Who’s who in Bristol’s tech start-up scene?

By Carissa Wong, PhD, Cancer Immunology

With Brexit on the horizon, UK-based start-up companies promise to play an important role in driving the future economy. The South West is home to more than 10,000 tech companies and in Bristol, the tech sector forms the fastest-growing part of the economy.

Bristol-based tech companies receive the third most investment of all UK cities, behind only London and Manchester. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are thought to be among the hottest tech trends of 2019; research at the University of Bristol (UoB) and the University of West England (UWE), in combination with the city’s science incubators - places for start-ups to find their feet - are enabling innovation to thrive in these areas.  

Here, we look at the start-ups emerging within the Silicon Gorge that deal with everything from bionics to leak detection.

Open Bionics

Open Bionics is a company offering the bionic ‘Hero arm’ to limb-different children over 8 years of age living across the UK, US and France. The Hero arm is a below-elbow device that is custom-built to fit the individual, and provides a functional hand powered by long-lasting batteries. Sensors detect muscle movements and transmit electrical signals down the bionic arm which can lift up to 8kg, while being the lightest of its kind on the market - the largest size available weighs less than 350g.

Artistic covers inspired by movies such as Frozen transform the assistive devices into cool, beautiful and reliable hands which can transform the lives of their owners. Open Bionics received the James Dyson Award for Engineering in 2015, and an award for Hottest Startup Founders in Europe at the Europas, a tech start-up awards event. Joel Gibbard, the founder of Open Bionics, told the BBC after winning the Dyson Award that the Hero arm is "at the lower-end of the pricing scale and the upper end of functionality."

Open Bionics began as a crowd-funded endeavour, with support from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a UoB-UWE partnership that has become the largest centre for robotics research in the UK.

Ziylo

This 2014 spin-out company was co-founded by UoB PhD student Harry Destecroix, and was famously sold for over £600M to the Nordic leaders in diabetes research, Novo Nordisk. Ziylo have developed a synthetic glucose-binding molecule that binds to glucose with a strength that varies depending on local glucose concentration. This enables dynamic regulation of blood glucose levels for diabetes patients, and gets around the problem of hypoglycemia, where blood glucose levels dip too low.

Hypoglycemia can result from conventional treatment using insulin injections. The founders of Ziylo soon set up the incubator space Unit DX after realising that Bristol lacked facilities for tech start-ups to develop. Their new business Carbometrics was created at Unit DX to continue development of their potentially life-saving diabetes treatments.

Gapsquare

Gapsquare is a start-up that uses machine learning and AI software to help close pay gaps based on ethnicity, sexuality, religious beliefs or disability. Statistics are used to process human resource (HR) and payroll data and the results are presented in graphs and narrated by the software in user-friendly reports. This enables businesses to critically analyse how their HR system can be changed to reduce bias and discrimination during recruitment and when giving out bonuses.

Zara Nanu, founder and CEO of Gapsquare and Visiting Fellow at UWE Business School, did not come from a traditional STEM background. Zara's work on women in the criminal justice system and with the Government Equalities Office on gender pay gap legislation inspired her to think about how technology could be used to tackle inequality in the workplace.

Sian Webb, VP Partnerships & Growth at Gapsquare, rightly notes that “just because you have not done a degree in IT, it doesn’t mean that you can’t go into IT in later life and do well at it.” Gapsquare software is now used by nearly 200 companies worldwide.

Inductosense

Based at Unit DX in Bristol, Inductosense develops non-destructive sensors to monitor corrosion or erosion of structures, free of human error. These sensors can be attached to materials; from there, they send out ultrasonic signals that are reflected back and detected by the same sensor.

This data is transmitted from the sensor to a hand-held data collector when the collector is brought in close range, and a special software can analyse the results. Benefits of this device are that measurements can be reliably made, long-term and at the exact same spot in the material.

Science incubators such as Unit DX and the Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (QTEC), combined with business development support from companies like SETSQUARED (based in the Engine Shed), help entrepreneurs to nurture start-up businesses by providing lab and desk space, investment opportunities and mentoring.

QLM Ltd

The QTEC programme provides 12 months of funding to help fellows develop start-ups in the quantum technology industry, and so far it has given rise to 17 companies. One of these is QLM Ltd, developed by Xiao Ai, which makes sensors to detect methane leaks from oil and gas transportation apparatus.

This is especially useful for oil and gas companies that are under increasing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming. The leak-detectors can be deployed using drones at 1/10 of the cost of existing helicopter-based technologies.

Though not all will make it to be fully-fledged businesses, starts-ups are always optimistic ventures which are inspiring, ambitious and aim to push the boundaries of human society - this is to be celebrated.

Featured Image credit: Epigram / Topaz Maitland

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