In the UK, 16 million homes built before 1960 have air-bricks installed to ventilate underfloor and indoor areas to prevent condensation. However, research has shown that vents left continuously open can lead to homes losing a considerable amount of heat. AirEx has developed a smart ventilation control that can be installed in place of the air-brick. Its sensors measure temperature, humidity and air quality while its algorithms enable automatic air flow regulation, while taking into account local weather and air quality data. AirEx opens to reduce underfloor humidity, and closes to reduce heat loss. The resulting flexibility in airflow can amount to a 10% to 15% reduction in energy bills.

Agnes Czako is Co-Founder and Managing Director of AirEx. Agnes joined the SME Leaders programme in 2020. She says: “Gaining new knowledge and tapping into a fantastic network of peers are two of the key elements for me. I think a course focusing on transformational leadership and leadership in a technology-driven world will be invaluable for me and the company.”

AirEx has received Ofgem approval and has market traction. The company is now aiming to rapidly scale up its business, hoping to be deployed in thousands of UK homes and across Europe where it’s estimated there are a further 35 million houses with old-fashioned air-bricks.

Vaticle have invented a new database called TypeDB: a logical database to organise large and complex networks of data as one body of knowledge – commonly known as knowledge graphs. It is the world’s first database that enables engineers to tackle a higher order of complexity in knowledge engineering.

Vaticle’s database technology provides the knowledge base foundation for artificial intelligence systems used in various industries, including financial services, defence and security, life sciences and robotics.

Haikal Pribadi is the Founder and CEO of Vaticle. Haikal has drawn on expertise in robotics, optimisation theory, and intelligent systems to build a new logical database that serves as the knowledge-based foundation of cognitive and intelligent systems.

Haikal, a computer scientist, is the designer and lead engineer of the technology system built at Vaticle. He joined the SME Leaders programme in 2018 and is focusing on scaling the company’s technology to cloud distribution.

The pioneering community developed with Vaticle has grown to thousands of engineers around the world. The community is spread across a dozen countries with a mission to solve the world’s most complex problems through knowledge engineering.

Bottom-trawling fishing that drags weighted nets across the sea floor, dredging activities and offshore construction are a few examples of commercial enterprises that adversely affect marine life. The South West eco-engineering company, ARC Marine, is helping redress sea-bed habitat degradation by championing nature-inclusive design and accelerating reef creation.

ARC Marine’s man-made solution to man-made problems is the Reef Cube®. These blocks have an integral chamber with six passages through which marine life can access and colonise. Composed from 98% recycled materials, they are made from low-carbon concrete, are plastic-free and are the only circular economy-based reef technology on the market.

After several years of testing at sea, Reef Cubes® have been shown to enrich marine biodiversity, becoming colonised and being used as spawning and nursery grounds. The cubes are already being taken up by oil and gas, offshore wind, aquaculture, and coastal defence projects. They can be placed on undersea cabling and provide a positive marine legacy, having the potential to be marine refuges for hundreds of years.

Tom Birbeck is the co-founder and CEO of ARC Marine. Tom has a specific focus on business strategy, raising investment, as well as overseeing product development and IP. He joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2022 and says, “I think the scheme will improve my knowledge of finance-related instruments and metrics. I hope to meet mentors that have scaled up and taken a company from being private to stock-listed. This accelerator should help us build solid foundations for our growing business.”

ARC Marine has recently secured more than £2 million in seed II funding and is aiming to rapidly expand before entering a Series A round. The company plans to build its first manufacturing plant on the South West coast to service its UK market. However, its ambitions are global. ARC Marine intends to use its worldwide patent to accelerate reef creation wherever there is a need to improve the amount of seabed fauna and flora.

Flusso Ltd, a semiconductor company spun out of the University of Cambridge, has recently launched its FLS110 flow sensor. This is the world’s smallest flow sensor: it has a footprint of just 3.5 mm by 3.5 mm and can be used to measure mass flow, volumetric flow, differential pressure, and air velocity.

