The Tyndall Explorer 2021 programme brought together six competing teams from university and industry sectors across Ireland for this national deep technology pre-accelerator. The programme was led by David McGovern and Patrick Morrissey of the SFI Research Centre, Irish Photonic Integration Centre (IPIC), based at Tyndall National Institute and Helen Fullen of Alineate who directed the programme. Explorer was launched earlier this year as a collaboration between IPIC, Tyndall, the IPCEI European cluster collaboration, international high-tech photonics OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, and IQE with support from SFI, Munster Technological University, DCU, National University of Ireland, Galway, Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork.
In the final showcase, six competing finalists presented their applications, which spanned across various innovative technology areas.
AIC is an AI-based platform leveraged with novel machine-learning algorithms to provide users with recommendations/predictions of different features related to public health care. AIC applications include predicting the safest time and routes of closed spaces indicating the risk level of Covid-19 contagiousness, asthma and wheezing attacks indoors.
Enegma provides novel solutions for application-level energy consumption measurement, monitoring, modelling, and optimisation for applications on modern computing platforms such as supercomputers, high-performance computing clusters, and cloud computing infrastructures.
Atlantic Photonic Solutions (APS) is a photonics start-up that uses light to resolve biological problems. APS have focussed on the global parasite/host problem of sea lice on farmed salmon and have discovered a “sweet spot wavelength” which affects the sea lice without harming the salmon.
InPhoSS is a gas sensing platform providing high-resolution real-time gas measurements. With growing concern worldwide about pollution resulting from human activity, emissions monitoring has become increasingly important InPhoSS offer a real-time and accurate method to measure these pollutants.
CreativeConnections is a platform that changes the way online creators and brands find and match with each other by streamlining the search for brand ambassadors. CreativeConnections benefits both the brands and online creators by focusing on improving their respective businesses.
INSPIRES employs micro-transfer printing technology to miniaturise bulky and expensive optical spectroscopy systems to chip-sized, low-cost devices. INSPIRES seeks to identify high-value applications to meet market demands of sensitivity, speed, compactness, or volume production capability to realise such products.
APS were announced as the winners of the Tyndall Explorer Programme 2021. The APS team leveraged the programme to help to further develop their commercialisation plans and to expand their customer discovery and market engagement activities. The programme helped connect this innovative team to a wide network, which will enable the company to address new markets and to use their patented technology in additional applications. Furthermore, APS have secured EU funding to commercialise their patented process.
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Laura Britton, Kevin Murphy, Rory Casey
The next programme is now seeking early stage photonics and microelectronics-based ideas that have the potential to develop into scalable start-ups and address current societal challenges. The participating teams will learn from commercialisation and technology experts to better understand prospective customer needs, help de-risk their deep-tech ventures through product and customer validation, and prepare the teams for grant funding and investment. In addition, teams will be supported by industry mentorship from international experts to help bring their idea from concept to pitch. The programme also assists teams in gaining both national and international exposure and facilitates access to the investing community.
Explorer will be accepting applications for its next programme aimed at empowering entrepreneurs with deep-tech ideas in Q4 2021. Teams and individuals will be able to apply at www.tyndall.ie/explorer. If you have queries regarding Explorer, please contact a member of the team by emailing explorer@tyndall.ie.