Illuminating the Future of Battery Technology: An Interview with Christoph Schnedermann of Illumion

In the fast-evolving world of energy storage, breakthroughs in battery technology are critical to shaping a sustainable future. At the forefront of this innovation is Illumion, a deep-tech company leveraging advanced optical techniques to revolutionize battery development. Christoph Schnedermann, its founder and CEO, discusses his journey, the company’s vision, and his insights on leadership and fundraising.

Could you tell us a bit about your background and how Illumion started?

Certainly! I originally hail from Germany and spent eight years at Oxford University, where I pursued a PhD in ultrafast spectroscopy. My academic journey then took me to Harvard where I worked on water splitting, a key technology behind artificial leaf research. Eventually, I moved to Cambridge to focus on physics and energy materials, which ultimately led to my deep interest in battery technology.

Recognizing the long development cycle of battery materials, which often takes a decade, my co-founders and I saw an opportunity to introduce a more efficient approach. That’s how Illumion was born. We are a hard-tech company specializing in scientific instrumentation that uses an optical technique to observe the real-time changes in battery materials during operation. We actually track ion flows within materials, which eliminates much of the trial and error in formulation, accelerating the discovery and optimization of new materials.

That sounds amazing. And what are your key goals for Illumion over the next few years?

Right now, we are focused on scaling our impact in the battery R&D sector, which is a $3 billion market. Initially, our instrument is targeted at academic institutions and early-stage R&D departments and we have already made initial instrument sales. Over the next few years, we aim to expand into battery manufacturing and recycling, both of which can benefit immensely from our real-time material analysis.

Our long-term vision is to establish Illumion as a platform technology in areas beyond batteries; observing real-time ion flows in materials has potential applications in areas like catalysis, bio interfaces and even memory storage. In the next 5 years though, our aim is to sell hundreds of our instruments globally, transforming the way energy storage materials are developed and commercialized.

You have transitioned from a technical role to CEO. What advice would you give to aspiring startup leaders?

Becoming a CEO has been a transformative experience. Moving from an academic career to leading a company meant developing resilience, mastering stakeholder management, and staying 100% focused on our vision despite the inevitable challenges. At one point, we came close to shutting down operations, which was incredibly stressful and reinforced the importance of managing uncertainty and having the right support network, equally both personal and professional.

Above all though, building a strong team and maintaining a clear sense of purpose has been essential.

What fundraising lessons have you learned that might help other founders?

Fundraising is always more challenging and time-consuming than expected. It took us 12 months and over 50 investor conversations to secure our seed round.

The key lessons for me were: Start early, keep conversations going, and find investors who truly understand the timescales around deep-tech rather than just looking for the fast, hockey-stick type returns.

We also made sure to conduct due diligence on investors, not just them on us, to ensure that we had the right long-term partners on our CAP table. Leveraging grants and public funding was another crucial strategy to reduce dilution and extend our runway.

Our recent £2.1M seed round was led by Foresight Group, with participation from Cambridge Enterprise, Parkwalk Advisors and Cambridge Angels. This, along with our pre-seed funding of £650k, has positioned us to now accelerate our growth.

How has having Cambridge Angels as part of your investor group benefited Illumion?

Having Cambridge Angels on board has been incredibly valuable. Their experience and network have provided strategic guidance beyond just funding. The Cambridge ecosystem is highly connected and this has opened doors to key hires and partnerships; our Chief of Staff, for instance, came through an indirect connection. The right introductions and insights at the right time have made all the difference.

Engineering a Revolution in Pest Control: How Spotta Combines Innovation and Sustainability

From engineering sensors to earning the nickname "the bug guy," Robert Fryers co-founded Spotta to revolutionise pest monitoring with smart, ultra-low-power devices. Read about Spotta's journey and how the company has demonstrated success across 18 countries, monitoring pests from citrus groves to hotel bedbugs.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what Spotta does

I never expected to be ‘the bug guy!’. My background is in engineering, which I studied at Cambridge, before going to work at the Technology Partnership where I specialised in low power sensors in challenging environments. This is where I met my cofounder, Neil. In 2013 we left to set up a product consultancy and in 2016, whilst prospecting in the pest control industry, we discovered that this was a huge market that was ripe for disruption/automation but had limited ambition. Hence Spotta was born.

