On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden unveiled an executive order banning new investments in certain tech sectors in China, citing security risks. The order is set to come into effect next year, and the US will be waiting to see if its closest ally will follow suit. However, for now, the UK says it will consider the measures taken by its transatlantic partner, as it continues to evaluate security implications.
“This executive order on outward investment gives important clarity on the US approach,” a spokesperson for the government said in a statement shared with the Financial Times earlier today. “The UK will consider these new measures closely as we continue to assess potential national security risks attached to some investments.”
The forthcoming ban includes new private-equity, venture-capital and joint-venture investments in advanced computer chips, quantum computers, and certain AI systems. Furthermore, companies already doing business in China will need to notify the government of new investments in the sectors. The goal is to hinder the Chinese military from obtaining both US technology and money.
Needless to say, China did not respond kindly to the order, stating it considered the measures to be “blatant economic coercion and technological bullying.”
Tech trade balancing act
This leaves Rishi Sunak and his government with a bit of a diplomatic conundrum. In the declaration on cooperation on export controls between the US and the UK signed in June, the parties agreed to undertake a review of export control, focusing on “end users of concern.” Britain further said it would update its control regime to better “tackle sensitive technology transfers.”
The UK has also stated it is ready to remain closely tied to the approach of the US, especially when it comes to military technologies, and “respond effectively” to any impact British capital and technology could have on shared security concerns.
Mainland China is not a huge destination for UK foreign investment, attracting £10.7bn (€12.4bn) in 2021, compared to the £461.4bn (€537.5bn) that flowed westward across the Atlantic. However, in an update on the government’s foreign policy plan from May, Britain says it will endeavour to shield critical supply chains, but also emphasises the importance of UK-China trade for the British economy.
As technology, economics, and national security is becoming ever increasingly intertwined, it seems we are going to need a whole new school of high-stakes tech diplomacy.
London-based startup accelerator Founders Factory has gained a new partner in the form of Mediobanca. The Milan-based investment bank is looking to increase its presence in the UK, and has pledged €12mn to the joint venture.
Specifically, Mediobanca will be looking to back as many as 35 fintech startups that focus on technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence over the coming five years. However, it will also include early stage fintech startups in other parts of Europe.
Founders Factory, co-founded by Brent Hoberman, Henry Lane Fox, and George Northcott in 2015, has thus far supported over 300 companies globally through its Venture Studio and Accelerator. The company says it is currently investing in fintech, health, climate, media and telecoms, consumer, and Web3.
“Combining our venture-building capabilities and fintech experience with Mediobanca’s heritage, financial prowess, and global ambition creates a powerful platform to back fintech founders,” Henry Lane Fox, Founders Factory’s CEO, said in a statement announcing the collaboration. Among the fintech startups Founders Factory has backed thus far are climate risk modelling software company Dovetail, AI-powered commercial real estate investment tool Built AI, landlord accounting software Hammock, and end-to-end mortgage platform Acre.
Hope for a faltering UK fintech investment climate?
Fintech has traditionally been one of the UK’s most successful tech sectors. In 2021, it saw record investments of $13.5bn (approx. €12.2bn). Despite a global downturn, it also fared fairly well throughout 2022, with investments dropping only 8% compared to the year prior.
However, a cautious climate throughout H1 2023 has meant that UK fintech has experienced a drop by as much as 37% from the second half of the year prior. What’s even more disconcerting is that the majority of deals took place in the first quarter.
Mediobanca is Italy’s largest investment bank. Other than Milan, the company has offices in Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Luxembourg, New York, and Paris. Under a new strategy, Mediobanca is looking to expand its portfolio. In May this year, the investment bank acquired UK-based “financial advisors to the digital economy” Arma Partners, with an annual revenue of over $100bn (€90bn).
While €12mn might not be a huge drop in the venture ocean, Mediobanca’s push towards diversification may be something of a lifeboat for the fintech ecosystem.
Hydrogen-powered planes are, essentially, nothing new. The USSR flew the alternative fuel testbed Tupolev Tu-155 on hydrogen (and liquid natural gas) more than 35 years ago.
However, challenges associated with the technology meant that it was basically moth-balled for commercial aircraft operations (rocket fuel is another matter) — until now. With the future of the planet in peril, almost everyone in air transport wants to talk about hydrogen propulsion.
From startups to multinational original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), much of the industry is adamant that hydrogen can make zero-emission flights a reality.
It is just a matter of actually building the engines and the planes, ensuring adequate and economically viable fuel supply and infrastructure, scaling the technology — and, of course, convincing regulators that it is safe enough for commercial flights carrying passengers.
“Most technologies required for a hydrogen-powered aircraft are emerging already in other industries and we have been working on this for some time already,” aerospace giant and hydrogen-propulsion proponent Airbus shared with TNW. “We’re not starting from scratch. The main challenge will be to certify them to airworthiness standards.”
Researchers have indeed been hard at work for years studying both direct combustion and the conversion of hydrogen into electrical energy through fuel cells. (Both are applicable to aviation and we will look more closely at them further on.)
The technology has, on the whole, been proven to work. But what will it take to make air travel “guilt-free” in earnest?
Past few years have seen ‘dramatic’ validation of hydrogen aviation
Aviation accounts for about 2.5% of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. However, its share is rising quickly. The industry is expanding at an alarming rate, with the global fleet of aircraft predicted to grow by 80% by 2041, compared to pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Furthermore, aviation has an impact on the climate that goes far beyond CO2.
“Sustainability in aviation used to be buying random offsets in various places,” Val Miftakhov, founder of hydrogen fuel-cell powertrain developer ZeroAvia, tells TNW. “In the last five years, we have seen dramatic validation of hydrogen aviation.”
Miftakhov is something of a veteran in zero-emission transportation, having founded eMotorWerks, developing SmartGrid-integrated EV charging technologies, in 2010. After selling the company in 2017, Miftakhov, a long-time pilot hailing from a family legacy of aerospace engineering, turned his attention to decarbonising one of the world’s most hard-to-abate sectors.
Zero emissions from the UK to the Netherlands by 2025
ZeroAvia has one of the most ambitious timelines in the hydrogen aviation industry. The company intends to have a fuel-cell engine capable of powering a 19-seater aircraft for flights between the Netherlands and the UK commercially ready as soon as 2025.
In January this year, ZeroAvia flew a Dornier 228 19-seater testbed, at the time the largest commercial aircraft powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, for the first time. (That title has since been — temporarily — nicked by US-based Universal Hydrogen and its 40-seat ATR 72 nicknamed ‘Lightning McClean’. ZeroAvia intends to steal it back with a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400.)
The testbed aircraft took off from Cotswold Airport in Gloucester, UK, and was powered by a conventional engine on the right wing, and ZeroAvia’s ZA600 600 kW hydrogen-electric engine on the left.
ZeroAvia is running a test flight campaign with a Dornier 228 aircraft. Credit: ZeroAvia
The company is also developing a powertrain for 40 to 80-seater aircraft with a range of 1,000NM (1,852km), the ZA2000, which it says will be ready for commercial use by 2027. Thus far, it has secured €10bn in pre-orders from a number of the major global airlines and lessors, who plan to use it to retrofit their regional fleets.