The FLS110 has been designed so that manufacturers can easily incorporate reliable flow sensing into a wide variety of products. By using a novel and flexible integration concept, it can accommodate a broad range of flow rates – from 0.001 to over 500 standard litres per minute – allowing the same component to be used across multiple applications.

The FLS110 could be used, for example, for active filter monitoring in vacuum cleaners, air-conditioning units and other consumer appliances. It could alert users if their filter was blocked or damaged, or the product needed repair. The technology could also help with new healthcare device innovations, such as smart inhalers and fitness monitoring systems.

Dr Andrea De Luca is the co-founder and CEO of Flusso. In 2020, Andrea was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Young Engineer of the Year award and in 2022, he joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme.

Andrea says, “I am looking forward to the mentoring, to better understanding my weaknesses and how best to address them. The networking will be a great chance to learn from, and share experiences with, other entrepreneurs. While the training will help me hone my leadership skills.”

Flusso is going through a transitional stage, moving from product development to building its global volume sales. The company intends to bring two further product lines to market in the next couple of years, and position itself as a leader in environmental sensing.

Around a fifth of all the electricity used in buildings worldwide is generated to power air conditioners and electric fans. Amounting to 10% of total global electricity consumption, air conditioners’ energy demand is predicted to triple by 2050. Verv, an AI company with a passion for getting companies to hit their net zero targets, is rising to this challenge. It has created a predictive maintenance technology that aims to enable a new generation of smarter, longer lasting and more sustainable air conditioners, heat pumps and large white goods.

The company’s technology replaces the existing dumb isolators, which are required for each AC and heat pump, with their patented smart AI isolator. Using real-time monitoring, it can identify signs of component fatigue, and locate and predict faults. The system captures a high-resolution view of the energy signature of a unit’s power draw, with AI algorithms identifying inconsistencies in performance. If these signal an issue, the problem can be located at component-level and relayed to manufacturers, so a spare part can be identified if it needs repairing. The data gathered can provide a real-time snapshot of the health of an appliance.

Peter Davies is the founder and CEO of Verv, and an award-winning entrepreneur. On joining the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2022, he says, “I think what has appealed to me is the chance to use this scheme to improve my leadership and negotiation skills. I’m keen to take the company through scaling to exit and so am also looking forward to the tailored mentoring that can help me complete this journey.”

Verv’s innovation will enable users to manage their energy consumption in real time in order to repair and extend, rather than scrap and replace, their devices. It is now looking to gain more investment, clinch a large order with a roll-out partner and find international companies that will be able to scale up its machine learning technology. 

Problem:

The morphology of hair is determined by the shape of the follicle. The curved follicle of afro hair result in strands with ellipsoidal cross section and tightly curled hair. This structure hinders the ability of scalp oil to travel along the hair strand, which makes it drier than Caucasian and Asian hair. As such afro hair requires regular moisturising and less washing. However, due to its structure it tangles easily making its manipulation painful and time consuming. Applying conditioner and detangling can take up to 50 minutes, which can be particularly stressful for mothers with young girls.

For centuries, this pain, the lack of representation of Black women and the stigma around afro hair placed a pressure on Black women to conform to European standards of beauty. Many chemically straighten their hair to fit the Eurocentric definition of beauty. In the 2000s, the natural hair movement empowered Black women across the globe to embark on a self-love and self-discovery journey. Many are giving up relaxers and are learning to care for their hair, but the challenges in caring for the afro hair remain.

Solution:

Myana Naturals has developed a device for application of treatments such as conditioners. It is optimised for afro hair and aims to reduce the time and the pain experienced when caring for tightly curled hair. Its mission is to support Black women in their journey by reducing pain, making every haircare day a celebration of their beauty.

The natural hair movement has created a significant shift in the hair care market, with a decrease in chemical relaxer sales and an increase in products to care for natural hair. In a survey of more than 300 women with afro hair, 70% said they take more than 20 minutes to apply a conditioner. In the US, the market for shampoo and conditioner for tightly curled hair is worth $1 billion. The demand for styling tools targeted for use with afro hair increased from 220 million in 2013 to 268 million units sold in 2018.