Spotta focuses on providing early warning systems for pests and that means customers can get in early and prevent problems before they grow. That allows proactive, targeted treatment instead of blanketing everything with chemicals Our solution is a small, easy-to-install, ultra-low-power computer vision device, that doesn’t require on-device processing or streaming and can therefore run on one AA battery for a year.

We now have ten thousand pods installed in 18 counties, thereby proving the power of our technology. We have sales in monitoring Red Palm Weevils in Date Palms and are taking first orders for monitoring Asian Citrus Psyllid; this has decimated citrus growing in Florida and is now threatening Brazilian citrus. We even have a nicely growing market monitoring bed bugs in hotels.

What are your goals for Spotta for the next few years?

Many people don’t know that TAM in pest monitoring is $40bn and we are only just getting started in the tech automation of this market. Our immediate goal is scaling revenue in our three focus areas – Citrus, date palms and hotels. We’re currently fundraising to hit several million ARR in revenue, after which we’ll embark on a further growth round.

Ultimately, we are aiming to become a unicorn, transforming pest monitoring into a tech-enabled - proactive rather than reactive - industry.

What advice could you give an aspiring CEO?

I realise now that you need to have a clear vision of where you want the company to go as this really helps give clarity of purpose, both to the people you hire and in your fundraising journey. This vision can change over time; initially we were just focussed on the bed-bug market and driving to an exit in the £20-30M range, but now our vision has grown to wanting to have a global impact on the way the world manages pests and through this, reduce our reliance on harmful pesticides.

Do you have any fundraising advice you could share from your journey to date?

We have done 3 rounds so far and I have realised that DD runs both ways; you have to do DD on the people/funds you are talking to and not just the other way around particularly as everyone is keen to talk and take a first meeting and potentially waste

your time. Pre-qualify them – do they invest in your sector/geography, what is their ticket size and talk to other founders that they have invested in.

Also recognise that investors invest in momentum; we are raising a £2M round with 2/3rds committed, but those fundraising conversations have suddenly become much faster since we hit a big revenue inflection point in October this year.

How has having Cambridge Angels in your investor group assisted you?

Two main things – support and patience. We launched our bedbug product in February 2020, 2 weeks before hotels worldwide shut down because of Covid – not great timing! If it wasn’t for support from angels Spotta would likely be toast by now, but CA angels saw the bigger picture and that both the platform and the team had legs.

It has also been fantastic to have investors on our cap table who’ve ‘been there/done it’ before. Paul Anson has been brilliant as chair and our angels very much have the start-up culture in their veins.

Innovating at the Edge of Probability: A Conversation with Phillip Stanley-Marbell, Founder of Signaloid

Cambridge Angels backed Signaloid takes the title of being one of the first contract awardees for the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA). In this interview with founder Phillip Stanley-Marbell, we learn more about Signaloid and Phillip's journey from Bell Labs via Apple to now leading the team at Signaloid.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Yes, certainly, the relevant bits at least! I’m an engineer and I create advanced computing technologies that exploit an understanding of physics. I spent the last 25 years moving back and forth between industry and academia.

In the mid 1990s, while still studying for my undergraduate degree, I spent time working at Bell Labs in the US and got to work under people such as Dennis Ritchie (creator of the C programming language). The experience motivated me to go do a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), after which I joined IBM Research in Zurich. After about half a decade there I moved to Apple in Cupertino, where I was involved in the development of the Apple watch, among other things.

While Apple was a lot of fun, I had some ideas at the intersection of computer hardware architecture and probability theory that I knew that, if I didn’t put in the work to turn these ideas into reality, I would regret it at the end of my life. I therefore left Apple for MIT in 2014 with the intention of going into an environment where I could build ideas and a team with the appropriate expertise and then moved to the University of Cambridge as a professor in 2017. I incorporated Signaloid in 2019, self-funding it for two years before raising the first angel investment in 2021 and completing a seed round in January 2023.

