The war for talent has conventionally been waged with an armoury of salary and benefits including healthcare, extra pension contributions and – more recently – offerings like free canteens and coffee machines, writes Lisa Hayward, Legal Director and head of employee incentives, Birketts LLP. 

As the new decade sees millennials (those born between the early 80s and the mid-90s, aka Generation Y) become the dominant force in the workplace, we look at models of employee ownership that companies should be considering to attract, incentivise and reward employees.

Research on workplace trends, including Gallup’s, ‘How Millennials Want to Work and Live’, Deloitte’s ‘Millennial survey 2019’, and KPMG’s ‘Meet the Millennials’ chart a departure away from focus on pay and a move towards finding purpose and meaning at work. 

Millennials prioritise culture and communication; they want to feel that their opinions and output are contributing to a bigger picture. Gallup’s report highlights how the millennial approach differs from those of the generation before:

Gallup’s report highlights how the millennial approach differs from those of the generation before:- Past (My payslip, My satisfaction, My boss, My job) compared to Future (My purpose, My development, My coach, My life).

Research into employee incentives, including ‘Ownership at Work: Equity for all’, ‘The Ownership Dividend’ and the Employee Ownership Association’s Employee Ownership Impact Report shows that a company’s readiness to meet these needs can be facilitated by how employee ownership. 

Employee ownership, whether direct or indirect, incentivises employees by offering them a ‘significant and meaningful stake in the business’.

Engaging employees in the development of the business, including them in decision-making processes aligns with the goals in the ‘future’ reference above. 

The business case for employee ownership is persuasive; there is a strong evidential correlation between employee ownership, high employee engagement and strong economic performance. 

The research shows that employee ownership models (particularly Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs)) act as enablers of innovative and entrepreneurial thinking, and transforms the way employees participate in business.

A millennial’s initial choice of employer and the subsequent degree of loyalty to that employer is influenced by the prevalence of markers that give individuals a sense of purpose and meaning; ethical, fair and transparent is important to employees to the extent to which they prove that the company’s interests are aligned with their own. 

For example, Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends asked CEOs to rate the most important measure of success for their companies, ‘impact on society, including income equality, diversity, and the environment’ was ranked as the number one issue. 

It is thought that this trend is one of the reasons that employee ownership has received unprecedented attention in recent years. 

The Employee Ownership Impact Report found there are societal advantages that flow from the business model, including ‘an increase in jobs and job security within communities’, ‘improved and sustained local employment’, a ‘stronger local supply chain’, ‘stronger community empowerment and responsibility’ and more ‘diversity of organisational ownership leading to greater resilience’. 

There is growing interest in the societal impact of a more equitable business model that transcends concerns of shareholder profitability in favour of more equitable distribution of profit: employees getting out what they put in.

Another reason that employee ownership, and in particular EOTs, has received greater attention is unquestionably the tax relief afforded by the government to shareholders who are prepared to sell a qualifying interest into an EOT. 

Shareholders can settle their interest into a qualifying EOT free of Capital Gains Tax. Employees of companies owned by EOTs are able to receive a qualifying bonus free of income tax of up to £3,600 per year. 

Based on this, it is likely that we can look forward to the number of employee owned businesses in the UK continuing to rise into the new decade.

• If you are interested in finding out more about the benefits of employee ownership for your business, or you would like to learn more about the models for employee ownership and would like to discuss next steps, please get in touch. You can call Lisa on 01473 406316 or drop her an email at: lisa-hayward [at] birketts.co.uk

AudioTelligence, the Cambridge company dedicated to making speech clear and intelligible in a noisy world, has raised a further $8.5 million in Series A funding. 

The round was led by Octopus Ventures with participation from existing backers Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Enterprise, and CEDAR Audio. 

While the adoption of voice-activated technologies in ‘smart’ homes and workplaces is on the rise, the accuracy of modern speech recognition systems remains severely limited in noisy environments.
 
To tackle this problem, AudioTelligence’s technology acts like autofocus for sound, using data-driven ‘blind audio signal separation’ to focus on the source of interest, allowing it to be separated from interfering noises. 

This enables microphones to focus on what users are saying, improving the audio quality for listeners, regardless of background noise.

Valuable applications for AudioTelligence’s technology include voice assistants operating in noisy environments, smart speakers, smart TVs and set-top boxes where broadcast sound interferes with command recognition, and two-way telephony in noisy places.

