Today’s edition is not quite a startup profile, and not quite an investor interview… it’s a bit of both.

Longtime subscribers might remember we took a look at the work of Cambridge Future Tech back in September 2023. This deep tech venture builder as been busy in the time since, so I had a chat with them to find out about some of their latest startups and their thoughts about the deep tech space right now.

But first:

• The Future of Computing Conference 2025 is coming to London this spring, backed by Conception X, IQ Capital, Silicon Catalyst, XTX Ventures and Barclays.

• On 26 March 2025, future of computing startups, investors and industry leaders will converge at Barclays Headquarters in Canary Wharf to discuss breakthroughs in quantum computing, AI chips, semiconductor materials and chip interconnects – and what comes next.

• It sounds really good to me. You can sign up to attend ✨ here ✨

– Martin

Talking spinouts and sovereignty with Cambridge Future Tech

Cambridge Future Tech has been on a tear in recent years, scaling up its operations to help spin all sorts of deep tech research out of universities and into startups.

Previous startups we’ve written about from the CFT portfolio include: SAIF, Cam AI, Mignon (now called Literal Labs), GitLife Biotech, NeuroXR, and Mimicrete.

I caught up with Owen Thompson, CEO and co-founder at the company, to find out more about their latest startups and more about the state of the spinout landscape right now.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

OT = Owen Thompson, MB = Martin SFP Bryant

MB: I recently received an email from CFT about a new collaboration with global mining company Anglo American, called PeroCycle. What’s the story there?

OT: PeroCycle is a project we've been working on for a while with Anglo American. It's focused around steel decarbonisation, and specifically removing CO2 from the steel furnace process.

I was amazed when we started this project to learn that CO2 from steel furnace sites represents somewhere between seven to 10% of global carbon emissions. Is huge. It's unfathomably huge. So the project is a real moonshot in that regard…

The market pull is there because we've got a corporate partner we're working with, and the provenance of the technology from Birmingham is outstanding, so it's been a real flagship project for us for a while.

The spinout has taken a little while to do with some quite complex legal paperwork involved due to the kind impact of the technology that's coming out. So the spinout is happening now, and the company's incorporated. It's a really big deal for us. It's a really meaningful startup in the heart of the deep tech space with a real sovereign capability from a UK university. So we're very proud of it.

The alternative [to PeroCycle] is that you close down the entire steel furnace sites and rebuild them as green hydrogen sites, or something like that. And that would cost in the region of billions of dollars to produce, whereas this thing will be a fraction of the price to retrofit the steel furnace size.

So it's very cost effective. It allows you to also utilise the existing iron ore reserves, instead of switching over to hydrogen in a way that doesn't cause masses of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

MB: So what exactly is PeroCycle working on?

OT: What the research group at University of Birmingham’s School of Chemical Engineering, led by Professor Yulong Ding, have managed to achieve is developing a technology that can remove CO2 from the steel furnace process in quite an interesting and sophisticated way. It’s previously been written about in The Economist.

It can be retrofitted to existing steel furnace sites, which which is a hugely impactful objective, not only because of the removal of CO2 but the cost-effectiveness of doing retrofitting versus having to shut the sites down and rebuild with a different type of green-hydrogen based facility or something like that, which is in the cost of billions.

In layman's terms, essentially, there are quite large CO2 emissions that are created from the steel furnace process when you produce steel from iron ore. What the technology allows you to do is recycle a lot of that back through the furnace process to remove those emissions and actually create a sustainable way of creating steel without those CO2 emissions.

It essentially recycles CO2 back into the process using a sophisticated set of mechanisms.

MB: What are your next steps and funding plans for PeroCycle?

New startup 2: Omnibuds

MB: Another commercial partnership you’re doing is a bit different. You’re working with Nokia Bell Labs to commercialise some of their IP. What’s happening there?

Obviously, Bell Labs has an impressive, very well-known provenance, currently owned by Nokia. And the Bell Labs site in Cambridge has been developing an in-ear, vital-sign monitoring device called OmniBuds. It can monitor six vital signs to a medical grade standard.

We have just established who the CEO is going to be, and we're pulling everything together. When we work with corporates, a lot of the time we're out on a tech scouting remit, searching for technology to solve a strategic issue like decarbonisation.

But the fun thing of working with Bell Labs is we get to look at their suite of IP and what might be appropriate to spin out for impact and for strategic purposes for them as a corporate, to create maybe another revenue line or another impact area.

So we've looked at a lot of IP coming out of Bell Labs, and this is the one that really appealed to us as incredibly strong.

There are some great, global competitors in this space, so it's a really interesting time to go and look at the smart wearable space.

MB: What is OmniBuds developing?

OT: The device sits in the ear canal like a normal ear-pod would, but it can monitor six different vital signs to incredibly high standards.

What you're looking at with a smartwatch or a smart ring is getting consumer-level data that is of interest to someone who's doing fitness activities or sleep monitoring or something like that, but what you can get from the ear canal is to a much higher medical grade.

So you can gather data on a daily basis that could pre-empt the development of things like cardiovascular disease.

If you look at this from a B2B perspective, this is the future of vital signs monitoring, and it has to be through the ear canal. That's where the data can be found to be able to hit the medical standard on those monitoring parameters.

There’s a lot more IP involved than there would be with the university spinout; the technology is much closer to market, and working with the corporate has pros and cons compared to working with a university research group. But ultimately, we've managed to get it across the line and I think we're really, truly excited about this one.

MB: What’s next regarding route to market and funding?

MB: What’s your take on where Cambridge Future Tech is right now?

OT: We've been around for almost five years now, and we've been slowly ramping up our deal sourcing mechanism, by which I mean the number of corporate and university research group relationships that we maintain and monitor when we go out and do a scouting exercise for a specific technology.

And I think what we're really starting to see is that that's that has become really effective.

We've got a large team back in the office of 20 people, many of which are recent PhDs. We are out on the ground in the research groups, talking to the professors, understanding the state of the art within the verticals that we scout within, and that's really bearing fruit now.

Personally, I have a career of building sovereign capabilities. I started off in the military, flying fighter jets. I move forward into BAE Systems, running two of their R&D sites as general manager for advanced tech.

And now we're massively liberating technologies at professor or PhD level from the UK’s leading universities in a way that I think the VC community need for us to feed them, in a way in which they couldn't possibly do because we're able to come back an extra 18 months earlier in the process, because of the way that we're set up.

So it feels very satisfying. It feels like we've really hit on something interesting.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.