And what does Signaloid do?

Many organisations rely on Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations, particularly in the finance and engineering fields. Signaloid’s technology can help them run the MC simulations significantly faster (often twice to ten times faster) than on Intel processors; they get answers faster and have greater capacity to run a variety of simulations. We have essentially designed a new type of processor that enables arithmetic on probability distributions and we can deliver this to clients in a variety of different ways, be it public cloud, private cloud, on prem, or as an edge hardware module.

What are your goals for Signaloid over the next few years?

Our goal over the next few years is to keep growing revenue in our focus market segments of finance and manufacturing and to continue to execute on our roadmap for improved hardware accelerated implementations of our technology.

Our main deployment path for customers today is via our cloud-based deployments but we are on track to complete at least one custom silicon test chip (“tapeout”) before the end of the 2024. We have agreements in place with IMEC and access to TSMC’s advanced technology nodes which will allow us to also provide our technology for integration into accelerators designed by other companies. Interestingly, many of the

more aggressive quantitative finance organizations, both hedge funds and market makers, are now building their own application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and technologies like ours that can speed up risk analysis, option pricing, and Monte Carlo methods in general, by orders of magnitude.

At the same time as executing on our medium- and long-term plans, we have current engagements with two of the ten largest banks and we have partnerships with the likes of Bosch and contracts with some of the largest aerospace companies. We’ve also recently won two large UK government agency contracts. We are approaching cash-flow break-even and do not need to fundraise as a necessity, but there are always strategic opportunities (we closed a £3M seed in January 2023 round and have more than that amount in signed contracted revenue over the next two years).

In the context of fundraising and revenue, our goal is to be a commercially-successful entity solving an important problem in the world and delivering value to paying customers. As a company, we judge ourselves by the value and impact we deliver to customers, not by how much we’ve raised in external funding. One area where I would like us to do better, in the daily grind as a company, is improving our balance between large contracts and “sticky” broad-based recurring revenue.

What advice could you give to an aspiring CEO?

Understand how your target customer can use your technology as a tool “in anger” and give them that tool. If you focus on solving your customer’s problems, you will have many opportunities, and real justification, to develop groundbreaking technologies. If you focus on developing a technology, you will likely end up with neither a useful technology nor any customers. So choose wisely.

Before founding Signaloid, I took part in an entrepreneurship programme at MIT where the program drilled into us the importance of Talking to Customers; looking back, while I thought I “got it” then, I think I underestimated how important it is to really understand what each individual customer is trying to achieve. Customers will often initially often fob you off with pleasantries but somehow you have to get them to cross the chasm to trust you enough to share what their real problems are. At Signaloid, we tried to enable customer validation opportunities by always having a customer-facing product, even right at the beginning when we were still bootstrapped off my savings.

A sales person or a “commercial person” that you hire from the outside can, maybe, teach you the ropes of customer acquisition, but a technical founder needs to do this customer acquisition themselves. If you think you can delegate customer acquisition, you are likely abdicating your responsibility. You will get sold many salespeople.

And what advice can you give going into a fundraising round?

If you’re fundraising to be able to say how much you’ve raised, then I’m ill-equipped to say anything that would be relevant or helpful. If you’re fundraising to build long-term

relationships, here are a few positive things I took away from the sustained and elevated pain during Signaloid’s seed round:

- A financing round involves human beings and people are not always rational in their decision-making. This can make it fun! This can make it difficult!

- During our seed round I spoke to at least 60 investors. Of course, the vast majority of these didn’t invest but I learnt a huge amount through the tough questions they asked. I learned a great deal from the experience of all the pitches. I only felt perhaps 2 out of the 60 or so discussions were not so pleasant, but everyone has bad days, no?