ZeroAvia is still mulling over a shortlist of potential manufacturing sites. “We are looking for the shipments of our engines to start in 2025. So we have to have production capacity next year, which means that we have to finalise locations this year,” Miftakhov told TNW, adding that the decision would probably be made by the end of summer.
Realistic entry-into-service projections?
Not everyone in the field shares ZeroAvia’s enthusiastic timeline. Josef Kallo, founder and CEO of H2FLY, a Stuttgart-based startup also developing a hydrogen-electric fuel-cell propulsion system, says that 40 seats with a range of about 2,000km is more likely to happen by 2029.
“I am a little concerned that we have to tell a realistic path to the realisation, even if it’s a little bit more risky for the financing,” Kallo tells TNW, adding that he believes his colleagues in the space might be underestimating how much effort and time needs to go into component development.
It’s not as if H2FLY hasn’t gotten far already. The company, founded out of the University of Ulm and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in 2015, performed the maiden flight of its four-seat hydrogen fuel-cell powered aircraft, the HY4, in 2016. It has since achieved several significant milestones, including the world altitude record for a hydrogen-powered aircraft, cruising at 7,230 feet.
H2FLY has successfully completed liquid hydrogen ground testing. Credit: H2FLY
Furthermore, H2FLY completed the successful integration of a new liquid hydrogen storage system in April this year. The ground fueling tests were part of the EU-funded Project Heaven (short for High powEr density FC System for Aerial Passenger VEhicle fueled by liquid HydrogeN), and the aircraft has now been shipped to Slovenia for a summer flight test campaign.
The company also recently announced the H175 program for its next generation fuel-cell system, capable of powering aircraft in the megawatt-class range, for 20 to 80 seats. H2FLY hopes to have it certified “by the end of this decade.”
Retrofitting existing airframes compared to clean-sheet designs
If anyone thinks that civil aviation regulators would allow operators to strap even a conventional tube-and-wing configuration to some hydrogen tanks and off into the zero-emission future we go, they would, naturally, be mistaken.
According to Airbus, hydrogen planes will “need to achieve equivalent or better safety levels [to kerosene-powered jets] before hydrogen-powered aircraft will take to the skies.”
It can usually take anywhere between five to nine years to certify a new aircraft. Established OEMs will have a leg up on startups when it comes to certifying clean-sheet designs, due to experience of the process.
This is why startup powertrain developers have decided to go down the route of retrofitting existing airframes with their propulsion systems. However, converting older airframes is not going to go on forever.
“Really visionary is to have a new aircraft designed for the [hydrogen] propulsion and then use that with all the benefits to really have long-range, high-efficiency, low-noise aviation,” Kallo states.
Those who are looking to design larger aircraft powered by hydrogen will need a new approach to everything from aerodynamics, structural reinforcement, thermal management, and systems integration.
Solving the storage problem
Hydrogen has a higher energy density by weight than jet fuel. However, it has a lower energy density by volume. This means that putting hydrogen tanks on a plane entails throwing out seats or cargo capacity, i.e. paying customers or payload, or altering the design of the aircraft.
In addition, storage of hydrogen as a gas requires high-pressure tanks (350–700 bar tank pressure), whereas hydrogen as liquid, albeit taking up less space, requires cryogenic temperatures of -252.87°C.
For instance, a blended wing body design (BWB) could offer potential benefits to storing hydrogen on board due to larger internal volume compared to traditional tube-and-wing designs.
A few intrepid companies out there are already intending to build new planes specifically designed for hydrogen propulsion. One is Swiss startup Destinus, which is developing a hypersonic hydrogen-powered jet capable of travelling at Mach 5 and above.
Another concept is the blended wing body Kona, designed to “revolutionise the status quo of freight transportation,” from aerospace startup Natilus. The company recently completed flight testing of a quarter-scale prototype aircraft, following three years of extensive wind-tunnel testing.
Clean-sheet design startup Natilus has chosen ZeroAvia’s fuel-cell hydrogen-electric engine to power its BWB aircraft. Credit: ZeroAvia
While ZeroAvia has decided to go after existing types of aircraft for certification purposes, the company has all critical technologies, such as high-temperature fuel cells, motor and electronics development, in-house, and for very practical reasons.
“There’s no supply chain for this yet, because it’s so new,” Miftakhov states.
There might not be a supply chain for parts yet, but OEMs are also labouring away at new propulsion technologies. For example, British engine maker Rolls-Royce is also developing a range of products based on hydrogen fuel cells.
Hydrogen-electric vs. direct combustion
A hydrogen fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts the chemical energy of hydrogen into electricity. Fuel cells enable aircraft to produce electricity autonomously without the need for a built-in battery that requires charging from an external power source.
They do not have any moving parts and, as such, operate in near silence. As previously mentioned, this requires extensive component development.
However, this is not the only technological pathway to flying planes on hydrogen. A more immediate means of using existing gas turbine technology would be through direct hydrogen combustion.
Hydrogen combustion works in the same way as conventional internal combustion. It can work equally well in turboprop and turbofan engines and is scalable for different types of aircraft configurations and ranges. However, it comes with a different set of considerations.
The technology eliminates most emissions and reduces some remaining ones such as nitrous oxide (NOx). But, it does produce water vapour, which in turn produces contrails. Research shows that contrails may be responsible for as much as 50% of aviation’s warming effects.
However, the contrails produced by hydrogen combustion differ from those generated by burning fossil fuels. In July last year, Airbus announced a project called Blue Condor, which will use two gliders — one fitted with a H₂ combustion engine and one with a conventional kerosene engine — to study hydrogen contrail formation.
ZEROe
Airbus is looking into both technological pathways. A little over two years ago, the European aerospace behemoth unveiled four possible hydrogen aircraft concepts — known collectively as ZEROe — with the promise of delivering one into commercial service by 2035. Three of the designs under the ZEROe umbrella use hydrogen combustion.
One of these is a BWB. However, Airbus has said it will not be the first hydrogen plane out of the gate, as designing both a new propulsion system and a new airframe at the same time would be incredibly complicated.
The BWB design could solve storage issues, but will not be the first to fly. Credit: Airbus
The fourth concept aircraft, representing a high-wing 100-seat regional airliner, features six eight-bladed propellers attached to removable fuel-cell engine pods. Essentially, each pod is a stand-alone propeller propulsion system.
They feature propellers, electric motors, fuel cells, power electronics, liquid hydrogen tanks, cooling systems, and a set of auxiliary equipment. Due to the removable fixtures, the pods can be quickly disassembled and reassembled, potentially creating rapid solutions for refuelling at airports.
In order to try the associated technologies, Airbus will use an A380 flying testbed equipped with liquid hydrogen tanks, and hydrogen engines mounted on the fuselage. The double-decker airframe employed for the mission is none other than MSN 001 — the very first A380 to roll out of the factory. Airbus says the demonstrator will take off on its first flight in the next five years.