AudioTelligence recently demonstrated this capability at the CES show in Las Vegas. Tests with a home assistant platform showed that sentence recognition rate in noisy conditions jumped from 22 per cent to 94 per cent.
The $8.5 million investment will support AudioTelligence’s ambitious plans to disrupt the $10 billion voice market by fuelling further breakthroughs, supporting new partnerships with technology providers, and tripling employee headcount over the next three years.

This latest investment round follows a total of $4m seed funding in 2018 from Cambridge Innovation Capital and Cambridge Enterprise. The company was founded in 2017 as a spin-out from University of Cambridge-founded CEDAR Audio.

Ken Roberts, CEO and founder of AudioTelligence, said: “Voice command systems work reasonably well when the audio scene is quiet, but performance deteriorates rapidly once you have multiple people talking or when there’s background music. 

“The number of applications where our technology is needed is enormous and still growing every day.

“We’ve already seen some great results from real-world testing and this investment will fund further product development to ensure we can all communicate clearly with the next generation of smart consumer devices and each other.

“Our solution doesn’t need calibrating or training and the code is production ready – which means existing devices can be easily upgraded to AudioTelligence with no more than a software update.”

Five – the autonomous vehicle technology pioneer with its largest UK operation in Cambridge – has raised $41 million Series B funding. 

Five – initially known as FiveAI – aims to use the cash to productise offline cloud-based development platforms alongside components of its online vehicle software. 

Together, these will allow partners to bring performance and engineering certainty to their self-driving programs and help solve the challenges that must be addressed ahead of the mass commercialisation of self-driving technology. 

The Series B investment brings Five’s total raised to $77m, making it one of Europe’s best-funded self-driving startups. The round attracted global interest, with participation from UK, European, Chinese and Russian investors.

The investment follows UK government grant support for the development of a full self-driving system, which Five demonstrated on public roads in London.

Five’s science and engineering knowledge is being applied to complex challenges the industry must solve before the widespread commercialisation of self-driving technology.

New investors are Trustbridge Partners, Direct Line Group and Sistema VC. Existing investors Lakestar, Amadeus Capital Partners in Cambridge, Kindred Capital and Notion Capital also participated in the round.

The next decade is expected to bring the widespread roll-out and commercialisation of advanced self-driving technology. However, before the industry can get there, it must overcome some formidable challenges. 

These include how to integrate many new and existing components into a self-driving system that is functional enough to operate safely in the real world and how to build essential safety assurance evidence that is both measurable and sufficient. 

These challenges are exacerbated by unavoidable hardware and system software limitations, by the high dimensionality and changing nature of the real world, by the need to apply deep learning models to key aspects of self-driving systems and by the need to discover, label and curate vast quantities of data to develop, train, maintain and verify these systems.

The nature of these challenges makes self-driving simultaneously the most strenuous and the most exciting science and engineering endeavour of our era, requiring the world’s leading mathematicians, scientists and engineers to tackle them.  

Five (Five AI Inc.) began developing its approach to self-driving technology in 2016 and a year later secured the lead role in StreetWise, a UK government-aided development program in which Direct Line Group also contributed. 

Over three years, Five’s expert team developed a high functionality self-driving system for mixed-use urban public roads. In 2019, that technology was demonstrated over hundreds of rides driving autonomously over a 19km route in London, one of the world’s most complex testing environments.

Five’s work in building a sophisticated self-driving system has led to a profound understanding of how to develop and assure safety-critical software that encounters and interacts with complex and changing objects, behaviours and environments in the real world. 

In consequence, Five’s team began building cloud-based platforms alongside its software to address the most complex challenges it encountered in the process of development and assurance.

This latest round of funding will be used to productise these vital offline cloud-based development platforms alongside high-value components of Five’s online vehicle software. 

Together, these will provide global partners with the means to bring needed performance and engineering certainty to their self-driving programs and deliver the assurance evidence required for their safety cases, both of which will be essential for meaningful public road deployments and the widespread commercialisation of self-driving technology.  

Stan Boland, Five’s CEO, said: “This funding round is validation of the work we are doing and the role our technology is set to contribute to developing and assuring self-driving. 

