Charco NeurotechLtd has developed the CUE1, a small, non-invasive, wearable therapeutic device for people with Parkinson’s disease. Worn on the sternum, the device delivers two validated neuromodulation therapies at the same time: focused vibrotactile stimulation and ‘cueing’. These improve motor performance and alleviate numerous symptoms, for example countering ‘freezing of gait’ (when people feel their feet are stuck to the ground).

The CUE1’s focused stimulation works with the body’s sensory system to help improve the speed and fluidity of an individual’s movement. Cueing uses regular or rhythmic stimuli to assist a person with Parkinson’s to start and continue movements like walking. Patients who have benefitted from the CUE1 say that their motions become smoother and better coordinated when wearing the device.

Everyone’s Parkinson’s is different, so an accompanying Bluetooth-enabled app (the CUE app) allows an individual to fine-tune the device’s vibration settings. It also provides a symptom tracker plus interactive games to record progress and movement.

Soo-Min (Lucy) Jung is the co-founder and CEO at Charco Neurotech. Lucy joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator in 2022 and says, “As Charco grows, I would like to enhance my leadership skills in several key areas, including strategic negotiations and dealmaking. The mentorship will also be an important element in my professional development – I will benefit both from the mentor’s advice and their expertise.”

At the end of 2021, Charco raised £7.4 million in a seed investment round. The company will use this to expand its team and continue the release of the CUE1.  The funding will also ensure that the production of the device is fully scalable and the manufacturing quality is consistent. The backers of Charco believe that the CUE1 has the ability to greatly enhance the quality of life for people diagnosed with Parkinson’s worldwide.

Porotech has created a new class of semiconductor material: porous GaN, a composite of solid GaN and air. The company’s breakthroughs enable nanoscopic holes to be made in the semiconductor, resulting in a wide range of optical, mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties. The company is also delivering monochrome and full-colour micro-LED products to exceptionally high specifications.

Before this innovation, the manufacture of full-colour micro-LED displays was complicated and commercially prohibitive. Several material systems needed to be combined to develop a finished product. Porotech’s innovative process allows monochrome and full-colour displays to be placed on a single indium gallium nitride material system at mass scale, with the luminosity, efficiency and resolution needed for high-quality image projection against bright backgrounds.

Now, all three light-emitting elements can be produced using a single toolchain. Porotech’s technology offers a brand new material platform for semiconductor devices to be built on. This will be relevant for emerging markets such as micro-LED displays, metasurfaces, sensors, lasers, and quantum light sources.

Dr Yingjun Liu is the co-founder and CTO of Porotech Ltd, and joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator in 2022. He says, “As I am responsible for setting the technology plan and managing growing teams, I want to develop a unique blend of management and technical skills for a high-growth business. Being able to exchange ideas with future industrial leaders and learn from leading entrepreneurs will help me contribute even more to our company’s global business and technology progress.”

Porotech recently secured £14.5 million in Series A funding. This investment will help the company to speed up its production of micro-LED products and rapidly scale up. Micro-LED displays will play an important part in subsequent generations of TVs, wearables, smartphones, and AR glasses.

Surfactants, used to decrease surface or interfacial tensions, have multiple uses in the chemical industry. Their industrial applications include household detergents, cosmetics, and agriculture. Holiferm Ltd, a Manchester-based company, is looking to move away from non-fossil-based chemical surfactants by developing and supplying sustainable, fermentation-derived ingredients for industrial and consumer products.

Holiferm has developed commercially viable, continuous manufacturing processes for biosurfactants and lipids that are able to deliver green products to the mass market at volume, and at competitive prices. The company’s patented integrated gravity separation and fermentation technology increases fermentation process productivity fourfold and reduces biosurfactant production costs by more than 50%.

Vicky De Groof joined Holiferm as a fermentation engineer. Within a year she had become the company’s Chief Technology Officer, responsible for a team of 10 people. Vicky then joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2022, and says, “I hope the networking opportunities and workshops will allow me to meet others, create new ideas, widen my perspectives, build my business confidence and lead to serendipitous findings.”

Holiferm is aiming to persuade the £27 billion surfactant market to move away from petroleum-based chemicals to biobased, sustainable alternatives. In 2021, the company started the year with a team of 10 and a pilot plant. By the end of that year, it had raised over £7 million of investment, increased the team to 20 people, and started to build a commercial plant.