Airbus will mount hydrogen engines to an A380 testbed. Credit: Airbus
Not all are convinced by Airbus’ efforts thus far. William Todts of Transport & Environment states that the company is spending more time and money building the hype than the planes.
Meanwhile, there is another crucial element missing — the actual fuel to power all this innovation. Nobody will buy an aeroplane they cannot operate. Not only does the promised land of zero-emission aviation need access to an abundance of hydrogen; it needs it to be green.
Green hydrogen
Green hydrogen is produced by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis using renewable electricity. Currently, it accounts for less than 1% of global hydrogen production, with the other 99% derived from non-renewable sources that produce greenhouse gas emissions. So what will it take to scale?
Carol Xiao, an expert on hydrogen with the Institute for Sustainable Process Technology (ISPT) in the Netherlands, says that, contrary to what she first thought when learning about the industry, money is not the problem.
“The money is there,” Xiao tells TNW. However, she adds, investors will not commit as long as the supply and demand chains are not secure.
According to Xiao, aviation can have a substantial impact when it comes to creating a market for green hydrogen. “If they say ‘we will use hydrogen’, especially green hydrogen, they will be a market which people can supply,” she continues. “It will help the supply chain make a decision on equipment, and it will also help get the infrastructure ready.”
Technology without a business case?
In addition, the industry will also be competing for materials to build hydrogen electrolysis production plants — and the renewable energy to run them.
“I think if we fail, we will fail on the renewable energy provision, and not on the technology,” Josef Kallo says. “And this has to go hand in hand. Otherwise, we’re working on the technology but there is no business case because there is no infrastructure and fuel.”
Guillaume Faury, Airbus chief executive, seems to share these concerns. At a company event last year, Faury said that availability or lack of availability of clean hydrogen at the right quantity in the right place at the right price in the second half of the decade was a “big concern.” He further added that a lack of green hydrogen could be a reason for delaying the launch of the ZEROe programme aircraft.
The renewable energy equation
Using renewable energy to produce hydrogen could help solve problems around what is known as intermittency — the unpredictable and fluctuating nature of certain renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power.
“You can use hydrogen production and hydrogen storage as a grid storage mechanism; you can generate it when the renewable power is abundant on the grid, and then utilise it when you need to on the aircraft,” says Miftakhov.
“That allows you to, in fact, increase the renewable penetration of the grid. We know that we can make it economical, and we can scale it.”
Achieving economies of scale will also bring the cost of renewable hydrogen down, with predictions that the price will drop from the 2020 cost of 5–7$/kg, to ~3$/kg in 2030, and ~2$/kg in 2050. One recent study showed that, taking into account a potential tax on fossil jet fuel and the price of carbon, it could become cheaper to run a hydrogen plane than its kerosene-powered counterpart by 2035.
How aviation can be certain it will get priority when it comes to accessing a limited supply — or all the renewable energy it will require — is another matter.
Aviation’s decarbonisation journey is anything but easy. Nor is it moving at a fast enough pace. With record-breaking aircraft orders happening as we speak, it is clear that neither airlines nor aircraft manufacturers have any intention of curbing the industry’s growth.
With all the challenges that hydrogen-powered aviation still has to face, it may seem like a long shot. But with concerted efforts and the potential for widespread adoption, it could maybe, just maybe, make zero-emission air travel a reality.
UK Finance, which represents more than 300 companies, has written to the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, requesting that ministers make tech companies take responsibility for payment fraud on their platforms. Specifically, the lobby group is pointing the finger at Meta, which it claims is connected to over 60% of all push payment fraud.
An Authorised Push Payment (APP) scam, also known as bank transfer fraud, is a type of scam in which fraudsters trick individuals or businesses into authorising the transfer of funds from their bank accounts to accounts controlled by the criminals.
It typically involves social engineering techniques to deceive victims into believing that they are making legitimate payments or transfers. These include tactics such as brand impersonation, too-good-to-be-true crypto deals, online romances, overdue fines, or “relatives” asking for money.
As the victim is the one who initiates the payment, banks in most countries are reluctant to reimburse the funds. Starting in 2024, the government will require UK banks to reimburse fraud victims that have been tricked into sending money to fraudsters.
The <3 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
With the new rules looming on the horizon, it is understandable that the UK finance industry is pushing for tech companies to take more responsibility for financial online crime.
UK fraud strategy to “incentivise” online scam investigation
According to a report from Outseer last year, APP scams now comprise 75% of all online banking payments fraud. Meanwhile, UK Finance claims that criminals stole £485.2mn through APPs last year alone.
Promisingly, this was down 17% from the year prior, but fears are that the recent step-change in generative AI could help turbo-charge fraudulent tactics online and make scams more sophisticated.
The UK government announced a new national fraud strategy in May this year, but stopped short of forcing tech companies to pay compensation to victims of online scams. It did impose a “duty of care” on large platforms to protect users from fraud and other negative content.
The data in the letter from UK Finance, as first reported by the Financial Times, says that platforms owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta — Facebook, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, and WhatsApp — are the locations of 61% of all APP scams.
A spokesperson for the company told the FT that it is an industry-wide issue with scammers using increasingly sophisticated methods to defraud people in a range of ways, adding that Meta was working with the police to support their investigations.
According to the UK’s fraud strategy, tech companies must make it easy for users to report fraud on their platforms (“within a few simple clicks”). Furthermore, the strategy says it will “shine a light on which platforms are the safest, making sure that companies are properly incentivised to combat fraud.”
Depending on how the government will implement this measure, it would seem Meta has its work cut out for it. According to statistics from UK bank TSB earlier this year, when taking into account the three biggest three biggest fraud categories — purchase, impersonation, and investment fraud — as much as 80% occur on Meta’s platforms.
Martin SFP Bryant is the founder of UK startup newsletter PreSeed Now and technology and media consultancy Big Revolution. He was previously Martin SFP Bryant is the founder of UK startup newsletter PreSeed Now and technology and media consultancy Big Revolution. He was previously Editor-in-Chief at TNW.
This story is syndicated from the premium edition of PreSeed Now, a newsletter that digs into the product, market, and founder story of UK-founded startups so you can understand how they fit into what’s happening in the wider world and startup ecosystem.
The space race is back on, with a growing number of commercial operators keen to follow in SpaceX’s exhaust trail.
This means there’s real demand to accelerate the timelines for testing a wide range of devices and materials for use up in space. After our recent coverage of Space DOTS, let’s take a look at another company doing work in this field.
Gravitilab is opening up new opportunities for testing in microgravity — the weightlessness experienced in space, which can make anything we take up there work differently to how it does on Earth.
The <3 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
“All of the grand challenges facing humanity: climate change, feeding the world, healthcare challenges, and in our sector, space debris – they all require access to microgravity for research and testing,” says CEO Rob Adlard.
“And that market is really choked. In fact, it’s not a true market right now. And so we’re blowing this wide open with some new hardware and a new approach to it.”
Practically speaking, what Norfolk-based Gravitilab does is take a research experiment or a piece of industrial hardware from a customer, putting it in microgravity and then returning it with data about what happened.