“We’re excited to be able to accelerate development and engagements with partners. Our shareholders have large and complementary contributions to make to that progress, and we are delighted to welcome Trustbridge, Direct Line Group and Sistema VC to our cap table. We look forward to their support on the next stage of our journey.”

Five’s founding team has collectively built businesses that have sold for more than $1bn, and the company has established close ties with some of the world’s leading academic institutions. 

With origins in the communications chip industry, Five’s founders are experts in the use of cutting-edge tools and techniques to verify deep technology, including finding and addressing residual bugs in high-complexity silicon and software. The team is now applying this knowledge to the challenges of self-driving, which it is well on track to solving.

Serial entrepreneur Stan Boland is a legendary figure in the evolution of Cambridge technology hunted by global giants. He was co-founder and CEO at Element 14 Inc. (acquired by Broadcom Corporation for $640m in 2000), co-founder and CEO at Icera Inc. (acquired by NVIDIA Corporation for $430m in 2011) and CEO at Neul Ltd (acquired by Huawei for an undisclosed sum in 2014). 

Co-founders at Five led groundbreaking algorithm development, software development, verification, processor design and product management at those firms.
Five’s scientific advisers include Professor Philip Torr (University of Oxford), Professor Andrew Blake (formerly director of the Alan Turing Institute and Microsoft Research), Professor Alessio Lomuscio (Imperial College) and Professor John McDermid (University of York). Subramanian Ramamoorthy (University of Edinburgh) acts as VP of the company’s Robotics and Vehicle Software group.

Of Five’s team, 40 per cent hold PhDs in computer science, mathematics, engineering and physical sciences.

Five currently has eight fully equipped self-driving vehicles, each provisioned with tens of sensors and processing power at supercomputer levels. Its largest facility is in Cambridge UK.

CML Microsystems Plc, an Essex business which designs, manufactures and markets semiconductors primarily for global comms and solid state storage markets, has acquired Cambridge technology cluster company Plextek RFI Ltd (PRFI). No figures are being disclosed for the deal.

PRFI is part of the Plextek Group of companies and specialises in the design and development of RF, Microwave and Millimetre-wave (mm-wave) ICs and modules. 

The team has completed in excess of 100 IC designs, operating at radio frequencies up to 100GHz and are a third-party approved design house for a number of leading semiconductor companies globally. 

Design experience includes front end ICs for mm-wave 5G, broadband Monolithic Microwave ICs (MMICs), receiver, transmitter and power amplifier (PA) ICs for microwave links and GaN PAs for both commercial and defence applications. PRFI is located on the Essex-Cambridge borders in Great Chesterford.  

The acquisition has been funded from a mixture of existing cash resources and shares from treasury.

Plextek RFI was founded from within Plextek by Liam Devlin some 20 years ago and demerged into a separate limited company in 2015. 

Design experience includes front end ICs for mm-wave 5G, broadband Monolithic Microwave ICs (MMICs), receiver, transmitter and power amplifier (PA) ICs for microwave links and GaN PAs for both commercial and defence applications. The designers, IP, order book and customer relationships are all part of the deal.

This represents the first outright sale of one of the Plextek Group companies. These are set up as sister companies and include:-

• Plextek Services Ltd (the original technical product design house), which solves today’s hardest engineering problems in sensing, data collection and communications
• Blighter Surveillance Systems Ltd – Best-in-class e-scan radars for border security, counter-drone, perimeter security, wide area surveillance & coastline security, including to Heathrow and Gatwick Airports and civil and defence customers in over 35 countries
• Redtail Telematics – full stack providers of black box telematics to insurers, OEMs and fleets including Admiral, ByMiles, Concirrus, TRACKER Network, LoJack and young driver specialist Ingenie
• Telensa Ltd, (now co-funded by ETF and others) – a world leading supplier of streetlight metering and management solutions, whose deployments exceed GE and Philips combined.

The marriage between Plextek RFI and CML arose out of a clear strategic alignment. 

Chris Gurry, CML’s group managing director said: “PRFI’s dedicated and experienced team enhances our strategy for expansion within communications markets.

“Their design expertise expands upon the group’s existing skills and provides a new independent services and consulting income stream for CML.”

Plextek group chairman Dr Colin Smithers added: “We are both delighted and saddened to see Plextek RFI come to maturity and to wave it off into its new beginning at CML where we are sure they will help directly with their strategic goals. The choice of deal partner covered many aspects including a strong cultural fit.”