- At the completion of our seed round in January 2023, I sent a personal “thank you” email to every investor I spoke with and asked them if I could send them monthly updates. Most said yes. So, since January 2023, I have been sending a monthly update to a list of investors that has now grown to almost 80 (I add new VCs when they get in touch to ask if we’re fundraising). The investors on this list, most of whom did not invest, have been very helpful, making introductions, helping with hiring, and more.

How has having Cambridge Angels in your investor group assisted you?

They have helped enormously and the name says it all; they are a group of experienced angel investors and not just an faceless entity. I have been able to pick up the phone to any of them at any time and they have always been helpful. I am speaking to one of them tomorrow in fact.

You are one of the first recipients of ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency) contracts. Can you tell us about that?

ARIA is quite unlike anything else I have come across in the UK. We have a contract whose award was made public at the end of July and we have other engagements with ARIA in the pipeline. The form of engagements (contract as opposed to grant funding) has many positive knock-on effects: ARIA has several programme directors who are experts in their technology fields and have a clear picture of technology challenges which, if solved, could have significantly positive technological or financial impact for the UK. People interested in the specifics of contracts awarded to date, intellectual property retention by organizations, etc., should visit ARIA’s web page to find out more.

What was the process you went through to get the ARIA contract?

It was an efficient process which took approximately three weeks from the application deadline to the initial selection, followed by discussions with the programme director and their team. The total time from the application deadline to project start was under three months. The ARIA programme directors are of such high calibre that, even if a contract tender is not successful, you will likely find the process intellectually stimulating.

5 questions...An interview with Techspert CEO, Dave Holden

Imagine having 20 million contactable experts on call.  This is what Cambridge Angels portfolio company Techspert offers the healthcare market.  In this interview, CEO of Techspert, Dave Holden talks about his entrepreneurial journey, and offers his top funding tips to other founders. 

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to starting Techspert? [Eg What is your relevant experience and what made you become an entrepreneur]

Following a masters in Biochemistry at Oxford, I worked as a trainee Patent Attorney in the Biotechnology field in London. 

I enjoyed being close to the core of innovation but felt often the service we were providing was hindering the innovation process rather than accelerating it. 

I wanted to have a more entrepreneurial role and went to Cambridge University to study for a Masters in Bioscience Enterprise, which lead me to a role corporate development role in a diagnostics start-up, Psyomics. 

During this role, I experienced the pain points of gaining access to the right insights. Expert insight is crucial when trying to make complex product and go-to-market decisions, but it took me weeks to connect with people who were even vaguely relevant to the markets we wanted to sell into. 

This experience lead me to set up Techspert (Biotechspert as it was then). I wanted to develop a platform could map in real time exactly who has what expertise in the healthcare sector and therefore connect businesses to exactly the right expertise. I knew the information was out there online, that experts were willing to be paid for these calls, and that there was a unmet need from corporates and investors alike. I underestimated however, how hard it would be however to get to the scale we are today. 

What is the big problem that Techspert is tackling and how does it do it?

The big problem is getting fast access to experts and insights in the healthcare sector. It takes Billions of dollars and often decades to get products from discovery to market in our sector and wrong turns during the process are extremely costly. The reason we exist is to have a positive impact on this process by connecting the right people together in the healthcare sector. For example, our clients needed to roll out vaccines in Uganda and used our platform to connect with specific healthcare professionals on the ground. 

We solve the expertise and insights bottlenecks by ingesting large quantities of data to map healthcare experts globally. We cover over 20 million contactable experts, with 430 thousand engaged on our platform. This enables us to deliver industry-leading quality of match, and unique experts that can't be found anywhere else. 

Our customers, including consultancies, biotechs, investors and marketing firms use our platform to complete calls and surveys with experts, but generative AI now enables us to take this to the next level. In addition, our customers can now query previous calls and groups of calls in real time within the chat interface in our product. This means we are moving up the value chain, on our mission to become the worlds leading platform for Heathcare primary research.  

This sounds like a competitive space so how does your approach differ from others? 