To this end, the startup is developing two products. The first is a UAV called LOUIS that can generate a few seconds of microgravity without going into space (you might have seen this in the news a couple of months ago).
The second is a suborbital launch vehicle called ISAAC that will take payloads into space for a few minutes before returning them.
Gravitilab’s ISAAC rocket, currently in development
“It’s funny, in a way. You think that everything that happens on Earth is perfectly natural, and it’s the way it’s meant to be. But actually gravity is a pollutant. And it stops us being able to see what the physics actually is,” explains Adlard.
“Microgravity is an absence of things that exist on Earth; buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure, and sedimentation. The absence of those three things make everything function differently… and it’s really quite surprising what happens. You couldn’t really guess what’s going to happen.”
Even chemical reactions can occur differently in space.
“You’re only doing chemistry until you’re doing it in microgravity, and then you’re doing physics,” Adlard jokes.
The opportunities here include supporting academic research and the burgeoning satellite industry.
On the academic side for example, Adlard says Gravitlab is working with Manchester University to replicate a lab experiment in space.
“It involves heating up some material. That’s quite a complicated thing to do on a spacecraft. So we’ve got to spend quite a long time developing a payload making that into something which is flyable.”
As for satellites, Adlard says the high failure rate of nanosatellites can be up to 50%. So, being able to test how they’ll handle the space environment before they’re deployed can save major headaches and yet more space debris later.
“There are 1,000 startups building new, innovative hardware that’s never been flown before. So there’s a great need to get all that done. We’re in the supply chain for the space economy.”
Rob Adlard
Adlard co-founded Gravitilab in 2018 with the specific aim of tackling the queue of companies trying to get their products into the space economy, in the wake of the way SpaceX had rethought the sector.
With a background in aeronautics and space engineering, he began to consider new applications for an existing technology.
“I became very interested in what smaller rockets and suborbital rockets can do. In the past, suborbital rockets used to be just technology demonstrators – a stepping stone to something else. I think it’s only recently they’ve taken on this sort of different significance.
“If you said to anybody in the industry ‘would it be valuable to be able to put something into space for a few minutes and get it back in your hand the same day?’, everybody would say ‘yeah, oh my goodness, that’s incredible, what have you invented?’
“Well, it’s a suborbital rocket, which is something that people are familiar with, but nobody had thought about it in that way.”
Adlard met co-founder James Kilpatrick (now the company’s chair and CFO), and they established Gravitilab, initially under the name Raptor Aerospace. Once they’d figured out a clear path forward for the company, they rebranded to a name that better reflected their mission.
The Gravitilab team
Adlard says Gravilab’s UAV, LOUIS, is being readied for an official launch into the market this summer.
“It took a lot longer to develop than expected,” he says. “It took about 18 months for us to get permission to do a first flight with it. And we needed to do the first flight in order to then develop all the rest of it.”
He says he’s looking forward to showing it off more, as many in the industry don’t understand clearly what it is yet.
While he prefers not to share too many details of exactly how it works, Adlard says this much: “essentially it overcomes the acceleration due to gravity, by accelerating at the appropriate rate so that the payload inside experiences the inverse of the acceleration of the vehicle.”
The startup is also developing a variant of LOUIS called JACQUES, which can provide ‘partial’ gravity, for customers who want to simulate gravity on the Moon or Mars.
The startup’s suborbital rocket, ISAAC, is a longer-term project. A new version of its engine is currently in development, with plans for a test flight in January next year.
As an early-stage startup in spacetech, Gravitilab has raised more than most startups we feature in PreSeed Now.
They’ve previously raised £2.2 million in investment. They’ve also won a recent grant of £400,000 from the UK Space Agency on top of previous business support grants from local authorities.
Gravitilab is now raising a £5 million round to accelerate its R&D phase and allow it to begin commercialisation. Adlard says there is a pipeline of customers lined up.
Adlard wants Gravitilab to penetrate deeper into the microgravity market over time. This will involve developing a larger vehicle to support larger payloads and longer periods of weightlessness.
But he also wants the company to tackle the environmental impact of the space industry.
“We are developing a new fuel for our engine, which will mean that we have a carbon neutral fuel source, which is really quite unusual. We’ve got a particular set of propellants that fuels our hybrid rocket engine, so it’s quite different to liquid engines.
“There are a number of things that we could do with that propulsion technology. We could do things with in-space propulsion. We’ve got some exciting plans for things that might happen in about five years’ time. But it’s all to do with sustainability, reducing space debris, cleaner propulsion and just providing great space services.”
In a busy market of startups targeting the space economy, Gravitilab appears to largely stand alone.
“Nobody’s doing anything that is targeted at opening up this choked market,” Adlard says.
“You can access microgravity right now through the NASA and ESA programmes, but only a couple of organisations can, and it has to be very specific, if they win a competition to do it. And you can’t really access that commercially. Certainly in Europe, if you’re one of these 1,000 startups trying to develop hardware, you can’t access that, in order to test your hardware. You just can’t do it.”
Another alternative would be a ‘drop tower’–such as the one belonging to the European Space Agency in Germany–which allows for short microgravity experiments on Earth.
Gravitilab promises to be a more affordable and more flexible option though, and allow for multiple drops each day. The LOUIS UAV can be delivered to the customer, rather than the customer having to travel.
Meanwhile, a US-based company called bluShift Aerospace is offering to facilitate experiments in space in a rocket. But again, Adlard says flexibility is Gravitilab’s advantage here. A smaller payload means they won’t need as many customers to fill the space and justify a launch of their ISAAC rocket
And Adlard says Gravitilab, across its products, will offer a wider variety of microgravity time to suit different customers’ needs.
Aside from the obvious difficulties around making sure the company has the right funding at the right time, another challenge Gravitilab could face relates to the UK’s relatively recent entry into the space industry.
“The UK lags behind a bit with national programmes and national ambition,” Adlard says.
“There isn’t really a space market in the world that hasn’t been supported to some extent by its government, because it needed that help because it’s so new and it’s so different… SpaceX would have folded if they hadn’t got a NASA contract at just the right time for them, to be blunt about it.
“The US has got significant funding for researchers to use microgravity. Germany has its own programme, and the UK’s got nothing. We can’t access the EU programmes… It would be great if in the push to be a ‘science superpower’, they would put some funding into that kind of research.”
The article you just read is from the premium edition of PreSeed Now. This is a newsletter that digs into the product, market, and story of startups that were founded in the UK. The goal is to help you understand how these businesses fit into what’s happening in the wider world and startup ecosystem.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
Linnea is the senior editor at TNW, having joined in April 2023. She has a background in international relations and covers clean and climat Linnea is the senior editor at TNW, having joined in April 2023. She has a background in international relations and covers clean and climate tech, AI and quantum computing. But first, coffee.
Most of us have heard of carbon offsets by now. However, the average person perhaps doesn’t give them much thought beyond when prompted by an airline to “offset the CO2 of your journey” (for a suspiciously small amount). But how familiar are you with carbon removals?
Offsetting and carbon credits (sort of like permission slips for emissions) are not only big business, but part of a new climate-accounting reality to which companies will have to adapt sooner or later as they embark on net-zero roadmaps.
