A packed hub, sporting company displays and playing to a crowd of over 300 was welcomed by Isabell Majewsky, CEO of the GO Group saw Formedix  (2000) “we sell time and money” opening the batting. Wanting funding from £750k-£1m, it is one of a pair of companies that have been created by “a change in regulations.” The 230 member strong Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC)  with currently four data standards that enable 8.1month trial cycle time reductions, saving $9m and potentially leading to 30-50% process improvement saving the industry $5.8-$6.6m annually.

CEO Mark Wheeldon says that the Formedix Origin study design tools software is a ‘must have’ rather than ‘nice’ technology, and as one of only 10 CDISC consultancies world wide, already won 2 awards from CDISC for standard development, and scooped clients from 5 from the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, a well as a top 10 biotech company and a top 10 medical device company. License (renewals at 98%) revenues is projected to exceed $430,000 next year.

Relaunched Cellexus  also looking for £1m is a disposable bioreactor system for the production of proteins used in the development and manufacture of new wave biopharmaceutical drugs. Two models, Regular and Plus marchines provide the user with a way to gear up from the lab-bench, does not currently have a competitor and is a system based on a sterile bag, agitated by influx of gases (oxygen, nitrogen or CO2) with a series of paddles to maintain movement.

The bioreactor market (disposable and reusable) is worth $30bn worldwide growing at 10-15% and single-use technolgies wanted by biopharmaceutical companies racing to get product to market. Already it has sold in UK, USA, France, and Germany, and anticipates http://www.gt-biologics.com/about/its first order from China.

Software and genetics are inevitable partners. Seventh bat Fios Genomics  provides fee-for-service statistical and bioinformatics data analysis services to academics and the paharmaceutical industries for rapid, expert analysis of data generated from high-throughput biological platforms for applications such as pharmacogenomics, biomarker discover SNP genotyping, predictive toxicology and sequencing. Originators are from the University of Edinburgh and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. It is also in the modest £500,000 sector, offers an exit strategy through a trade sale, merger or acquisition in 4-5 years.

GT Biologics ($2m) is tilting at probiotic products, world current market $32bn. A spinout from the Rowett Institute and Aberdeen University it offers oral based probiotics for treatment of Inflammatory bowel disease, with a similar product for animals being developed.

Fourth to bat was H2Ology , another developed by ”change in regulation” and bidding for £1m on paper, though its presentation only talked £500,000. Its product is an advance treatment station, treatment and recycling plant (ATS-TARP) (Mini, left) an Edinburgh University patent, developed to decontaminate road water run-off for Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) when regulations by the Scottish Executive in 2007 meant a changeof direction (though the initial market remains south of the border.)

ATS-TARP dewater road gully and road sweeping waste, so solids can be legitimately discharged to landfill sites (as waste to landfill must drop from 52% to 25%) H2Ology added a sand and aggregates recovery systems. The business strategy pitched at 415 British councils probably taking an average 2 units, not to mention highway agency contractors, port operators and private contactors. While the ATS-TARP, TARP+ and TARP Mobile can be sold to the end user, H2Ology has organised asset finance leasing as an alternative and where it own and operates the system, charges end users a gate fee per load or per tonne to deposit waste.

There were some fascinating angles that emerged in the pitches. One of those is the interesting strata of serial ‘start up’ entrepreneurs that exist. Attracted by the challenge of “growing a winner” these can cite their previous successfully established and sold or moved on from, and as old hands in the investment game, tend to pitch for high funds in the £1m upwards, are fast of the draw to offer investors more than one “exit strategy.” By contrast, there are the start-ups who have stitched their lives and souls into their product, and are asking rather modestly one feels, for the apparent regulatory minimum of £500,000.

One such is Process Technology Europe formed in 2003  which provides services to the casting industry (right) and is just starting up its website. Its technology is based on the addition of materials to the wax used in making the cast, enabling it to be receptive to microwave energy. That enables the lost wax process to melt faster and reduce the energy used and as the same concept and equipment is used to bake the cast it can become a combined single operation.

Evaluated by the University of Birmingham’s Castings Industry Centre of Excellence, the development reduces process tiem, energy and CO2 emissions by 75%. It also has an exist strategy of 3-5 years and needs to gain only 3.7% of the world market of 2,000 investment casting foundries worldwide (turnover £3,000m) in 5 years with a further growth potential for introducing the technology to larger associated casting industries. Quiet aces in its hand are its business development director Mark Bolton who speaks fluent Chinese Mandarin concentrating on Asian and international markets, not to mention Dr Samantha Jones, head of the Investment casting foundry at the University of Birmingham.