Our competitors rely on two main methodologies for finding experts (i) curated databases (ii) linkedin. Both these sources require manual input and extensive human resources for either data entry or recruitment on linkedin. 

Our technology takes a completely different approach, ingesting data automatically across millions of experts and combining it to predict expertise and deliver precisely matched experts across the sector. Unlike other networks, we can therefore reach untapped frontline professionals. 1 in 3 of the experts we serve is unique to us this is one of the key reasons our customers come back to us year after year. 

Our approach also means we can automate much more of the process, delivering greater speeds, efficiency, and convenience. Our platform is also very feature rich, including many AI features that extract insights from calls and serve them to our customers instantly, within the platform, saving them many hours across their research projects.   

What has your funding been to date and do you have a couple of fundraising tips for aspiring entrepreneurs?

We have raised a number (too many) rounds over the years. Including crowd funding, angel funding and VC. 

My first tip/question in relation to funding, is do you need to do it? If there is a way you can get more cash faster from your customers and therefore reduce the funding and dilution you need to take on, then that should be number one priority in my opinion and is the best and cheapest form of financing for growth. If I could go back in time this is something I would change with how we have grown - to be more capital efficient and improve our margins and cashflows earlier, rather than prioritising growth of revenue and the team.

Make sure your time horizons and exit thoughts line up with investors you bring on. It is tempting to say what many VCs want to hear at this point 'that you want the business to get to unicorn scale within the coming years etc', but if this isn't truly what you see as the best and most achievable route for the business to succeed then it could cause issues further down the line. There are investors who have different fund dynamics where a lower risk routes to profitability are also viable if that fits with your personal ambitions as a founder.  Other than that. VCs care about the scale of the opportunity you are aiming for, and how likely you are to get there. So try to paint a clear picture of the end destination and how exciting and lucrative it is, while also backing it up with evidence and metrics that prove you are heading in that direction. Also try to lean into your personal strengths as a founder, whether that is product, sales, marketing or finance, and show awareness of that, so that you can bring your personal passion and conviction out effectively during the process. 

How did backing from Cambridge Angels help you?

Cambridge Angels were instrumental in our first £1m round. Simon Thorpe has been supportive of the business throughout, given great advice throughout the journey, and opened doors to other investors along the way. There is a lot of experience in the group that yields great suggestions on investor calls, many of which have been implemented to great effect. 

5 questions... An interview with Concr's CEO, Irina Babina

How does Astrophysics help eliminate the trial-and-error approach to cancer care? Hear from Concr's newly appointed CEO Irina Babina, who has shared her experience and Concr's exciting progress in this 5 question interview.

· Congratulations on taking over as CEO of Concr. Could you give us a bit about your background and how you came to the business?

Of course. I’ve always worked in life sciences and started with building my own research in oncogenic addiction of aggressive breast and gastric cancers. After 10 years in academia, I moved into funding management, helping other scientists to develop their ideas. During that time, I completed an MBA and then moved fully into commercial side of science, as a VC and a life sciences consultant.

That’s when I got involved with Concr, initially as a strategy consultant and later became a part-time Head of Strategy. What really appealed to me was their adoption of existing and proven engineering methods to address challenges in medicine. I’m a huge advocate for convergence science and leveraging knowledge from other fields. My involvement with the company kept growing, and I eventually joined the management team and succeeded our founder-CEO in January.

· What is the problem that Concr is tackling and how does it do it?

Concr is on a mission to eliminate trial-and-error approach to cancer care. Despite all the tremendous collective research effort in cancer, patients’ benefit remains disproportionately marginal. We need better tools to select patients for existing and emerging treatments, for which we need to better understand the biology of response and resistance to these therapies. This is where Concr technology can really help move the needle.

To capture the complexity of biology and factor-in our limited knowledge of it, Concr adopted computational modelling methods from astrophysics, which allows cosmologists to simultaneously integrate enormous amounts of complex and fragmented data to model the universe. Concr adapted these Bayesian methods to integrate the diverse and disparate data gathered over decades of cancer research and clinical treatment to model human disease biology.