Offsetting as a practice has gotten a pretty bad rep, and not at all unjustified. As John Oliver quipped “if the idea that you can simply invest a little money and make your carbon footprint disappear sounds too good to be true, that’s because it absolutely is.”
Indeed, at times, carbon offsetting projects have been proven to do more harm than good. Whether from well-intentioned incompetence or unscrupulous greed, issues have ranged from biodiversity loss to land grabbing.
However, a different approach to reducing – and removing – CO2 emissions is evolving. A growing body of carbon removal technologies and projects might just actually contribute to cleaning up the mess we have made for ourselves in more efficient and, importantly, equitable ways.
Brokering hope
Carbon removals are also referred to as carbon dioxide removal (CDR), carbon drawdown, or negative emissions. Where carbon offsets simply aim to compensate for emissions by investing in emission reduction projects elsewhere, carbon removals target the capturing of CO2 from the atmosphere and locking it away for decades or even centuries.
And cleaning up the atmosphere is exactly what the London-based startup CUR8 wants to help facilitate. The company, which is building what it calls a market-maker platform for carbon removals, was founded in 2022 and recently raised £5.3 million (€6.15 million) in a pre-seed round led by GV (Google Ventures) and including funding from CapitalT.
CUR8 co-founder and serial fintech entrepreneur Marta Krupinska says that when she first heard of carbon removals in December 2020, it blew her mind, and gave her what is “not a common feeling” for anyone working in climate – hope.
“I’ve definitely felt that there’s been all of the scientific proof that we’ve left it too late. So to suddenly think that there are ways in which we can build these time machines that will undo the damage that we’ve done, that was just absolutely mind-blowing,” Krupinska told TNW.
“It’s going to be a trillion dollar industry, and we have to build it faster than any industry we’ve ever built before. So obviously, that for an entrepreneur is very enticing,” she continued. The problem was, at the time, she didn’t know much about climate science.
Krupinska, who has led Google for Startups in the UK and co-founded international money transfer platform Azimo, was introduced in 2021 by a friend to Dr Gabrielle Walker, the former climate editor at the prestigious journal Nature and features editor at New Scientist.
Dr Walker, who has taught at Cambridge and Princeton Universities and founded non-profit Rethinking Removals, decided to focus her attention on removals after asking people from the IPCC if reaching the Paris Agreement would be possible without them. Basically, the response she received was, “Are you having a laugh?”
Committed warming
Why they are so adamant is down to what is called committed warming. This means that even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, the warming effects of what we have already released would not simply stop; they have already been baked into the system (hence the need for removals). Indeed, the IPCC predicts we will have to remove 10 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050 to have any chance of keeping global warming below 2°C by 2100.
At first, Dr Walker was sceptical about CDR because, as she says, “It is hard to get CO2 back out of the air.” But having visited a small-scale pilot direct air carbon capture facility in British Columbia and coming away bolstered by the promise of the technology, she said to herself, “Ok, that could work, we need to make it happen.”
However, in turn, she knew nothing of running a company. As such, Krupinska and Dr Walker bring “immensely complimentary skills” to the startup they have founded together with their third partner, Mark Stevenson.
Stevenson has been an advisor to the UK Ministry of Defense on Peace, Security and Climate Change and to Médecins Sans Frontières, and is an ambassador to Client Earth and chairs the Impact Board for Climate.vc. The three have banded together along with their team to achieve CUR8’s ambition of facilitating 10% of all global carbon removals over the next 25+ years.
Direct air capture
There are several pathways to carbon removal, both technology and nature-based. On the technology side, there is direct air capture, or DAC. Essentially, this sucks carbon out of the air using chemical reactions. Then, it pumps the CO2 deep underground for storage. Alternatively, it can go into other hydrocarbon products, such as (more) sustainable fuels but, of course, this means it goes straight back into the atmosphere again.
According to the IEA, DAC is “a key part of the carbon removal portfolio.” However, it is categorised as “technology readiness level” 6 (on a scale of 1 to 9). This means that it is in the large-scale and prototype phase, but not ready for commercial deployment. As such, costs have previously been prohibitively high for anyone but the likes of Microsoft. But CUR8’s approach of including it in a portfolio will help achieve economies of scale and make it accessible to a broader range of companies.
Spectrum of drawdown speed
Other pathways include something referred to as enhanced rock weathering (ERW). Some rocks with high silica content, such as basalt, sequester CO₂ from the air as a part of a chemical reaction, triggered by rainwater. This process can be sped up by spreading large quantities of selected and finely ground rock material onto land areas, beaches or the sea surface.
Further types of negative emission approaches include aforrestation (with respect for biodiversity), soil-based sequestration, and turning crop and forestry residue into biochar – storing carbon for millennia, instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. Making buildings out of timber also ensures the carbon stays locked in the wood, as well as replaces more polluting materials such as concrete.
The oceans also provide a multitude of carbon removal opportunities, including photosynthesis-enhanced seaweed farming and oyster reef restoration and alkalinity enhancement. All of these methods come with their own set of benefits and challenges.
“If you’re buying removals, you should always invest in all of the methods around because not a single method will scale to 10 billion tonnes by 2050,” Krupinska says.
“Our portfolio will always contain methods from across the spectrum,” she continues. “We try to achieve the maximum durability with maximum biodiversity and social benefits pulled together in one portfolio that’s significantly cheaper than the top end of price points of removals.”
CUR8 has, among other clients, provided carbon removals for The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pageant and The State Funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth II and large-scale events including British Summer Time and All Points East. The portfolio comprised technologies including direct air capture (1pointfive), enhanced rock weathering (UNDO) and durable soil carbon (Loam Bio).
The cost of carbon
Carbon credits range in price depending on the type, location, and availability of the projects that generate them. They can cost anything from between $0.30 to $300. (Remember the dubiously low cost of your air travel emissions offset?)
Carbon offset credits represent one tonne of carbon dioxide prevented or reduced. Carbon removal credits (CRCs) on the other hand represent one tonne carbon dioxide equivalent that is removed from the atmosphere.
CUR8 has set the cost of its CRCs at £150. This is pegged to $185 – what has been calculated as the “social cost of carbon,” or the economic cost to society from emitting one metric tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Speaking of social cost and impact, 40% of CUR8’s portfolio will be located in the Global South. “If we can help set up more of the carbon removal supply in the Global South, we can genuinely turn climate change victims into beneficiaries of this new economy,” Krupinska says.
“There are credits that we need to get money towards, which are transforming infrastructure, from fossil infrastructure to clean, in the Global South, particularly, because that’s where the money isn’t available,” Dr Walker adds. “That’s a part of the climate system that otherwise might be harder to solve.”
Fostering trust in the process
The company says it performs all supplier due diligence in-house, tracking 100+ data points across impact, integrity, and scalability. And scaling the industry needs, and rapidly.
The benefits of a portfolio approach, CUR8 says, is that by working with a range of suppliers it also helps to grow the entire sector, ensuring there is enough supply in 1, 5, 10, and 25 years time. Furthermore, it balances benefits and challenges with drawdown speed, as well as reduces risks.
