Video Transcription
Alex Joseph 00:02
Steve, before we get to that, I'm going to talk a little bit about Cambridge Consultants, who we are, what we do, and how we can help your businesses transform the market you're trying to get into. So we've been around for over 60 years, founded in the 1960s in Cambridge, UK, and we have around 800 engineers. It's actually slightly more engineers and scientists. You know, we've got biologists, physicists, chemists. We've got an analytical biologist, whatever that is. So if someone wants to let me know, that'd be great. We have over 140 labs. We do, on average a year, around 500 projects for our clients. A project for us could be a couple of weeks, a really short burst of consultancy or design review, or it could be a multi-year, multi-phase design development program where we're going from early stage concepting all the way through to taking a product to the market with our clients. I think one of the most sort of baffling stats is that we've produced for our clients over 5000 patents in the time we've been doing this. Our clients actually retain all of the IP generated from working with us, and 5000 patents over 60 years, at about one patent every 3.2 days. So it's quite, quite, quite a lot, and some of them have been in fairly interesting areas that I'd love to tell you about afterwards. We also do quite a lot of our own investment ahead of the technology curve. So you'll see at around 2015 we started looking at synthetic biology, looking at AI. In fact, there was a session earlier on AI imaging, which they talked about a lot of the sort of things we've made internal investments in photonics. We have our own photonics lab. We're able to spin up and test our own chips. And now computational biology, human-machine understanding, and quantum sensing, and a lot of these right now sound like buzzwords, but we're really looking at how can we take these pieces of technology and how can we build them into products that our clients are actually going to want to use? We also, over the last six years, have invested in our own businesses, and we've grown. We've had over 20 spin-out companies, and three of them have grown to greater than $1 billion market valuation. They're actually all in printing and semiconducting, so as our CSR, if you've ever taken a Bluetooth headset and you've put it on and made the little noise, that's one of our chips that was invented at Cambridge Consultants. Our most recent spin-out, even Essex, is a DNA synthesizing spin-out. They're based in Cambridge. They're at their series B, and they're doing relatively well. We're hoping they're going to do some cool things very soon. What we're looking to do with all of our clients, a lot of people say, "Why? Why work with the consultancy? Why should we, instead of bringing in a team internally, why should we choose to outsource some R&D or some problem-solving to you?" I think it's really about getting to that defensible market position as quickly as you can. That could be through patents, that could be through being first to market, that could be through some know-how that no one else has. When you accelerate your development with an external party, you can get there faster, and you can use the knowledge of hundreds and hundreds of other projects to be able to get your business there. Really, what we're looking for is, as your investment goes up, and as your investors' investment goes up, your project risk should come down to match that, and your market position should become stronger and stronger and stronger. So if you come and have a conversation with us, one of the first things we're going to ask you is, what does this look like for your business? What risks are you worried about? Are they technological? Are they commercial? Are they the user risks that we need to solve? We really want to help you build a sustainable business for the future. We've done this with quite a lot of businesses. So on the screen there are some of the multinationals who very kindly let us use their logos, but picking out some of the med tech-focused ones, you can see there J&J, Philips, Medtronic, and so on. We've also worked with a range of really interesting start-ups. Some of them are very kind to let us share those stories. So Catalog, we developed the first machine that can print and synthesize DNA for data storage, so we can store all of Wikipedia in a little vial of liquid about this big. Key, AZ, with our long-term development partner for the next hailer, which is the pink one that opens with a sideways action, a loom. We developed the technology behind that. And you may remember them having a very large investment from the US government during COVID, and Medtronic, I can't name anything specific, but quite a long history of working with them as a partner. We have lots of amazing facilities and people to do these sorts of projects. So robotics labs, mechanical labs, in fact, we've got over 200,000 square feet of labs on site in Cambridge. And if any of you are passing by, would like to come and have a look, we'd be more than happy to host you. Medical devices are all about usability generally. So we have a user-centric design process that integrates nicely with our 13485 compliant development process. So if you come and work with us, the output you're going to get is going to help you get to market. It's not going to be a load of documents you can't do anything with. Here today, my colleague Mike and I, you'll see us walking around. If you'd like to have another conversation with us, we'd be very happy to meet lots of you and talk about your businesses.