Next, Myana Naturals will engage with women with afro hair to finalise the design, understand their hair care needs, consumer habits and the best way to communicate with them. This is essential in defining the brand personality and communication style. In 18 months, it hopes to successfully raise funds and launch the applicator in the UK, reaching a position to enter the US market. 

Traction:

• Finalist for Chwarea Teg Womenspire award in the STEM category.
• Swansea University Inspiring Women Series 2020.

NIAXO Ltd, founded in 2019, is a privately funded small medium enterprise. The technology company provides secure development services, underpinned by its Secure Platform for Analytics (SPA), which can be deployed on any public or private cloud. Its mission is to provide innovation, process improvement and software solutions, using its experience in delivering business analysis, data science, software development and business change.

One of NIAXO’s first engagements was to help UK central government process the vast amounts of data related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The company became the data platform delivery lead for the newly-formed Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) department. It helped build tools and services for the department, as well as preparing JBC’s longer-term data strategy.

Ed Puddicombe is a co-founder and the Director of Strategy and Business Engagement at NIAXO. Ed joined the Shott Scale Up Accelerator programme in 2022. He said, “I am really keen to learn from mentors and the other Shott accelerator candidates. My aim is for us to move from being a reactive ‘project team’ into being a strategy-led product delivery business.”

To achieve this goal, NIAXO is looking to establish a predictable income stream, with an equal balance of business generated by consulting work and product/service income. The company has recently launched various capabilities hosted on its SPA; they use data to process evidence-based, real-time analytics to inform customers’ strategic decision-making. This is just one of the ways that NIAXO’s hybrid cloud system aims to grow its market in both the public and private sector.

The problem

Additive manufacturing (AM) has opened up new ways to make smart industrial products. However, the aeronautic and automotive industries often produce parts using design software that pre-dates 3D printing. New design software was required that would be flexible enough to keep up with ongoing advances in AM.

The solution

Dr Francesco Montomoli, a Reader in Computational Aerodynamics at Imperial College London, worked on the idea for new design software for AM with PhD students Audrey Gaymann and Marco Pietropaoli. After three years’ work they had made enough breakthroughs and generated sufficient interest to launch TOffeeAM Ltd to commercialise their code.

The company’s software uses innovative mathematical modeling to design and improve components used in aircraft and car engines. It is able to explore geometric complexities within systems and has already been used to develop new designs for heat exchangers, fuel nozzles and valves. The heat transfer capabilities of TOffeeAM allows the code to be robust and accurate for aerospace applications. The interactive capabilities of their system means that it can work up to 20 times faster than existing design tools. By making components more resilient, lighter and more robust it can make some products 40% more fuel efficient.

The company has already been used to make components for world-leading AM businesses like General Electric Aviation and Baker Hughes. TOffeeAM is now aiming to consolidate its place in aviation and automotive industries while seeing if other fields, such as oil and gas, will also exploit this new resource.

Dr Montomoli says: “The Enterprise Fellowship has given us a great opportunity to learn from experienced people in several fields, from marketing to IP. An added bonus is being able to engage with the other fellows, sharing common challenges and opportunities.

Traction  

2018 Accepted onto Imperial College London’s Techcelerate programme
2018 Co-founder Marco Pietropaoli made an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Doctoral Prize Fellowship
2019 Co-founder Audrey Gaymann made an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council  Doctoral Prize Fellowship
2019  AWS Programmable prize
2020  Entrepreneur First invest £80,000 to help launch the company

Visit their website: www.toffeeam.co.uk

The problem

Open surgery is the current standard for preparing patients for dialysis and bypassing blocked peripheral arteries. High failure rates (approximately 50%) in both cases present a serious danger to life and require repeat procedures, for US dialysis patients alone this adds up to $4.6 billion per year.

The solution

Sorin Popa, founder of Pathfinder Medical, developed an electronic catheter guidance system that enables clinicians to connect blood vessels in a minimally invasive way, eliminating the need for open surgery and improving outcomes for vascular procedures. This technology has the potential to reduce the cost and trauma associated with procedures to treat those with renal failure and peripheral arterial disease.