“We’re a market maker, so we’re going beyond the broker model. The broker model is the way that we’re starting. But we’re also talking constantly, both with suppliers and in the demand market to understand what’s actually needed to accelerate this,” Dr Walker says.
“And the aim is not just to see a market that’s developing and grab a piece of the pie, or even make it a bit easier for some people who would otherwise have to do something that is a bit harder. This market needs to go from a few hundred thousand tonnes of high durability removals now to somewhere between 10 and 15 billion a year by 2050.”
Not to be overly dramatic, but the fate of the world may actually depend on it.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
Much of the world may currently be fretting about how to limit the impact (lack of privacy, copyright issues, loss of jobs, world domination, etc.) of artificial intelligence. However, that does not mean that there isn’t enormous potential for AI to improve quality of life on earth.
One such application is healthcare. With the ability to process big data sets, the deployment of AI could lead to significant advances in predictive diagnostics, including early detection of cancer. While more research is needed, one of the latest studies in the field shows promising results for AI-assisted diagnosis of lung cancer.
Doctors and researchers at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, and Imperial College London have built an AI algorithm they say can diagnose cancerous growths more efficiently than current methods.
In the study named OCTAPUS-AI, researchers used imaging and clinical data from over 900 patients from the UK and Netherlands following curative radiotherapy to develop and test ML algorithms to see how accurately the models could predict recurrence.
Specifically, the study looked at if AI could help identify the risk of cancer returning in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. Researchers used CT scans to develop an AI algorithm using radiomics. This is a quantitative approach which extracts novel data and predictive biomarkers from medical imaging.
Research algorithm superior to current technology
NSCLC patients make up 85% of lung cancer cases. While the disease is often treatable when caught early, in over a third of patients, the cancer returns. The study found that using the algorithm, clinicians may eventually be able to identify recurrence earlier in high-risk patients.
The scientists used a measure called area under the curve (AUC) to see how efficient the model was at detecting cancer. A perfect 100% accuracy score would be a 1, whereas a model that was purely guessing 50-50 would get 0.5. In the study, the AI algorithm built by the researchers scored 0.87. This can be compared to the 0.67 score of the technology currently in use.
“Next, we want to explore more advanced machine learning techniques, such as deep learning, to see if we can get even better results,” Dr Sumeet Hindocha, Clinical Oncology Specialist Registrar at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, and Clinical Research Fellow at Imperial College London, said. “We then want to test this model on newly diagnosed NSCLC patients and follow them to see if the model can accurately predict their risk of recurrence.”
Support for practitioners – and patients
Rather than believing it will replace doctors, most now view AI in healthtech as a tool that will assist practitioners in providing the best possible care – including improved bedside manners. Despite investors growing gradually more risk-averse over the past year, the healthcare AI sector is still expected to grow from close to $14 billion in 2023 to $103 billion by 2028.
The UK is teeming with AI healthtech startups. Many are focused on drug development, genomic analysis or more consumer-centric telehealth symptom checking and wearables. However, some are intent on improving disease detection and diagnosis. These include the likes of Mendelian, who just received close to £1.5 million to roll out its AI-based solution for rare disease diagnosis as part of the government’s investment into AI technology within the NHS.
The rest of Europe also has its fair share of diagnostic AI startups. Among them are Liége-based Radiomics. The company focuses on the detection and phenotypic quantification of solid tumours based on standard-of-care imaging. In Norway, DoMore diagnostics is using AI and deep learning to increase the prognostic and predictive value of cancer tissue biopsies. The company’s founders also say it could help guide the selection of therapy to avoid over- and undertreatment.
Meanwhile, a few percentage points of more accurate diagnosis, vital though they may be for the affected individual, may not be the only positive impact AI could have on our care systems.
According to Eric Topol, the author of Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, “the greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honoured connection and trust—the human touch—between patients and doctors.”
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
While the UK is being labelled as “closed for business” and Rishi Sunak is playing Unicorn Kingdom in Silicon Valley, the British chip industry risks losing some of its strongest players due to a lack of supportive policies.
Based in Cambridge, UK, Pragmatic Semiconductor, funded in part by the CIA’s investment branch In-Q-Tel, has created an ultra-thin, ultra-low-cost, flexible integrated circuit (FlexIC). Instead of relying on silicon, it is made from indium gallium zinc oxide at a fraction of the cost.
The application of the technology spans a wide range of sectors, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, packaging and games. In the words of Pragmatics, it offers “digital traceability and interactivity to everyday objects.”
Scott White is the Founder and Executive Director, Strategic Initiatives, of Pragmatic. According to White, the company could end up leaving British shores if the UK government’s semiconductor strategy fails to meet expectations.
So what would British politicians need to offer to provide adequate support to rival the allure of the US $52.7 billion CHIPS Act? White tells TNW that Pragmatic wants to see the government support innovative new companies through public procurement.
“By creating home-grown revenue opportunities, and becoming a major customer for new semiconductor technologies addressing key national priorities such as net zero and affordable healthcare, the government can provide the reassurance and certainty that investors need to support startups and scaleups,” White said.
Following the lead of Arm?
The current lack of ability to effectively raise funding for the business in the UK means that Pragmatic could move its operations overseas. Furthermore, it could potentially list outside of the UK in the future, following in the footsteps of Cambridge-compatriot Arm. Earlier this year, in a significant blow to London, the chip architecture giant and crown jewel in the UK tech industry chose to only list the company in New York.
What would a sufficient strategy look like in more detail? White believes that annual public sector procurement targets, commitments for public institutions to ‘buy British’, and encouraging public bodies, like NHS Trusts, to explore uses of the technology, would provide the required opportunities.
Furthermore, such a strategy would address both supply and demand, ultimately making “the UK a more attractive place from which innovative semiconductor companies can build and maintain a global base.”
Funding from the government, the CIA and… China
After a Series C $125 million round (an oversubscription by more than 50%) late in 2022, the CIA’s investment branch In-Q-Tel, also referred to as IQT, owns part of Pragmatic. British Patient Capital, a subsidiary of the UK government’s economic development bank, also participated in the funding.
The company has now raised over $190 million to date and employs over 200 people. Puhua Capital, a Hangzhou-based VC focused on health and technology, has also invested an undisclosed amount. Although, Pragmatics has intentionally kept Chinese investment low, due the sensitive geopolitical situation.
The geopolitics of chip-making capabilities
According to Chris Miller, the author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, the process of designing and manufacturing chips is the most complex technological process that humans have ever undertaken. In Miller’s words, the supply chain needed to produce an advanced chip “stretches across multiple continents, involves some of the most purified materials, and the most precise machine tools ever made.”
In 2022, the global semiconductor market size was over $573 billion, and is predicted to grow to $1,380.79 billion by 2029. Meanwhile, Miller further believes that it is not only a matter of business, economics or technology, but also a question of political relevance as to which countries have these capabilities and which don’t.