We use it to examine complex – typically, molecular – data to define characteristics of patients and their cancers that are associated with response and resistance to existing or emerging therapies. Importantly, we can do it at an individual- and cohort-level, which hasn’t been done before.

Where are you in the development of the platform and what commercial traction do you have?

Most of our work currently is with biotech and pharma looking to reduce uncertainty in drug development and increase probability of success of their drug assets, although we’re beginning to get some interest from healthcare providers, given that we can make predictions for an individual.

Having delivered our first commercial projects last year, we now refined and productised our offers and built the infrastructure for rapid project set up and delivery. Furthermore, we completed beta version of FarrSight® - our cloud native software that allows interaction with the results of our predictive analytics, as well as contains self-service bioinformatics tools.

At this point, we’ve negotiated additional commercial contracts and have a rich pipeline of promising leads across the drug development supply chain. Full launch of FarrSight® is planned for June this year.

· This sounds like a competitive space so how does your approach differ from others?

You’re right, it could be difficult to differentiate all the AI/ML offers currently on the market, and I see it as a positive: this is a new and rapidly growing sector with much promise. What sets Concr apart is our positioning, our technological differentiation and validation studies across biological and clinical datasets.

For starters, Concr is not a drug discovery platform, which so many current offers focus on. We focus on predicting therapeutic response for an individual patient through in-depth understanding of the underlying biology.

What allows us to do it so effectively is the astrophysics technological backbone. It solves the challenges of integrating and learning from fragmented and diverse biological datasets, from preclinical research to patient clinical data, yielding most sophisticated scalable digital models of human disease biology. Consequently, it minimises reliance on “big data” – we can make accurate predictions with a fraction of data needed by conventional ML methods. This is particularly important in cases where research data is limited, for example if a drug asset is early in development or if it’s a rare cancer.

Of course, the only way to know if something is working is through results. We have case studies demonstrating technical, biological and clinical validation of our predictions, generated through collaborations and commercial work. We’ve just released a paper describing our approach to in silico trial predictions, which was validated in 8 historical clinical trials. Last month we launched our first prospective clinical validation study in early triple-negative breast cancer, which will test clinical utility of our platform.

· What has your funding being to date and what are your funding plans for the future?

We are fortunate to be backed by exceptional financial supporters, a testament to the groundwork laid by our former CEO, Matt Foster. Early on, our core technology was developed through our collaboration with Roche and supported by an Innovate UK grant. Securing this grant required us to demonstrate financial stability, and thanks to a swift £200K investment from Cambridge Angels, we achieved this in just two weeks.

Last year we closed a £1.94m oversubscribed seed round, including follow-on investments as well as new institutional investors, which allowed us to complete initial validation studies, secure additional contracts, and enabled us to secure another non-dilutive grant for clinical validation.

These achievements strategically position us for our imminent Series A round, a significant milestone we are about to officially embark on. This pivotal fundraise will support our commercial growth, scale business operations and allow for further improvement and refinement of our technology.

5 questions...An interview with Kalium Health CEO, Tom Collings

Tom Collings is CEO and co-founder of Kalium Health, working to transform the management of cardiorenal diseases using our real-time blood monitoring technology.

What is your background and how did this lead you to starting Kalium Health?

I qualified as a Mechanical Engineer and I’m a builder at heart. My career started with building product prototypes in a workshop, from which I learnt how to design better products. From there I found myself managing complex, high-value medical technology development projects. Now I’m building a team and a company, so the building never stops!

Kalium Health was started in 2018 when a doctor at Addenbrooke’s Hospital spotted an unmet clinical need and teamed up with two researchers from Cambridge University to develop a solution. I volunteered my capabilities and the four of us together realised the huge potential. It’s truly a result of the powerful cocktail of ideas, talent and funding that makes Cambridge one of the best places in the world to start a technology business.

Where is the company now and what are your goals for it over the next 24 months?