Worldwide 3.4 million patients have end stage kidney disease and require their blood to be routinely filtered externally through haemodialysis.

This requires surgery to open up the arm and prepare patients’ blood vessels by forming a connection between an artery and a vein (known as a fistula or vascular access site). Pathfinder Medical’s catheter system can be used to connect blood vessels using a small covered tube known as a ‘stent graft’.  

This technology enables patients to receive kidney dialysis without surgery. It can also be used to bypass blocked vessels for those with peripheral arterial disease which affects over 200 million patients globally.

The technology improves outcomes for patients by reducing stress, discomfort and the risk of vascular access problems. It brings cost saving to healthcare providers by improving the efficiency of procedures and reducing the likelihood of costly repeat procedures. 

The global market for the technology is worth over £3.8 billion annually. In the UK, the solution could save the NHS an estimated £45 million per annum on kidney dialysis alone.

Traction

• 2018: Pathfinder Medical receives ISO 13485 accreditation and starts developing devices for a first in man clinical trial
• 2017: UK patent GB2536362 (B) is granted to Pathfinder Medical for the catheter guidance system
  
• 2016: Sorin's technology awarded the James Dyson Award International Top 20
• 2015: awarded a £166,000 'Smart Award’ from Innovate UK and a £1 million grant to develop the technology in partnership with Imperial College London

A 2016 Enterprise Fellowship was awarded to Sorin to support the growth of his start-up as it trials its technology in preparation for commercialisation.

Formerly the UK Innovation Director for Atkins, Elspeth is the CEO and Founder of IAND, a digital platform that helps major enterprises manage multiple suppliers. 

Initially graduating as a chemist, Elspeth later turned her hand to transport and urban design, demonstrating business and technical leadership on over 100 transport planning projects both nationally and around the world.

Elspeth chairs the Enterprise Hub’s Innovators Network and is a judge for the Hub’s Launchpad Competition. She is also a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

In 2017, Elspeth was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to Engineering and Enterprise. 

Paul Excell is an award-winning entrepreneur, investor and global executive leader with an impressive track record of delivering growth and transformation in startups, scale-ups, global corporates and is passionate about social mobility. He is Chief Operating Officer and Non-Executive Director at ScaleUp Group^™️, providing tech scaleups with unique insights from successful entrepreneurs with over $4 billion in exits plus patient equity/debt growth funding (£2 million to £20 million). He has six tech clients in the growth portfolio, and his clients have raised £30 million to date. 

In addition to this, Paul is Co-Founder and Chair of Global iLabs, Founder and CEO of Excelerate^™️ and Non-Executive Director with Knowledge Gateway (University of Essex). He acts as a judge and mentor for the UK Enterprise Awards and the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Launchpad Innovation Award and SME Leaders.

Paul was previously Chief Customer Innovation Officer, Chief Operating Officer/Group Technology Officer, SVP[PS1]  Global at BT, Chair/member of several business Boards (UK and Spain, Nordics, AsiaPac) and sat on BT Group Board committees on Technology, Risk and Diversity. He was an Engineering Council Board member and acted as advisor to UN Secretary General on sustainability, technology and innovation.

He started his career as an apprentice and is now a chartered engineer (CEng), Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), the Chartered Institute for IT (FBCS) and Court Liveryman, Worshipful Company of Information Technologists.

Professor Mark Arthur Tooley FREng is the immediate Past President of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine. He was the Head of the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering and Director of Research and Development at the Royal United Hospitals, Bath until 2017 when he retired from full-time NHS work.  Since then, he has held several part-time roles. He is a specialist scientific advisor for NHS England, a digital clinical advisor for the West of England Academic Health Science network, and a healthcare technology consultant. He is a registered Consultant Clinical Scientist, an honorary professor at the University of Bath, and a visiting professor at the University of the West of England.