As such, successful startups like Pragmatic could find themselves caught in strategic tug-of-wars, stretching well beyond the scope of applied technological excellence.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
Martin Bryant is founder of Big Revolution, where he helps tech companies refine their proposition and positioning, and develops high-qualit Martin Bryant is founder of Big Revolution, where he helps tech companies refine their proposition and positioning, and develops high-quality, compelling content for them. He previously served in several roles at TNW, including Editor-in-Chief. He left the company in April 2016 for pastures new.
This story is syndicated from the premium edition of PreSeed Now, a newsletter that digs into the product, market, and founder story of UK-founded startups so you can understand how they fit into what’s happening in the wider world and startup ecosystem.
The burgeoning industry around space technology is based heavily on hardware, but the materials that hardware is built from need to undergo rigorous testing on Earth before they’re sent out into orbit and beyond.
Space DOTS is a startup that wants to transform material testing in the space industry by skipping the tests down here, and sending the materials straight up into space.
“What we do is a smartphone-sized version of a testing lab that anyone would use on ground to test materials’ properties before actually going into space. We have shrunk everything down so that it can be launched very quickly and easily at a lower cost, directly into orbit,” explains co-founder and CEO Bianca Cefalo.
“Instead of going through the entire process of iteration, failure, and iteration on the ground, you can just ‘fail fast, iterate’ faster, directly in space at a cost that is not going to break the bank of anybody doing so.”
The <3 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
Space DOTS co-founder and CEO, Bianca Cefalo
Cefalo gives the example of graphene, the light, strong, and thin material that has excited a lot of people since it was first discovered in Manchester 20 years ago. Before it could be used in, for example, the panels of a spacecraft, you would need to understand its properties (for example its reaction to heat) and how they perform in space.
She explains that this tends to be done first via simulation software, and then in labs that simulate the conditions of space. These tests help to understand the material’s performance in a vacuum, in reaction to the radiation in space, and the like.
“All these different environmental conditions are all simulated on the ground, then you cross-correlate the results. And you have an estimated understanding of what’s going to happen to this material once it goes into space… However, the last mile of validation is to actually test it in space to see how it really behaves under real space conditions.”
London-based Space DOTS wants to cut out all the ground-based estimations with the 10x10x1 centimeter laboratory it is developing, inside which tests can be conducted onboard spacecraft.
A render of the tiny Space DOTS laboratory
The first test the startup has developed is a tensile test, where a small sample of a material can be stressed to breaking point.
“That’s going to tell us what happened to it from a structural perspective in the exact environment, with the cumulative effects of the vacuum of space, radiation, the atomic oxygen, everything. That’s something that you wouldn’t get on Earth.”
Cefalo says the alternative on Earth would be to test each of these conditions separately in washing-machine sized tensile testing machines. But separate tests create a cumulative margin of error for how the material would really behave under all those conditions at once.
Cefalo is understandably guarded about the secret sauce behind exactly how they have minaturised a materials testing lab to such a small size.
“All I can say is it’s a mechanism that doesn’t use any gears, motors, or bearings, because they wouldn’t work in space, they would freeze. What we’re doing is just based on pure physics.”
Cefalo argues that the impact Space DOTS technology could have on the industry is huge, as it’d reduce the cost and time of certifying a material for use in space.
Whereas a traditional approach could cost millions of pounds and take years, Space DOTS hopes to charge much less, with the specific pricing depending on many variables. “And you know, certainly, how it’s going to work and you don’t have to repeat anything again on the ground because you’ve been to space, which is the ultimate validation.”
So that companies no longer have to get in line to eventually get a testing slot on the International Space Station, or shop around the difficult-to-penetrate space industry to find someone else willing to carry their experiment, Space DOTS plans to become a full service testing provider.
Cefalo says they are partnering with commercial space companies so anyone who needs a material tested in space can simply engage with Space DOTS and not have to worry about how the material actually gets up there and how it gets back.
“We take that load off the customer and we say ‘okay, tell us what do you need to do, tell us what kind of materials you want to test, what kind of orbital conditions or applications you have in mind. And we do everything for you, from mission requirements to sending it into space, and you don’t have to talk with anybody else.”
The plan is to allow customers to get into space “in a framework of months rather than years.”
And Cefalo hopes the Space DOTS approach can help the space industry catch up with progress in materials science. She says many newer materials aren’t covered by bodies such as NASA and the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS).
“You will find aluminium alloys, titanium, some plastics – a very basic database of materials. There are a whole lot of other materials and for those ones, there isn’t really a standardisation of how you should test them to be applied in space.
“Material sciences move very fast, and the space industry isn’t catching up quite as quickly as the material sciences moved. And we should be, because we think that space tech is sci-fi, but actually a Formula One car is more sci-fi than a spacecraft.”
The Space DOTS team. Photo provided by the startup
Cefalo grew up in Naples, Italy, where she studied aerospace engineering . She then interned with a German company where she assessed the impact of Martian dust devils on an instrument that was eventually sent to Mars.
From there she spent several years in Berlin as a thermal engineer in the space industry, before moving on to work for Airbus Defence and Space in the UK as a space systems thermal product manager.
“I had to look at methods, solutions, and materials that would make the next generation of telecommunication spacecraft lighter, more powerful, smaller, and cheaper,” she says.
But despite there being plenty of opportunity to use cutting-edge materials, customers baulked at the idea of being the first to use a material in their very expensive new spacecraft.
Cefalo and a colleague, James Sheppard-Alden, realised this was a common issue in the industry and identified ‘direct orbital qualification’ as a solution.
“As much as you wouldn’t test a rain jacket in the sun, you would not test materials for space on Earth. They need to be tested directly there.”
Cefalo saw this issue again in her next role with aerospace materials company Carbice, so she and Sheppard-Alden teamed up to address the problem. They founded Space DOTS in 2021.
They have signed up customers under memorandum of understanding agreements, as they work towards the target of initial commercialisation in 2025, following their first-in-orbit demonstration next year.
Cefalo says Space DOTS has been bootstrapped to date, with the exception of some financial support as part of the ESA Business Incubation Centre’s incubation programme.
The company is currently in the process of raising a £1.5 million pre-seed round.
Cefalo sees Space DOTS’ future as filling an essential gap to fulfil the space industry’s potential.
“If you’re thinking about where the space industry is going, it’s going well beyond spacecraft and rockets. It’s going to commercial space stations, it’s going to an ecosystem in space, habitats on other planets, manufacturing in space…”
She says this will require recycling debris from space, and even creating new materials or manufacturing from zero in space.
“The one thing that is missing at the moment is how to make sure that what’s being recycled in space or is being manufactured in space can be used in space without having a protocol or a quality control system in place. So far, nobody’s really thought about that.”
So Space DOTS aims to become the way materials are tested in orbit, on the Moon, on Mars, or beyond.
Aside from the obvious technical challenges of proving this thing works (yes, in-space testing needs in-space testing), Cefalo recognises the need to ensure the perceptions of what they’re doing are right.
“[We need to make sure] that what we’re doing is not seen as going against the status quo of qualification and testing in rounds.”
She doesn’t want Space DOTS to be seen as revolutionary.
