platform, at the forefront of this shift, is already delivering value and Balderton is excited to have the opportunity to be part of the company’s journey.”

Undo gets $14M to scale to meet the software accountability challenge

Undo, a long time player in the debugging tools space, offering its program execution capture and replay technology to help others diagnose software failures, has closed a $14 million Series B round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital, the Cambridge, UK-based builder of tech and healthcare companies.

The 2005 founded startup — initially bootstrapped (out of founder Greg Law’s garden shed) — has come a long way, and now has more than 30 paying customers for what it describes as its “record, rewind and replay” debugging technology, including the likes of SAP HANA, Mentor Graphics, Cadence and Micro Focus.

A quick potted history: In 2012, Law quit his job to go full time on Undo,  raising a small amount of angel funding and then a $1.25M from seed investment in 2014, followed by $3.3M in a series A funding in 2016.

New investors in the Series B round include Global Brain Corporation, a Japanese venture capital fund; and UK-focused Parkwalk Advisors, while all Undo’s existing investor groups also participated —  including Rockspring; Martlet; Sir Peter Michael (founder of Quantel, Classic FM and California’s Peter Michael Winery); the Cambridge Angels group and Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa).

The Series B will be used to expand Undo’s software development team, accelerate product development and grow its US operations. Undo says its best markets so far are electronic design automation (EDA); database manufacturers/data management; and networking.

“This funding will be used to significantly improve performance as part of Undo’s always-on recording vision, and also to accelerate our product roadmap and broaden the technology beyond compiled code so that it can be used with Java and other VM-based languages,” it tells us.

“Our main competitor is the status quo — engineering organisations that do not evolve with the times. Old-school debugging techniques (e.g. printf, logging, core dump analysis) have been around for decades. 2000 was all about static analysis. 2010 was about dynamic analysis, 2020 will be about capturing software failures ‘in the act’ through capture & replay technology.”

Undo argues that its Live Recorder technology offers “a completely new way of diagnosing software failures during development and in production” — arguing that its approach is superior to traditional debugging techniques such as printf, logging, core dump analysis which are “general purpose and provide limited information”, while it says static and dynamic analysis “are deep but can only look at specific instances of bugs” — whereas it claims its tech “can capture failure instances across the whole spectrum and therefore plugs in the gaps which no-one else has filled yet”.

The UK company also sees a growing opportunity for its approach given increasingly complex and increasingly autonomous software risks becoming unaccountable, if it’s making decisions without people knowing how and why. So the wider vision for Undo is not just getting faster at fixing bugs but addressing the growing need for software makers to be able to articulate — and account for — what their programs are doing at any given moment.

“Longer term it’s about that journey towards software accountability,” says Law. “Software accountability is quite a broad thing — it really means the ability to be able to know for sure what some software did as it ran. And today that’s all about the programmer’s understanding of what their program has done. But actually it’s far more than just programmers that need to understand software — and particularly as we move into this second chapter of the information revolution where computers are beginning to make decisions that affect our lives and our livelihoods. I mean in the case of social media and Facebook and things, Western democracy! The ability to have that accountability behind software actions is going to become a really important thing. That’s a progressive journey that we’re on.

“So the question is what did the software actually do? And as we grow, and as time goes on, we’ll answer that question in progressively bigger and bigger contexts.”

Cambridge duo share £100k haul to ‘Accelerate’ growth

Two companies each from Cambridge and London and one from Cardiff shared £100k and a raft of bolt-on benefits after winning the inaugural Accelerate@Babraham Startup Competition.

Qkine Ltd and Kalium Diagnostics from Cambridge, London twosome VisusNano Ltd and Oppilotech Ltd and Antiverse Ltd from Wales each won £20k, mentorship benefits and access to the accelerators five-star facilities for disruptive biotechnology businesses.They went head to head with three other companies.

The competition attracted a rich variety of high calibre applications, all of which were reviewed by a panel of senior academics, investors, entrepreneurs and industry leaders. 

After this challenging selection process, eight companies made it through to the second stage where they pitched to the competition panel and faced a quick-fire Q & A.  

The panel consisted of John Trainer, VP and Head, Partnering and Strategy at MedImmune, Jo Parfrey, Non-exec Director of Babraham Bioscience Technologies Ltd, David Grainger, Partner at Medicxi, Tony Kouzarides, Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Cambridge and Derek Jones, CEO, Babraham Bioscience Technologies Ltd.

Derek Jones said: “It is extremely challenging to communicate a business idea, cutting-edge science, and quantify the potential and convince a panel of judges that your proposition is better than the competition, whatever the situation. 