Mark completed his BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Bath in 1979. He was sponsored by Westinghouse Brake and Signal company for the four years of the course. He then did an MSc and PhD in Medical Physics at the University of London. His MSc thesis was developing a EEG frequency analyser for anaesthesia. For his PhD research, Mark invented (with a cardiologist) an original method for rate-independent diagnosis of cardiac rhythm for implantable devices, which was patented.  He spent the rest of his career in Medical Physics and Bioengineering departments, both in hospitals and academia, working along medical colleagues. He has worked at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London, Bristol University, United Bristol healthcare NHS Trust, and the Royal United Hospital, Bath. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal College of Physicians, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, and the Institute of Physics. He is a chartered engineer and chartered scientist. Mark is on the peer-review college of EPSRC, has recently been a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Healthcare Technologies Strategic Advisory Team and the Royal Society Fellowship panel.

Mark has been a long-standing member of the Panel for Biomedical Engineering at the Royal Academy of Engineering (now called the healthcare policy topic group). He was recently a member of the biomedical engineering membership panel, the Policy Committee, and the working group for Systems thinking in healthcare. He has mentored on the enterprise scheme.

Mark’s research interests include innovations in medicine, physics applications in anaesthesia, simulation in medicine, physiological measurement, biological signal processing, measuring the depth of anaesthesia, blood pressure measurement and novel patient monitoring solutions.

As an entrepreneur and communications professional, Helen's mission is to help businesses do more good in the world. After nearly 15 years working in government relations and leadership communications, Helen set up her own boutique communications agency, HN Communications. A smaller and more person-centred alternative to bigger agencies, HN Communications works with large and small clients to deliver complex communications projects. Clients include Bosch, Heineken, Nissan and The Climate Group. 

Helen founded her latest venture, Leaders LIVE in 2020, just as COVID-19 hit. Leaders LIVE fills a much-needed gap in the market for an independent, online platform for thought leadership and debate. Leaders LIVE brings together leaders from business, government and NGOs to debate some of the biggest challenges facing our world today, from tackling climate change to addressing diversity. After only a year Leaders LIVE has built a dedicated community, with live events hosted on LinkedIn and YouTube. Events regularly have hundreds of live attendees, with thousands more catching up on the replay. 

With a mechanical engineering degree from Imperial College London and an MBA from Erasmus, Mike is a chartered engineer, a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and a Sainsbury Management Fellow. 

He has led turnarounds, helped establish new businesses and delivered complex projects; challenging and coaching teams to innovate and transcend existing performance. Mike’s experience includes senior operations, project and corporate roles with Royal Dutch Shell UK, and large-scale project development and delivery roles at Alstom in locations across Europe, Asia and North America. Most recently he has been a Director at Centrica Energy, where he is responsible for one of the company’s largest operated gas businesses. He is a Non-Executive Director of Acqualithium and Vice-Chair of the Board of Hymers College. 

Naomi started her career at the National Criminal Intelligence Service (now the National Crime Agency), where she spent three years looking at fraud and financial crime intelligence. It included a stint working with the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. She then moved to RBS, where she spent 10 years working in various risk roles, across both the first and second line of defence.

Most recently, Naomi has been working at LBG as a Director in the Chief Resilience and Security Office, where she led on operational resilience and cyber and information security policy. She co-founded the Operational Resilience Collaboration Group, made up of more than 40 firms working together to build resilience in the industry, and co-authored the ORCG industry standard on operational resilience. Naomi also developed the ‘Mind the Gap’ initiative across various FTSE100 companies, with senior women giving  inspirational talks and providing mentorships to help encourage more women into careers in security. 

Dr John C Taylor OBE FREng was born in Buxton, Derbyshire in 1936.  Having spent five years living in Canada during his childhood, he returned home towards the end of the Second World War.  He attended King William’s College on the Isle of Man before studying Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge.

Dr John C Taylor is one of the UK’s most successful and prolific living inventors and, over a sixty-year career, has invented, produced and sold components for numerous electrical appliances around the world. 

While at his company Strix Ltd, Dr Taylor established the business as the world-leading manufacturer of kettle controls.  His research was instrumental in designing the ubiquitous safety switch that turns a kettle off when it boils and prevents it from overheating, and he also designed the 360˚ cordless connectors in modern kettles.