PRFI will remain based at the Plextek campus in Great Chesterford.

Cambridge and East of England companies will be in the front line of the UK’s battle for big-bucks deals under a free trade agreement with the United States, PM Boris Johnson believes.

The Government says that the region could net a £345 million boost from a new UK-US trade pact.

The PM outlined the UK’s negotiating objectives and said talks were expected to start this month. Illustrating its publicity push with the Union Jack flying in unison with the Stars and Stripes, the charm offensive began with a visit by International Trade Minister Graham Stuart to meet CEO and founder Julie Deane at the Cambridge Satchel Company which exports significantly to the States.

Other local companies highlighted for the launch campaign are also big sellers to America – namely Retrocorn in Colchester, James White Drinks in Ipswich and Motilal Books in St Albans.

A number of businesses in the East of England have already come out in support of an FTA, saying it would help them to trade more easily, according to a government press release. Stuart added that the proposed agreement formed part of the Government’s wider vision to level up economic growth across the whole UK.   

And Boris Johnson stressed that the negotiating objectives established that any future agreement must protect the NHS and uphold “our high standards on food safety and animal welfare.”

The proposed agreement would also include a chapter on digital trade, to maximise opportunities for businesses to trade digitally across the Atlantic. 

The US is the East of England’s largest export market, accounting for 14 per cent of the region’s goods exports: 3,774 businesses in the East of England collectively export £7,316 worth of goods to the US every minute. 
  
Boris Johnson said:  “We have the best negotiators in the business and of course, we’re going to drive a hard bargain to boost British industry.  

“Trading Scottish smoked salmon for Stetson hats, we will deliver lower prices and more choice for our shoppers. Most importantly, this transatlantic trade deal will reflect the unique closeness of our two great nations.” 

International Trade Secretary Liz Truss added: “Striking ambitious free trade agreements with our partners around the world is one of the key opportunities of Britain becoming an independent trading nation once again. 

“This deal with our biggest single trading partner will cut red tape for our small businesses, cut tariffs for our great products from dairy to cars and increase growth in all four nations.” 

The local businesses highlighted in the Government’s opening salvo of the FTA campaign are all hot gospellers for Anglo-US trade.

The Cambridge Satchel Company was founded in 2008 by Julie Deane and her mother Freda Thomas. They now employ 160 people and export more to the US than any other country. In 2019 the company exported £715,000 of goods to the US. 

Julie Deane  said: “I am very pleased to learn that the UK-US FTA is being worked upon; this agreement is of critical importance. The US was one of the first markets to really embrace and support The Cambridge Satchel Company with customers expressing their love of British style and manufacturing.   

“Many American celebrities including Taylor Swift, Emma Stone and Lady Gaga have been spotted with our bags, which has added to the demand from this market.” 

Colchester-based popcorn brand Retrocorn started selling its retro-style popcorn to the US two years ago. 

After securing a contract to work with a chain of 250 retail stores across the US, the company has seen continuous demand from US consumers, and the market now accounts for approximately 15 per cent of its total business. The company has plans to expand its presence in the US through an in-market distributor and hopes to grow its seven-strong team by three as part of its US strategy. 

Managing director Greg Taylor said: “Our business plan for 2020 is to reach more customers in the US with our products. An FTA could reduce the costs of import and could lead to the products being offered cheaper in the market, making it better value for money to the end consumer and more in line with other products. This would hopefully lead to an increase in sales and export volume for us.” 

The region exported £53 million worth of food and drink in the year to September 2019, amounting to over 31,000 tonnes. 

Specialised worldwide wholesaler of Indian published books Motilal Books, from St Albans, currently exports $500,000 worth of its books to the US and has doubled its sales to America in the past two years. 

As the biggest English book market in the world, the company sees huge potential for more growth, especially for their niche titles, into the US.  

Managing director Ray McLennan said:  “The UK is the natural launching pad to sell into the US and for all English-speaking countries. As the world’s centre for the creative industries the UK is very well accepted by the American markets.” 

Ipswich-based juice producer James White Drinks Ltd started selling its Beet It organic beetroot juice and concentrated beetroot sport shots in the US five years ago.  

By tapping into one of the largest consumer markets in the world, James White Drinks now sells $750,000 of its Beet It products a year in the US and demand is growing by around 25 per cent every year.   

