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One key thing about deep tech startups is that they can take a lot longer to get going at full steam than a B2B SaaS app.

Sometimes at PreSeed Now we cover a deep tech team at a VERY early stage. That means, even a year later they might have made considerable progress but still be within the ‘from inception to seed’ bracket this newsletter covers.

With that in mind, I thought it was worth checking in with a startup we covered a year ago. And it turned out to be a timely point at which to speak to InvenireX.

But first:

• ⏰ There’s still time to share your thoughts on the state of pre-seed funding. I had an interesting conversation with a deep tech VC on this topic that I’ll share in an upcoming edition. Don’t forget to take our two-minute survey  to have your say!

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A year in the life of a deep tech startup: What InvenireX did next

When we first spoke to InvenireX founder Dan Todd a year ago, he was in the depths of his PhD work. It was as a result of this PhD that he had created technology to allow faster, easier DNA and RNA analysis using nanotech, for potential applications in healthcare, life sciences, agriculture, scientific research and beyond.

He was raising a pre-seed funding round at the time.

Since then, the round has been raised (£500,000 led by PreSeed Now subscribers DSW Ventures) and a non-executive chair appointed. But what has been going on behind the headlines?

I caught up with Dan just hours after he had submitted his PhD thesis, a move that will allow him even more time to focus on the next stages of the startup.

As a recap, here’s what we said about InvenireX last year:

Here’s how our catchup played out:

MB = Martin SFP Bryant, DT = Dan Todd

MB: So how is life at InvenireX right now?

DT: Things are good. Things are busy. You’ll have to forgive me as if I'm a bit tired, because at three o'clock this morning I submitted my PhD thesis.

I've been doing the startup and the PhD at the same time. But I pulled it off to my original deadline. No extensions or anything like that.

We are light years from where we were this time last year. It's crazy, actually, the polar differences. The last time you did the piece on us, the picture you used was a version one prototype, which is so old and so far gone now. There have been so many versions since then. And we raised our £500,000 round.

We were a team of one or two people and now we have six full-time staff. We’ve built four fully-functional machines. One patent filed, and two more on the way. And we’re running commercial pilots.

MB: How do you describe your product now?

DT: The big sell is that we've got a machine that we've built here which can, in time, tell you that you are sick before you actually get sick. It can pick stuff up way earlier than anybody else can.

You can also tell if plants have problems like blight starting to develop, at a point before it's even physically noticeable, way before the current methods will be able to pick it up.

Everybody's heard of PCR from things like Covid. PCR is the current gold standard of finding the ‘needle in the haystack’. And it's kind of sloppy technically, and what it does is it finds the needle in the haystack by making more needles. It just ‘photocopies’ them, which is problematic when you have an imperfect copying process and you if you just want to identify something.

Instead, what we use what l call Nanite technology. I gave it a fancy term, because ‘Nanite’ sounds sci fi, sounds all technical. So filed the patent for Nanite technology. We design and make programmable DNA. We fight fire with fire, we engineer particular pieces of DNA to go after that ‘needle in the haystack’ to and capture it.

We chuck little nanomachines into a sample. It finds what it’s looking for and then we put it through our instrument that uses AI to be able to detect it in real time.

MB: What was the journey like going from your first prototype a year ago, to what you have now?

It was a lesson in many things. It was a lesson predominantly in ‘good enough’, rather than striving for perfection.

There's this tendency, because I moved from academic research, of always trying to hide or ignore your mistakes. Whereas in the startup life you have to learn what ‘good enough’ is. So when you're iterating and building a prototype, you're never going to get to the end goal. You're only ever going to attempt it, and then take bits off, and put bits on, and take bits off.

So this was a process of continuous refinement for a few months. And what really helped was to just remove all the barriers and do it from first principles, and not be worried if you have to pull out a hot glue gun and how it might look and things like that.

It was all about getting the fundamental nuts and bolts of the science to work and worrying about dressing it up later. A lot of it was a process of unlearning, and accepting that it's okay to fail. Failure is actively encouraged.

In the end I created ‘the tenets’, which just sounds crazy, sounds cult-y, but I have them on the wall in the office.

The nine tenets of InvenireX:

1. Something being difficult is not a reason or excuse not to do it.

2. EVERYTHING is just LEGO. It's just building blocks; simple pieces, simple assembly, complex output.

3. The human mind can learn anything (with the right resources)

4. You are much more capable than you think you are.

5. If it wasn't difficult, it wouldn't be special, and neither would we.

6. Failure is mandatory - It is actively encouraged. Keep learning and improving.

7. We have fun, but we are serious about the work

8. There is no such thing as labels, you aren't a 'molecular biologist' or an 'engineer' - there are only skills to be learned.

9. If you are stalling, stuck or stopped. Take a breath, step back and reevaluate.

These tenets are the guiding principle behind how I want us to think and operate. 

Academia and STEM is largely stuffy, institutionalised and siloed. It's a big echo chamber. 

What I want to do with the company is create a hotbed of creativity and freedom to experiment unperturbed by convention or 'the way things have always been done'.

It's something I actively am screening for currently when I'm looking to hire, which I am currently actually, - looking to add some lab scientists. The spirit of these things is in the job description’s ‘desired qualities’.

One other thing I should mention was we moved from a little six-person office to a 3,300 square-foot former call centre, which we then built the lab inside. We had a tiny, little, cramped, six-person office, and now we've built this huge custom space. It's now become a creative hub for creating new things.

MB: What do the next few months look like for you?

DT: It’s full-steam ahead. We need to finish the pilots and get the data in. We've got new pilots queued up.

A lot of it is inserting ourselves in the value chains of places like pipelines that are going to be very useful for the likes of big pharma.

Ultimately I see us being a white-label technology that is fundamental to propping up the quality analysis of something very important to us all.

It's a night-and-day difference from where we were, when was it one or two people and I built a little machine on my living room floor, to now we have this big premises and we've got all these machines that we've built ourselves and all the technology is ours.

It's just as big process of manifestation that I'd really like to share the story of. It’s really cool, more than anything.

Back next week

We’ve been talking to some really interesting startups lately. Who were they and what did they say?