“However, all eight finalists did incredibly well, and we were so impressed with all the pitches that we hope to be able to offer mentoring support and useful introductions to the runners up too.

“To those that made it through – we are delighted to welcome you to Accelerate@Babraham and look forward to working with you from September!”

John Trainer for MedImmune added: “It was a real pleasure to be part of this process. The eight finalists presented their ventures with professionalism, enthusiasm and a high level of competency, which was very impressive, but made our decision-making very challenging.

“Becoming part of the Babraham Research Campus community via the Accelerate@Babraham programme offers the chosen five ventures an exciting opportunity to join an environment that has an exceptional reputation for nurturing and supporting new life science concepts and companies. I wish them all well and look forward to seeing how they progress.”

RxCelerate is one of Accelerate@Babraham’s five strategic partners along with AstraZeneca, MedImmune, One Nucleus and Eli Lilly.

This inaugural competition supports the overall objectives of Accelerate@Babraham - to support the development of new science concepts and the creation of new companies. 

It is also complementary of the Babraham Research Campus’ ongoing support of the Cambridge life science cluster, through the provision of access to the campus community and infrastructure without the need to be an established occupier on site.

doppel wins best Female-Led Investment at the UKBAA Angel Investment Awards

We're honoured to announce that doppel has won Best Female-Led Angel Investment at this year’s UKBAA Angel Investment Awards. The company was recognised alongside Ros Singleton, doppel’s lead investor from the pro-women and award-winning angel network Angel Academe.

The award, which doppel was jointly awarded alongside World Wide Generation, represents a significant achievement as the company begins to scale.

Now in its 14th year, the annual UKBAA Angel Investment Awards celebrate high growth and success in the angel and early-stage investment market – recognising the fastest growing brands and acknowledging the founders, angels, crowd funders and early-stage venture capital investors behind them.

doppel received funding from two top angel groups Cambridge Angels and Angel Academe earlier this year.

doppel’s CEO Dr Fotini Markopoulou said:

“It’s fantastic to see the UK Business Angels Association dedicate an award to female-led investment. We are delighted to be recognised in such a prestigious category. We look forward to growing the business with support of both of our angel groups.”

Ros Singleton, lead investor from Angel Academe, added:

“I'm thrilled to be recognised for the Angel Academe investment in doppel. This is recognition for the whole team and collaborative approach we take to all our investments. Working closely with Cambridge Angels' lead, Paul Anson, I have learnt a lot and am confident the doppel team will go from strength to strength, thanks to their brilliant tech which helps people cope with life’s stresses naturally and within moments.”

Paul Anson, lead investor from Cambridge Angels, also added:

“We have great expectations for our investment in doppel. The drive and passion of the team and their ethical approach was key to creating an aligned and substantial syndicate and that same attitude will serve the founders well in scaling the business.”

About Angel Academe

Angel Academe is a pro-women and award-winning angel network.

We're helping more women enjoy the benefits of angel investing and, at the same time, helping the best UK tech startups access the capital and “smarts” women bring. We believe that diverse investor and startup teams make better decisions, are more capital efficient and give better return on investment.

About Cambridge Angels

Cambridge Angels is a group of more than 60 high-net worth investors who have proven experience as successful entrepreneurs in technology, internet, software, hardware, digital healthcare and life sciences. Members invest in and mentor high quality start-up and early-stage companies in these sectors in Cambridge, London, Oxford and throughout the UK.

Bango strengthens Amazon capability

Bango, the Cambridge-based mobile commerce company, has expanded the use of its billing integration technology, enabling customers to sign-up for Amazon Prime Video in the UK through a leading mobile operator.

Using Bango’s billing integration technology, qualifying customers have the opportunity to subscribe to Prime Video as part of the customer’s mobile plan. 

This follows Bango’s initial launch with Amazon in India for Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile network operator. 

Bango technology ensures that entitled mobile customers receive uninterrupted access to Amazon Prime Video from the moment they become active, for as long as they continue to subscribe and pay their mobile bills.

“Bango technology enables our customers to thrive by acquiring new users,” says CEO Ray Anderson. “Global merchants can offer their customers market leading products such as video and music services, home security, e-sports services and many more.”

Bango is the payment platform chosen by the world’s most influential companies to grow their sales faster in the new age of connected commerce. 
Working with global stores including Amazon, Google and Microsoft Bango has become the industry standard, helping people make payments quickly and conveniently.  

Peter Cowley appointed EBAN President

Huge congratulations to our #investedinvestor @plcowley for being appointed the new #EBAN #President! We are so proud of you! Thank you to the amazing #CandaceJohnson for her excellent contribution as President for the last four years! @EBAN_org @HaloIreland