Managing director Lawrence Mallinson said: “Having taken so long to work out a successful modus operandi in this very large but very challenging market, it is critical that a UK-US FTA is obtained quickly to enable us to capitalise on where we are now.  

“More co-operation on organic specifications, food security and labelling regulations should make it cheaper and easier to access the US market.” 

Cambridge synthetic biology business Evonetix is ramping up its DNA on a chip technology proposition after closing a $30 million Series B round led by new investor Foresite Capital which is anchored in San Francisco.

Draper Esprit, DCVC (Data Collective), the Morningside group, Providence Investment Company, Cambridge Consultants Ltd, Rising Tide Fund and Civilization Ventures, also participated.

Evonetix is developing a desktop platform for scalable, high-fidelity and rapid gene synthesis.

The cash will be used to accelerate internal technology development, including the integration of Evonetix’s technology to enable the synthesis of DNA on a chip. 

The investment will fund the company through to the introduction of its desktop DNA platform which, once fully developed, will facilitate and enable the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology with application across industries including healthcare, pharma, biotech, food and agriculture and data storage.

The investment will also support the UK company’s significant recruitment plans as it continues to increase headcount across scientific, operational and commercial staff located at Evonetix’s state-of-the-art facility at Coldhams Business Park, Cambridge.

Evonetix was founded in 2015 to develop technology that enables the parallel synthesis of DNA on silicon arrays to facilitate the fast-emerging field of synthetic biology, where there is increasing demand for high-throughput and highly accurate DNA synthesis. 

The company was founded by Cambridge Consultants and Hermann Hauser’s Providence Investment Company Limited and went on to close $12.3 million Series A funding in 2018, in addition to a grant from Innovate UK. 

The close of the Series B round brings the total funds raised by the business to $46 million to date. 

The company’s technology utilises a silicon chip, made by microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) processing, that controls the synthesis of DNA at many thousands of independently controlled reaction sites or ‘pixels’ on the chip surface in a highly parallel fashion. 

Following synthesis, strands are assembled on-chip into double-stranded DNA in a process that identifies and removes errors, enabling accuracy, scale and speed that is several orders of magnitude better than conventional approaches.

Dr Tim Brears, Evonetix CEO, said: “The backing of both our existing and new investors will enable us to fast track development, testing and delivery of our highly parallel desktop platform, which will be available to every researcher to accelerate their ability to use biology on a scale not possible with existing approaches.”

Cambridge’s global technology influencer Arm smashed its own record for the number of chips circulated to customers worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Arm silicon partners shipped a record 6.4 billion Arm-based chips, the third record quarter for unit shipments in the past two years.

Arm saw growing demand for embedded intelligence in endpoint devices as demonstrated by the record 4.2 billion Cortex-M processors shipped across the planet.

To-date, Arm partners have shipped more than 160 billion Arm-based chips, and an average of more than 22 billion over the past three years.

Rene Haas, president, IP Products Group, Arm, said: “This past quarter our partners shipped a record 6.4 billion Arm-based chips, including a record 4.2 billion Cortex-M processors, further cementing Cortex-M as the indisputable processor of choice for embedded and IoT applications.

“Additionally, our accelerated investments in new technologies and developer ecosystems resulted in our biggest number of licences signed in a quarter since 2015. 

“Arm, together with the world’s largest compute ecosystem, are well-positioned to enable efficient distribution of more intelligence across endpoint devices, build an AI-driven network edge, while pushing more efficiency and cost-savings into the cloud.”

The NHS, nursing a £139.3 billion budget this year, has embraced transformative keyhole surgery technology from Cambridge unicorn CMR Surgical.

Hospitals in Edinburgh and Milton Keynes have become the first in the UK to perform operations using CMR’s Versius robotics arm.

The latest generation Versius has initially been used to perform a range of colorectal surgeries, helping to treat patients with serious bowel disease or bowel cancer. 

The first NHS hospital to use Versius was The Western General Hospital in Edinburgh (one of four hospitals in the NHS Lothian Health Board), followed by Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Trust in Buckinghamshire. 

They are the first to use Versius in Europe; however, further NHS hospitals are scheduled to introduce the system in 2020. These include both large teaching hospitals and smaller local centres and could open the door to a much wider use of robotic MAS than seen to date. 