Aberdeen-based Green Ocean Energy is looking for £1.5m of a £4m package overall needed to build, install and test its Wave Treader, a wave energy converter which attaches to the transition piece of an offshore wind turbine to combine wind and wave energy from one installation, sharing infrastructure and installation costs to increase profitability and yield from the site.

The first full scale prototype is scheduled for deployment in 2Q 2011 and another free floating converter, Ocean Treader is scheduled for development after 2012. Its market is 1,600 offshore windturbines in the UK by 2015 and another 5,000 by 2020 putting the total at 15,000 offshore wind turbines in the UK and Europe.

Much smaller, but low risk, low cost is another wave energy device, the Roslin-based and Findlay family run AlbaTERN WaveNET draws its materials, construction and mooring technologies from the established fish farming sector. “WaveNet,” says technical director David Findlay “is a disruptive step change in the way wave energy is captured and is optimised for powering remote applications where price per kWh of electricity is very high.” WaveNET goes on trial this summer off the West coast and AlbaTERN bids for £500,000k to initially work helping remote communities and micro scale markets.

Last of the energy contenders is Tanya Ewing’s brain child device Ewgeco  with Perth-based Tayeco Ltd already profitable. Redesigned to give end users (consumer, business and smart meter markets) reliable and instant information on energy consumption, it connects to existing and new about-to-arrive smart meters for utilities (gas, water, electricity) and offers investors a significant return with a four to five year time frame.

Two very different software companies were presenting. Spinsight Ltd  pitching for £725,000 which is analytics technology combining video cameras, processing unit and proprietary software designed to be entirely portable, require only one operator and run off-the-shelf hardware.

CEO Alex McAndrew is pitching at the sports market, pointing out that the price paid for top stars justifies the expense of monitoring them for fatigue and low performance. It claims to disrupt existing models of labour intensive annotating video post match work and estimates a $300m market, leaving out surveillance, security and behavioural analsysis.

By contrast Money Dashboard  “gather, sort, manage & save” headed by founder, career entrepreneur Gavin Littlejohn teamed with James Varga, entrepreneur technologies a webservice that makes it easier for people (key demographics 20-40 age bracket) to manage financial lives, securely linking all internet backing and credit cards with single pass word sign-on. MD makes it money by providng ways to save, based on user data profile and linking them to products in the market that meet their needs. (Oh, for a good, straightforward old-fashioned Scottish bank, but no-one has the courage to pitch that at present!)

Another Internet contender is Affect Labs (£500,000) offering to “filter social networks to show you who’s talking, what they are saying and what you need to know.” CEO Steven Renwick notes that the technology is based on work done by Jennie Lees on natural language processing at Cambridge, developing a new sentiment classification system, which allocates a brand’s overall ‘emotional’ score. It’s not how often you get (right) mentioned, but how people feel about it that matters. Great market from politicians one would presume.

From the medical sector, Tayside Flow Technologies looks for £2m for its Spiral Laminar Flow platform for blood flow related medical devices, (initial focus grafts and stents) and other fluid transfer applications, its IP spun out of NHS Tayside. Using outsource OEM it aims to build a portfolio of products based on SLF and currently has 30 distributors.

Glasgow based and University spin-out Mode Diagnostics  looks for £1.2m and is preparing a pipeline of user friendly, clinically informative diagnostic products for over the counter retail market. Its first product is for cancer diagnostics with bSure is for early colorectar cancer detection, the seond leading cause of deaths in the US.) Baed on trade sales of £25m (5x post tax profits in 2013, investor could expect an 8.7% return.)

Strathclyde University spinout Solar Healthcare (too new yet for a website) is based on UV sensitive ink printed onto a variety of substrates. Looking for £950,000 to fund cash flow for two years, its first products are Sun Exposure Sensors to warn consumer when they have been in the sun too long through adhesive patches or adjustable wrist bands. Sunburn sensors says commercial director Chris Hatton  have been available for almost a decade but ‘never gained traction’ because they do not work effectively. Solar Healthcare aims catch this (left) solar tide on the flow.