Now, it is developing and refining new processes, doubling the team count again and generating a clear product pipeline. Holiferm’s fermentation technology will enable it to produce other types of biosurfactants and fermentation-derived chemicals that will help transform the chemical industry into a more sustainable one.

Problem:

There are approximately 50 pantograph (an apparatus mounted on the roof of an electric train to collect power through contact with an overhead line) related incidents in the UK each year. These cause cancellations of passenger services, damage infrastructure, reduce safety and reliability of electrified train operation and have huge financial implications (tens of millions of pounds per incident) for both train operating companies and infrastructure managers such as Network Rail.

A lack of real-time information about pantograph operation and being unable to regularly inspect the infrastructure to inform data-driven decisions currently costs Network Rail around £530 million per annum.

Solution:

Sentech Analytics Ltd has developed a new ‘smart-pantograph’ system: a multi-parameter, patented and field-evaluated optical fibre-based sensor system integrated with video information, to inform better data-driven maintenance solutions. This system allows users to create comprehensive inspection reports (required by the regulatory bodies) and reduce maintenance costs by providing real-time insight on the status of infrastructure and railway pantographs, preventing costly incidents while reducing maintenance and service outages.

Recent work with Network Rail on the Great Western Electrification programme illustrated this, and the smart pantograph now facilitates faster, more environmentally friendly passenger journeys between Bristol and Cardiff.

The company’s plan moving forward is to get detailed understanding of the challenges faced by the main stakeholders (within the UK and EU), to secure a pilot project and establish appropriate business models for two different market segments: train operating companies and infrastructure managers.

Traction:

• 2012 – 2014: UKRI – Instrumented railway current-collecting pantograph grant (~ £95,000).
• 2016: £180,000 support from Faiveley Brecknell Willis.
• 2018: £1.5 million grant from Innovate UK.
• 2018: £25,000 Enterprise Showcase Award.
• 2020: Enterprise Fellowship from Royal Academy of Engineering.
• 2020: £50,000 from D.A.T.S. Ltd for Midland Mainline dynamic testing (Commercial contract).

The problem

When a manufacturer, for example  a car maker, wants a new component made, it will go to a supplier with its specifications. To make this new item, the supplier needs material multi-axial property data to predict its materials’ response in the manufacturing process. Existing testing methods cannot supply such data across all possible temperature and stress states.

Solution 

To solve this issue, Dr Zhutao Shao and his colleagues from Imperial College London have developed and patented the world’s first high-temperature multi-axial material testing system. This patented testing process involves stretching a piece of material from multiple directions and under different service conditions until it fractures. Customers are then given the data and can use it to optimise their material’s structure.

Most existing systems use room temperature for testing and some may go up to 300° to 500°C. Dr Shao’s innovation can go over 1,000°C when needed. This option is important when judging how a material will behave under various stress states during the hot stamping manufacturing process. His multi-axial testing also undertakes fatigue, tension and compression testing of materials within a wide range of temperatures. The suite of checks are labelled ‘hot multi-axial tests’.

Multi-X Solutions already collaborates with car component suppliers for lightweight structural design and production of vehicles and will start trial sales in 2020. The company currently has one service and two products open to the transportation industry. Multi-X Solutions also has a materials database that will be added to as the company conducts tests on more engineering materials and structures.

The market that Multi-X are working in stands at £850 million worldwide and is rapidly expanding. The company is now looking to further develop and standardise the cost-effective testing methods for the data-driven advanced manufacturing industry.

Traction 
2018 Awarded Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Impact Acceleration Account funding
2018 Awarded title of the Most Valuable Project in Tencent Auto Open Platform Competition
2019 Dr Zhutao Shao was awarded an Enterprise Fellowship
2020 Accepted onto Imperial Techcelerate Programme

Unmanned Life’s software-as-a-service platform integrates different types of drones and robots to work together as autonomous fleets. The company uses AI to automatically deploy and manage UAVs and ground vehicles, both indoors and outdoors. These collaborative autonomous workforces can be used for a variety of business uses including surveillance and security, public safety, emergency response, warehousing, logistics, shipping and inventory counts.

Unmanned Life’s Autonomy-as-a-Service platform works over the cloud, with or without GPS, and communicates via radio, Wi-Fi, 4G or 5G. It can integrate swarms of different types of robotic devices to work together and its services have potential for the Industry 4.0 and Smart City applications.