“This creates a resistance with everything that has been done so far, especially when you go into the sales cycle. You may piss off people that think ‘oh, you’re coming in with this new technology with this new way of qualifying, or do you mean that everything I’ve done in my career so far is invalidated?’
“No. What we’re saying is that Space DOTS is just the organic evolution of where the industry is going and how we have to make sure to use the resources that we have, directly in space. We will never be the ones removing what has been done so far.
“The software simulation and the lab simulation will always need to happen. We want to facilitate the time to market of advanced materials by giving the extra mile of the validation in an easier, cheaper, and better way and making sure that these will be sustainable once an entire in-space ecosystem is built.”
“There are other companies who are doing very easy access to space high frequency testing, but they are focused on biotech, pharma, drugs, which is something that we don’t do because it’s that’s not our area of expertise, and it’s not something that we intend to do in the long term,” says Cefalo.
“So I think again, our main competitor is the status quo, which is how do we make sure that we are not going against them, but we’re actually helping them just as the next step of the evolution?”
The article you just read is from the premium edition of PreSeed Now. This is a newsletter that digs into the product, market, and story of startups that were founded in the UK. The goal is to help you understand how these businesses fit into what’s happening in the wider world and startup ecosystem.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
This story is syndicated from the premium edition of PreSeed Now, a newsletter that digs into the product, market, and founder story of UK-founded startups so you can understand how they fit into what’s happening in the wider world and startup ecosystem.
Whether you believe it’s the future of everything, or just a useful tool that will be part of the mix of tech we regularly use a few years from now, augmented reality is a rapidly developing field with one major drawback – like VR, it can leave you feeling sick.
For example, US soldiers who tried Microsoft’s HoloLens goggles last year suffered “‘mission-affecting physical impairments’ including headaches, eyestrain and nausea,” Bloomberg reported.
While the technology could “bring net economic benefits of $1.5 trillion by 2030” according to PwC, this sickness is a massive inhibitor to the growth of AR and VR.
One startup looking to tackle the problem is Cambridge-based Lark Optics, which has developed a way of bypassing the issues that cause these problems.
“In the real world, we perceive depth by our eyes rotating and focusing. Two different cues need to work in harmony. However, in all existing AR glasses, these cues fundamentally mismatch,” explains Lark Optics CEO Pawan Shrestha.
Having to focus on a ‘virtual screen’ on augmented reality glasses, means users have to switch focus between the real world and the augmented one. This depth mismatch causes physical discomfort and conditions like nausea, dizziness, eyestrain, and headaches.
What Lark Optics does differently, Shrestha says, is it projects the augmented reality image onto the user’s retina. This means the AR is always in focus no matter what your eyes do to adjust to the real world around you.
So far the startup has developed a proof of concept and is now iterating to refine its demonstrator model. Shrestha says they conducted two successful user studies with their proof of concept; one in their own lab and another with an external partner he prefers not to name.
When the tech is ready, they want to use a fabless model for producing the components they design, which they will then sell to original equipment manufacturers who make AR headsets.
Given they’re addressing such a fundamental challenge to the mass adoption of AR, it’s unsurprising that other companies are tackling it in other ways (more on that below). But Shrestha says his startup’s approach is the most efficient in terms of processing power and battery power, and doesn’t affect the user’s field of vision.
Shrestha grew up in rural Nepal (“really rural… I was nearly nine years old before I saw electric lights”). He says his parents’ enthusiasm for his education eventually led him to New Zealand where he obtained a masters degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Waikato.
Keen to develop technology he could commercialise, he says he developed an interferometer. While that venture didn’t work out, his work led him on to a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he spotted the commercial potential of a new approach to AR displays.
“It was scientifically challenging, but it was also something that could touch the lives of many, many people,” he says.
Shrestha co-founded Lark Optics (which was previously known as AR-X Photonics) with his friend Xin Chang, and Daping Chu who previously oversaw the PhD work of Shrestha and Chang. The trio have been working together for around a decade but only got started with Lark Optics in earnest last year,
Shrestha says this week they have been joined by a new recruit, Andreas Georgiou, who previously worked at Microsoft as a principal researcher in the field of optical engineering.
The Lark Optics team (L-R): Weijie Wu, Dr Pawan Kumar Shrestha, Professor Daping Chu, Dr Andreas Georgiou, Dr Xin Chang
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shrestha says being based in Cambridge is a big benefit to them, with a community of experienced advisers around them, and access to relevant investors. He is particularly inspired by the progress made by Micro LED tech startup Porotech, which has raised a total of $26.1 million to date.
And Shrestha has warm words for the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Enterprise Fellowship, of which he is a part. This provides up to £75,000 in equity-free funding to cover salary and business costs, along with mentoring, training and coaching. This was what allowed him to get started on developing Lark Optics as a business.
Lark Optics itself raised a pre-seed round of £210,000 in October last year, Shrestha says, and will be raising a seed round in Q2 this year.
As mentioned above, others are tackling the problem of AR sickness in different ways. LetinAR uses a ‘pin mirror’ method, Kura Technologies has developed a ‘structured geometric waveguide eyepiece’, while VividQ “compute[s] holograms in real-time on low power devices and integrate[s] them with off-the-shelf display hardware.”
Another company, SeeReal develops holography-based solutions to address depth issues in 3D displays.
But Shrestha says these rival technologies either require a very high level of data throughput, with a related computational and battery power overhead, or require very high resolution displays. And while some techniques decouple the AR display from the real world like Lark Optics does, Shrestha says they are “like looking through a chicken fence.
“We solved the problem without getting a significant penalty on processing power or battery power, or artefacts. So that’s why I think our approach is the best.”
Lark Optics’ ambition is to become established as the best optics for AR, VR, and mixed reality glasses.
“We want to realise the full potential of AR and VR. Now we have AR and VR you can wear for 20 minutes or 30 minutes. We want to make it feel as natural to look at real objects, VR ,or AR, and allow people to use it for all-day, everyday use.”
Shrestha sees the biggest challenge to achieving this is being able to recruit the right people in what is quite a specialised field. But he’s optimistic that attracting just one or two high-level people will end up attracting more, and the endorsement of a good seed round raise in the coming months won’t hurt either.
AR, VR, and MR has been massively hyped in recent years but there have been questions over how much of a future it has. Investor disquiet over Meta’s huge spending in the ‘metaverse’ space, and Microsoft’s job cuts in its HoloLens division as it struggles to turn it into a viable business, show that there’s no straight line from here to a future where this tech is widely used.
But that said, the current jitters of the public markets over stock prices and tech company spending isn’t an end for AR, VR, and MR at all. Apple’s first headset is on the horizon, which will no doubt spin up another wave of interest in the space (although the latest report says it’s been delayed two months, until June).
If technology like Lark Optics’ can help prepare AR, VR, and MR for the mainstream, the startup could be well positioned to reap the rewards.
The article you just read is from the premium edition of PreSeed Now. This is a newsletter that digs into the product, market, and story of startups that were founded in the UK. The goal is to help you understand how these businesses fit into what’s happening in the wider world and startup ecosystem.