It’s such an exciting time for us. We have developed the world’s first test for blood potassium levels that is rapid, accurate and suitable for home use. This is poised to change the way that cardiorenal diseases are managed, enabling real-time health monitoring so that medications can be prescribed more safely and patients can stay healthy outside the hospital.

We’re busy completing our clinical testing and getting regulatory approvals so that we can release our first product onto the market and begin working on our next ideas.

What do you wish you'd known before starting on your entrepreneurial journey?

People do business with people, not companies. Before founding Kalium Health I thought I had a great network… turns out I had to develop a whole different network of mentors, advisers, investors and other founders who have ‘been there, done that’. Everyone I meet is so generous with their time and I try to do the same.

What specific challenges did you have during fundraising (and how did you overcome them)?

As a team of mostly technical, first-time founders we had to learn to stop pitching the product and start pitching the business. I spent a year full-time raising our first equity funding and it was through countless meetings with experienced investors that I learnt the ingredients for a successful business. Now we’re putting that into practice and we will shortly close our third funding round.

How has having Cambridge Angels in your investor group helped you?

Cambridge Angels bring such a positive approach, undoubtedly due to the entrepreneurial success of the members who are better qualified than most to balance risk and opportunity. Their advice has helped me focus on the things that will really move the needle. Also, as a majority-female founding team we are delighted to have backing from several female Angels including Pam Garside, current Chair of Cambridge Angels and a super-connector in the UK/US healthcare space.

5 questions... An interview with Qureight's CEO, Muhunthan Thillai

In this “5 questions….” interview, their fantastic CEO, Muhunthan Thillai, talks about what Qureight does, his aims for the company in the future and some tips for fundraising and first-time CEOs.

Tell us a bit about yourself and Qureight?

I am a respiratory doctor at the hospitals in Cambridge and co-founder and CEO of Qureight. We founded the company a few years ago out of the Accelerator at the Judge Business School. We wanted to solve the problem of potential blockbuster drugs in lung and heart diseases failing during the clinical trial process. Qureight has built a software platform which uses real-world data and machine learning tools to create products to help clinical trials and we've had some great traction recently signing a number of commercial deals with biopharma companies both in Europe and the US.

Where are you aiming Qureight to be in 5 years?

In five years I want Qureight to be the largest data platform in the world running multiple clinical trials in lung and heart diseases. Our ambition is for the platform to be fully integrated with global biopharma companies, hospitals and contract research organisations and to use a variety of machine learning based products to help our clients get the best drugs to market faster. All of this is to help patients with these diseases get access to cutting edge treatments.

Can you give an example of a recent challenge you have had to navigate as a CEO?

We recently completed a contracting process with a client which was very complicated due to the nature of the trial they wanted to run on the platform. The contract went back and forth several times and the client (whilst well meaning) kept trying to push down the costs. For any start up this is a challenge that many of us at leadership face. We sometimes have to make a decision to would walk away from a deal rather than cut corners. In this particular case the client was happy to complete signing and start the work. It was a really important lesson for me that as we scale, we of course have to hustle for every deal, but at some point we have to have a benchmark that we stick to if we are to grow as a company.

Do you have a couple of fundraising tips for entrepreneurs in the medtech space?

I think the first point would be to always follow the science. In medtech most companies at the early stage will not have recurring revenue and many of the contracts they sign may be small pilots but it's really important to focus on the technology itself and use that to explain the true value of the company that you're building for future growth. Another point is to find the right investors. The fund raising environment is difficult at the moment but if you are lucky enough to get more than one investor, it's really important to work out who you want to grow with over the next few years rather than just accepting the first term sheet that comes your way.

How has having Cambridge Angels in your investor group assisted you?

The Cambridge Angels have been fantastically supportive. We have five on our cap table and they all come with different skills. Rather than naming all of them, the one person I would single out is Simon Thorpe who invested in our very first pre seed around three years ago and is a great person to get advice from in terms of company strategy and direction. The angels as a group have a number of events for networking and introductions to both investors and the wider ecosystem and we're very fortunate that some of them have backed us at the early stages of our company.