Wasif Mehdi, is the Chief Operating Officer at Unmanned Life responsible for company operations and portfolio delivery. He also fills the role of Product Lead, jointly with the CTO and CEO. Wasif joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2022. He says, “Networking with my peers will enable a cross-pollination of ideas, strategies and approaches for us. I see the accelerator as a critical source of knowledge, experience and skills that will feed into our business’s day-to-day operations. This will be especially relevant across our teams, processes and tools, and help smooth our scale up journey.”

Unmanned Life has already succeeded in getting significant investment and establishing working partnerships. The company is now looking to secure recurring commercial revenue contracts — a key milestone to achieve in preparation for a Series A funding round. It will then be able to fully exploit its position as the world’s leading provider of a cloud-based, software-controlled, fully autonomous drone and robot service platform. 

Recycleye Ltd has created the world’s largest visual AI dataset of waste materials, working in collaboration with academics from leading European universities. Using this knowledge, the company has developed Recycleye Vision, a database with over 3 million labelled images classifying waste. This system combines AI, smart analytics and low-cost cameras to identify refuse in real time. It can further refine identification by weight and brand detection and is already being used in large materials recovery facilities (MRFs) in England, Northern Ireland, France and Italy.

Recycleye Robotics  encompasses a robotic picking system in tandem with the Recycleye Vision database to physically pick up the recyclable waste at an MRF and place it into containers. The robot can pick 55 items a minute and is both more consistently efficient and accurate than human pickers. By applying machine learning, the system is able to detect differences between items such as food and non-food-grade plastics. As a result, the increased accuracy of the process boosts the resale value of the output bales of an MRF’s recyclables by as much as fivefold.

Peter Hedley is the co-founder and CTO at Recycleye, and joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2022. He says, “Our company has expanded so quickly that I am now the manager of other managers! I feel the accelerator scheme will give me the support to improve our planning, culture and technical strategy. The programme will also give me access to a network of other senior SME people who will share valuable knowledge at a critical stage of our growing business.”

Recycleye’s potential has already been recognised and it has raised around £5 million to date. The company will use this funding to scale up and increase the accuracy and capabilities of its machine learning and robotics technology. It will also look to expand its product line and find more European partners.

Material Evolution Ltd is using machine learning algorithms and patented geopolymer technology to turn waste into new materials. The company’s first success has been to use its pioneering chemical and manufacturing processes to produce a cement replacement made from 96% industrial waste.

The main carbon emitter in concrete is cement. By developing previously unused waste streams, such as slag from the steel industry, Material Evolution has been able to reduce CO₂ emissions in its cement by 85%.  The company’s machine learning algorithms ensure material consistency and repeatability in every batch.

Dr Elizabeth (Liz) Gilligan is a co-founder and the CEO of Material Evolution. Liz provides the technical direction for the company, as well as fundraising and selling. In 2022, she joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme and says, “This will hone my leadership skills for running our technical and non-technical teams. I plan to use the accelerator to develop more contacts and establish the best ways to inform people about the company and its products.”

Material Evolution’s potential has already been recognised. Towards the close of 2021, it raised £2.5 million in seed investment and grants. The company intends to use this to hire more team members, develop more products and set up batch production facilities. It ambitions are to work on new waste streams, achieve a production capacity of 100,000 tonnes, and further evolve its production algorithms. This will help the company achieve its aim: to help rapidly and radically decarbonise the UK’s foundation industries by improving their energy and resource efficiencies.

Cell and gene therapies have proven to be effective methods of treatment for diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and a range of cancers. However, there are two main challenges hindering the use and accessibility of these therapies. The first is that development timelines can be slow, due to time spent on resource-intensive process redesigns. The second is that manufacturing costs are currently high, due to expensive reagents, the necessity of clean room facilities and high batch failure rates.

MicrofluidX Ltd is tackling the problems of process control, scalability, and high costs associated with cell bioprocessing, particularly for autologous cell and gene therapy. Its automated closed technology enables scientists to speedily carry out process development by running dozens of cell culture conditions in parallel, with extreme process control. MicrofluidX’s strategy then facilitates scale up of the optimal condition to several billion cells for manufacturing at a fraction of current costs, while maintaining the same process development cell environment, thus avoiding expensive process redesigns.

Dr James Kusena is Vice President of Bioprocessing and Applications at MicrofluidX. James joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2022. He says, “There are several areas of expertise that I would like to develop including: creative and strategic thinking, project management and effective decision-making. These would allow me to enhance my leadership skills for both projects and partnerships.”

