Think carefully on this question: what is the purpose of your business?
You may be developing a cutting-edge technology, but if it does not meet a real need, the company itself may flounder.
“It is important to think about the wider picture – the impact of one’s technology and the reason why we develop it in the first place,” Thomas Fleming, COO and co-founder of Arctoris, tells TechBlast.
“Tech is a tool, not an end in itself.”
The 34-year-old set up the Abingdon-based MedTech with CEO Martin-Immanuel Bittner in 2016 after they met during their PhDs at Oxford. Their idea of transforming how drug discovery research is conducted emanated from these doctoral studies.
“Shortcomings in the data quality produced by manual laboratory operations is an impediment to drug discovery,” says Fleming. “Independent third parties, such as the in-house teams of pharma companies, trying to reproduce findings only succeeded in 10–20% of cases.
“With almost 90% failure rates, less than 5% chances of success and escalating costs, there is a thirst for quality of data that is consistent and reliable – by both BioTech companies and ‘big pharma’.”
They approached this problem by harnessing the benefits of automation, robotics and advanced computational approaches to bring about greater reproducibility, standardisation, throughput and speed to drug discovery.
Fleming says its hybrid business model – pursuing its own drug discovery programs, while also giving access to its technology platform to other BioTech and pharma companies – means it is able to progress both platform development as well as internal discovery work.
“Our revenue generation enables the company to benefit from the significant upside of drug discovery assets, while de-risking the company’s platform via active, revenue-generating partnerships with drug discovery companies worldwide,” he explains.
Arctoris has raised $10 million in funding to date and employs close to 30 people. It expects its next funding round in Q1 2023 to raise $25-35m.
“As we are preparing for our Series A fundraise, we are particularly focused on further scaling our BD efforts & partnerships – which includes new hires – as well as make sure the company’s positioning is fully and optimally developed,” says Fleming.
“At the same time, we are continuously improving and expanding our technology platform, including new experimental capabilities, and our pipeline, where we see several inflection points over the next 12 months.”
Arctoris is among 35 companies accepted onto the eighth edition of Tech Nation’s Upscale. The six-month government-backed programme is designed to support and scale the most promising mid-stage tech companies in the UK, at a critical stage of their growth.
The companies will receive over 60 hours of support at world-class coaching sessions – delivered by over 20 expert scale coaches – attend networking events with key stakeholders, peers, corporates and investors, and have access to a range of online resources, designed to tackle fundamental scaling challenges around culture, talent, international expansion and financing.
“We are honoured to be selected for Upscale 8.0 and to join other high-growth companies. As COO, there are many challenges associated with scaling up operations as the company expands and matures,” reflects Fleming.
“Tech Nation has assembled a brilliant selection of experts, advisors and mentors that we will be able to learn from at an accelerated pace. Additionally, the peer support network that comes with the outstanding cohort will undoubtedly prove to be an invaluable asset to us as founders, as we lead the company into its next phase of growth.”
He adds: “One of the great things about creating something entirely new is that you will do something that no one has ever done before. It is natural that this is a learning curve and numerous things can and will go wrong.
“I think one of our lessons learned was to find a balance between a reasonable starting point and the encompassing long-term vision. In our case, to first build and perfect a prototype system for key experiments, before embarking on scaling our technology to include additional experiments.
“Now we are capable of conducting experiments across the entirety of the drug discovery process i.e., from identifying a disease target to generating a fully validated preclinical drug target, alongside progressing our own internal R&D pipeline.
“As for advice for emerging entrepreneurs: if you see a need and think that you have found a way to address it, find out more about the space, get feedback, but most importantly pursue it and do not give up easily.”
Cooper Parry, Cooley and Silicon Valley Bank will be Programme Partners for this year’s Upscale programme.