As a portable system, Versius is designed to help increase minimal access procedures, offering the potential for better patient outcomes, NHS savings and more bed space.

Business Weekly revealed last May that NHS chair Lord David Prior promised to champion the technology across UK hospitals.

Fired up CMR is targeting a highly lucrative international market; global annual revenues for robot-assisted MAS are approximately $4bn currently but are anticipated to reach $20bn by 2025.

MAS – also referred to as keyhole or laparoscopic surgery – is associated with a number of potential benefits compared to open surgery, including the ability to reduce rates of surgical site infections, pain and scarring.

It is estimated that only one-third of procedures that could be performed laparoscopically in the UK are. Across Europe currently only 13 per cent of hysterectomy procedures are conducted laparoscopically. In addition, 800,000 cases of surgical site infection across all surgical procedures have been recorded, costing health systems millions.

MAS is also linked to faster recovery in hospital, with fewer post-operative bed days required for recovery.

A 2018 report by the Office of Health Economics found that a shift to MAS led to a reduction in the average length of stays for gynaecology patients from 5.5 days to just 1.5 days in 95 per cent of cases.

Versius has been carefully designed to enhance how surgeons perform MAS procedures including for major gynaecological and colorectal surgery. Three independent arms, which replicate those of a human in size and shape, are coupled with 3D visualisation and unique instrument controls that allow the surgeon to mimic their own human movement, enabling precise surgeries while also making long procedures less strenuous. 

As part of the introduction of Versius, a clinical registry has been established to provide a database of patient outcomes information to support patient safety, as well as technical data that can support assisted learning and help optimise Versius’ use in the future.  

Biomimicking the human arm, Versius allows surgeons the freedom of port placement, but with the benefits of small fully-wristed instruments. With 3D HD vision, easy-to adopt instrument control and a choice of ergonomic working positions, the new open surgeon console has the potential to reduce stress and fatigue and extend the careers of surgeons.

CMR Surgical provides a robust training programme to the full surgical team as part of its offering. This comprises of a bespoke online portal; Versius trainer for surgeons; residential training and peer to peer support.

Mark Slack, chief medical officer at CMR Surgical, said: “We set out to design a system that was versatile, portable and cost-effective and it is immensely rewarding to see it now being used in the NHS – one of the most thorough and clinically rigorous health systems in the world.” 

Inotec AMD, a Cambridge medtech business that has developed a device to heal and treat complex chronic wounds, has secured £7 million in a funding round led by Praetura Ventures.

The Cambridge Research Park business has developed Natrox, a cutting-edge product that uses pure humidified oxygen to treat a range of chronic wounds, from diabetic and venous ulcers to non-healing surgical wounds.

Following several successful clinical trials, Inotec AMD is looking to expand its foothold in the US, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. 

The business currently provides products to the NHS and health providers in key markets including the US, Italy, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. UK-based Praetura Ventures has invested £2.75m in the latest round. 

Existing investor Amadeus Capital Partners, Puhua Capital, Boundary Capital and a group of high-net-worth angel investors joined Praetura.

Inotec AMD is headed up by CEO Craig Kennedy and chairman Dr Adrian Patron. Headquartered in Cambridge, the business also has a US office in North Carolina.

The funding will enable Inotec AMD to build on its recent growth and target new international markets. Dr Andy Round, director and life sciences specialist at Praetura Ventures, will join Inotec AMD’s board.

Inotec AMD is the third life sciences business in Praetura Ventures’ portfolio, following investments in Ostara Biomedical, a biotechnology development company focused on mammalian reproductive biology; and Liverpool ChiroChem, a specialist business that develops the chemical building blocks for use in biopharmaceutical drug design and development.

Craig Kennedy said: “The UK alone spends £3.1 billion treating chronic wounds each year, while the US spends $50bn. Add to this the significant escalation in costs, not to mention the considerable distress to patients and families if the only course of treatment for non-healing wounds is amputation. It’s clear that there’s a real need for innovation and new solutions in this area.

“We’re proud to have developed a product with the potential to revolutionise wound care and significantly minimise pain and suffering for millions of patients worldwide. Our next step is to continue our momentum and expand into new territories.”

The global wound care market continues to grow rapidly, with a recent report by market research company MarketsandMarkets predicting it will be worth $24.8bn by 2024, up from $19.8bn this year.