MicrofluidX is now looking to further develop its microfluidics-based cell and gene therapy process development and manufacturing platforms. The company will do this by disseminating a range of prototypes to partners in order to gain further external validation. It will also finalise the research and development of its chip and cassette designs, ready for manufacturing. This will permit MicrofluidX to grow its network and close its Series A funding.

Alissa is a Senior Experience Designer specialising in lean methodologies and customer-centric design. She has over 8 years experience building and launching businesses and products with incubators, accelerators, startups, and consultancies. 

Alissa began her career in early stage startups, working across the design spectrum from brand to development. She next joined Founders Factory where she led strategic innovation projects for corporate partners including easyJet, L’Oréal and Aviva. Most recently, Alissa led the experience design of FinTech, e-Commerce, and Utilities ventures for some of the world’s largest corporates at BCG Digital Ventures.

Passionate about sustainability, in her spare time Alissa launched a VC-funded circular marketplace for pre-owned luxury fashion. She is also now responsible for sustainability at frog, Munich. 

Since 2009 John has been a hands-on angel investor, specialising in early stage businesses, often in data and communications. He is a director of: Hybrid Access Technologies, which offers multipath access network solutions at gigabit speeds; Rovco, a subsea company that offers underwater surveys with advanced vision systems, autonomous vehicles and AI; Wazoku. which provides software for ideas management and innovation; and Rabble, which makes fitness fun.

From 2013 to 2016 he was Chairman of Cambridge Angels, an established angel group investing over £10 million a year. He has a dozen other active technology investments, and is chair of the advisory board at First Capital, an investment bank specialising in growth technology businesses. He regularly mentors entrepreneurs.

His career was in telecommunications, where he started out in technology roles in a university spinout and as part of the founding team in a startup. He went on to embrace product management, sales and marketing roles in digital switching at Mitel; and business planning, strategy and due diligence at KPMG. He moved to corporate finance at HSBC, leading its global TMT corporate finance team in the dot.com boom. He finds his mentees particularly value the combination of his tech background with commercialisation and financing skills as these are core skills that growth businesses need.

He is trustee of: education charity Onebillion Learners (winner of the XPrize Global Learning Challenge $5 million prize); the Guildford Educational Partnership, an academy school trust; and Christ’s Hospital. His degree is in mathematics and electrical sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge. 

Lavaniya currently works as a Marketing Partner at bp Launchpad, where she serves as a strategic and tactical marketing advisor for portfolio companies.

Though her expertise and experience cover brand marketing, sales enablement and to marketing automation, she is most passionate about content, creative campaigns, and implementing blue ocean strategy. Whether the budget is small, big or non-existent, Lavaniya is able to adapt and utilise available resources to their highest potential and counts herself lucky to have learnt her craft through small failures rather than big successes.

After emigrating to Sweden, Lavaniya started her own media production company at the age of 21. She worked on feature films that never saw the light of day, TV programmes that did, and has produced around 2000 educational YouTube videos for a charity that teaches mathematics after school.

Lavaniya has worked with a diverse range of clients and businesses, spanning private and public sectors, and has lived in six countries across four continents.

After completing her MBA at HEC Paris, she worked in eSports (Fnatic), SaaS, and Telecommunications (at Croatia’s first unicorn company, Infobip) before jumping into the new world of Energy and tackling the energy transition. Outside of work, she’s writing her novel, participating in charity runs, and volunteering as a Trustee at the RSPCA in North London.

Dan Cohen joined Boston Consulting Group in July 2019. He is a partner and VP in the London office of BCG Digital Ventures (DV), BCG’s venture capital and incubator entity. Currently Dan oversees product development on all ventures in London, and acts as the general manager of ventures during incubation.

Dan has founded, built, and exited several digital businesses to private and trade purchasers over his career. Before joining BCG DV, he helped launch Amazon's Prime Video service in the UK, and was employee number 12 at Secret Escapes, a UK-based global travel business funded by Google Ventures.

Chris is a partner and head of the emerging companies team at Taylor Vinters. He has over a decade of experience advising early-stage and fast-growth businesses, particularly in the technology sector. He practises both as a corporate lawyer and commercial intellectual property specialist, and splits his time between offices in the golden triangle of UK innovation; Cambridge (where he lives), London and Oxford. Taylor Vinters’ market-leading technology practice advises on well over 150 fundraising transactions every year acting for both growth companies and angel, venture capital and corporate investors.

Sir Robin is a technology entrepreneur most known for his work as ARM Holdings’ founding CEO and Chairman. Under his leadership, ARM  become the world’s leading semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) company with ARM chips becoming the most prolific on our planet. He guided ARM from start-up through flotation on NASDAQ and the LSE in 1998 before retiring in 2007.