Dr Taylor’s innovations led to the production and sale of almost two billion kettle controls - 75% of the global market.  His inventions in the development of bi-metallic safety critical cut-outs for electric motors are also used in domestic appliances such as hairdryers and fan heaters.  His work has also seen over four hundred patents filed, including automatic windshield wipers, electric motor protectors and cordless kettle connectors and controls, and it is a testament to these components’ visionary design that they continue to be in prolific use today.

Awards

Dr Taylor has been the recipient of many honours including, but not limited to, the following:

• Appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2011 for his outstanding contribution to the advancement of British engineering, innovation and commerce
  
• Appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2011 New Year honours list for his services to business and horology
  
• Four Queen’s Awards given to the company he started, Strix Ltd. Three are for Export and one is for Innovation, granted for his 360˚ cordless kettle connector, used by millions around the world each day
  
• The Harrison Medal, awarded by the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers for excellence in horology
  
• Awarded the Chancellor’s 800^th Anniversary Medal for outstanding philanthropy from the University of Cambridge, presented by HRH Duke of Edinburgh.
  

He is also an elected Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, and has been conferred Honorary Doctorates from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and Durham University.  When he’s not inventing and innovating, Dr Taylor is a keen aviator, mountaineer, yachtmaster and philanthropist.

Philanthropy

Dr John C Taylor is a committed philanthropist and has made a number of donations in order to ensure that young engineers in the UK have the tools they need to be competitive in a global market.  In 2017, he became the main sponsor of the new Dr John C Taylor Enterprise Hub, affectionately known as the Taylor Centre, in the Royal Academy of Engineering.  He also established in perpetuity a Chair Professorship of Innovation in the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge. 

Following his career in creating electrical control switches, Dr Taylor became well-known for his interest in clocks and is one of the world’s leading experts in the work of John Harrison, an early pioneer of timekeeping and sea clocks. This led him to design and help build the Corpus Chronophage, a large, time-eating clock which that stands proud on the exterior of the Taylor Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.  Dr Taylor donated the clock, alongside a bestowment to make the Taylor Library possible, to his alma mater in order to support bright students of future generations.

http://www.johnctaylor.com/

Richard has significant experience in managing early stage and high-growth investor-backed businesses. He has spent the last 20 years finding, building and exiting these, investing in many. 

He has a strong focus on numbers, financial models, strategic and execution planning, and risk management. He has a toolkit of methodologies to call on to help businesses grow.

He is an experienced non-executive director of both SME and PLC (AIM) companies, has a good knowledge of the funding landscape and is well networked (UK and global) with connections to most Venture Capital, PE, lawyer, accountant and High Net Worth Investor communities. He has led and advised on many fundraises, including: grant; EIS  and SEIS High Net Worth Investors; Venture Capital Trust; crowdfunding; ‘follow-ons’; Series A; ‘new’ such as, revenue-based funding; and all forms of debt.

Richard is a trained mentor and coach and able to challenge and win trust at the same time. He has designed and delivered incubator and accelerator structures and programmes.

He founded and runs Realise Capital, a strategic financial and growth practice, is a chartered accountant (FCA) and previously has had roles as co-founder, CEO and corporate finance director. He has seen and had to deal with most situations that arise on a growth journey and can be hands on if the need arises. He has supported more than 75 ambitious founders to achieve exits in excess of £150 million and raise investment in excess of £25 million.

Amelia is a Senior Growth Architect at BCG Digital Ventures. She has more than five years’ experience building and scaling numerous B2B and B2C tech startups in the UK, US, Dubai and France. She has also worked with some of the world’s largest corporates to accelerate their marketing, sales and e-commerce efforts.

Her capabilities include competitive market intelligence, data-driven marketing experiments, analytics, go-to-market strategies, proposition development, digital marketing, and creating martech stacks across traditional and digital channels. Prior to BCG Digital Ventures, Amelia was a Growth Strategy Consultant at Manifesto Growth and Head of Brand and Partnerships at TRIBE.