Robin first became interested in technology aged 8 and at 13, was running his own radio and TV repair business which lead him to study Electronic Engineering at the University of Liverpool.

Sir Robin’s early career was in electronic design with Rank Bush Murphy and Pye TMC followed by 13 years with Motorola Semiconductors. Prior to his time at ARM, Robin served as the Managing Director of ES2 Ltd. and was the CEO of Henderson Security Systems. In addition to his day-to-day work, Robin served as Chairman of the Open Microprocessor Initiative (an ESPRIT panel advising on the collaborative R&D across Europe). He is a past President of the IET.

Robin was knighted in 2002 for services to the information technology industry, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2002 and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015. He is a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, and regularly mentors new entrepreneurs and serves as an angel investor and advisor to several UK-headquartered high-tech companies. His hobbies include skiing, tennis, painting and music.

Shefaly Yogendra, PhD is an internationally experienced strategist with a focus on sustainable growth, inclusive leadership and emerging technologies, which underpin her work in shaping boardroom and executive conversations. 

Shefaly is a non-executive director of two LSE-listed investment funds where she chairs remuneration and nomination committees respectively. She is also an independent governor and vice chair of London Metropolitan University where she chairs the audit and risk committee and earlier chaired the governance committee. On her boards, Shefaly leads conversations on risk, cyber and data issues, digital marketing, and inclusion and diversity. She is currently advisor to and incoming ESG advisory board member of a Luxembourg fund on forestry and sustainable agriculture. 

Previously she was the COO and an executive director of Ditto AI, and the co-founder and COO of luxe startup Livyora. Her career began in corporate venturing in HCL Corporation. Through her career, Shefaly has worked with several founders and startups, advised investors in emerging and critical technologies, and worked on emerging technology and regulation projects for the European Commission. Shefaly was among the “100 Women to Watch” in the Female FTSE Board Report 2016 and holds a PhD in Political Decision Making from the University of Cambridge. She trained earlier in engineering, management, and technology policy

Dr Andrew Hosty FREng is an international leader with over 15 years of non-executive board experience and 30 years of executive and management experience, spanning private equity, UK Plc and global blue-chip corporates. He is non-executive director of a companies including: RHI-Magnesita, the global leader in the manufacture and supply of refractories; James Cropper Plc, who create some of the world’s most distinctive and technically advanced paper products; and Rights and Issues Investment Trust Plc, a fund that focuses on small cap UK industrials. 

Andrew is Non-Executive Chairman of mOm Incubators ltd, a pre-revenue startup developing low-cost baby incubators for crisis zones. He is also Non-Executive Chairman of Nexeon ltd, a company developing next-generation cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. From 2016 to 2018 Andrew was the CEO of the Sir Henry Royce Institute, the UK's home of advanced materials research and innovation. He was Chief Operating Officer of Morgan Advanced Materials, and served on the Plc Board as an Executive Director from 2010 to 2016. 

From 2013 to 2016 he served on the board of Consort Medical Plc, a healthcare company focused on developing advanced delivery technologies, formulation and manufacturing solutions for drugs. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, holds a PhD from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2011).

James uses storytelling to help innovative businesses reap the rewards of putting purpose at the heart of their business. Ranked in The Drum’s top 10 UK marketing influencers, he is a published author (Humanizing B2B), mentor and speaker. He’s passionate about helping technology and engineering companies achieve their potential to change the world for good. 

James started out working in tech before moving into marketing, as he felt there was a real gap in the industry’s understanding of the fundamentals and potential of technology. After a prestigious grad role at Saatchi and Saatchi he joined Tidalwave in its newly formed strategy department, which shortly thereafter was ranked in the Financial Times’ Fasttrack top 50 fastest growing privately owned companies in the UK at the time. In two of his four years there he was recognised as the agency’s MVP. 

He ran award-winning agency Mason Zimbler - recognised as ‘UK Agency of the Year’ by B2B Marketing, and then successfully sold it to a US marketing giant. 

As Co-Founder of Rooster Punk, he helps ambitious companies achieve sustainable growth and profitability through a more human and meaningful approach to the way they build their brand. Rooster Punk works with startups like Currencycloud (now a unicorn), scale-ups, VCs and platforms like Crowdcube as well as corporates such as Tata and Samsung. 

James is also an advisor, mentor and investor in several other businesses and charities.