Thank you for your interest in our company.
Unfortunately QMI does not currently have any available vacancies – however please check back here at a later date to see our current listings.
If you would like to find out more information about our technologies or have any queries, please contact the relevant team member using our contact information found on our team profiles.
TouchKeys Instruments Limited is a technology for adding touch sensing capability to a piano-style digital keyboard. Measuring the movement of the fingers on the key surfaces greatly expands the expressive range of the keyboard, allowing techniques like vibrato, pitch bends and timbre changes to be played easily and intuitively. Unlike other products in the musical controller market, TouchKeys retains the traditional look and feel of the piano keyboard, making them more accessible to pianists, as well as providing a unique solution for piano tutoring and learning.
Associate Professor in Digital Media, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Why did you start your spin-out?
First and foremost to get new music and audio technologies into the hands of creators. Even the most wide-ranging research agenda can only reach a fraction of the community that a company can address. TouchKeys aims to expand creative possibilities for keyboard players without requiring them to learn an entirely new instrument.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
Get out there and try something on whatever scale is achievable. You’ll gain enormous practical experience getting your research into the hands of even a handful of users, and you’ll learn a lot of valuable skills along the way. Don’t worry about having the perfect idea or the grandest possible scope from day 1, just look for opportunities that you can reach and see where they take you.
Bela is an embedded computing platform for creating beautifully responsive interactive projects. Bela provides ultra-low latency, high quality audio, analog and digital I/O in a tiny self-contained package that can be easily embedded into a huge range of applications. Built on the BeagleBone family of open-source embedded computers, Bela combines the processing power of an embedded computer with the timing precision and connectivity of a microcontroller.
Associate Professor in Digital Media, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Why did you start your spin-out?
First and foremost to get new music and audio technologies into the hands of creators. Even the most wide-ranging research agenda can only reach a fraction of the community that a company can address. Bela aims to change the way we create interactive systems through powerful yet easy-to-use open-source tools.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
Get out there and try something on whatever scale is achievable. You’ll gain enormous practical experience getting your research into the hands of even a handful of users, and you’ll learn a lot of valuable skills along the way. Don’t worry about having the perfect idea or the grandest possible scope from day 1, just look for opportunities that you can reach and see where they take you.
Poolbeg Pharma is a clinical stage infectious disease pharmaceutical company, with a novel capital light clinical model which enables them to develop multiple products faster and more cost effectively than the traditional biotech model. Poolbeg aspires to become a “one-stop shop” for big pharma to find Phase II ready products for commercialisation. With access to knowledge, experience and clinical data from over 20 years of human challenge trials, they use their insights to reposition clinical stage products, reducing spend and risk.
DAACI AI is a platform is designed to exponentially increase the capabilities of established composers to write original music, meeting the ever-growing demands of today and tomorrow.
hVIVO is an industry leading services provider in viral challenge studies and laboratory services supporting product development for customers developing antivirals, vaccines and respiratory therapeutics. hVIVO was established in 1989 and in 2020 became part of Open Orphan plc, the niche CRO pharmaceutical services company.
VacV Biotherapeutics Limited is dedicated to developing proprietary oncolytic virus therapies based on the VacV platform for the treatment of cancers with significant unmet needs.
LANDR is the creative platform for musicians: AI-powered music mastering, distribution, plugins, collaboration, promotion and sample packs. LANDR was launched in 2014 and has since helped millions of musicians all around the world.
Why did you start your spin-out?
I am passionate about impact from research. For me, its not enough to just write a paper and hope that it gets read and cited. I’m inspired by seeing research make it all the way from proof-of-concept to product, or in some other sense making a difference. Entrepreneurship is a great way to achieve that aim.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
Firstly, the goals of entrepreneurship and academic research are not contradictory. One can publish papers, create open source code and share knowledge while still protecting IP. In fact, academic impact can promote the commercial offerings. Secondly, QMUL offers tremendous support to start-ups and the teams behind them. They’ve supported me on the journey at all stages. So, if you’re interested in commercialising research, its really worth contacting Queen Mary Innovation. Finally, it can be a really rewarding experience. Entrepreneurship is challenging and risky, but absolutely wonderful when it succeeds.
Resolomics Limited is a biotechnology company developing innovative, high-value companion diagnostics and a novel cell-based therapy. Resolomics initial product focus includes rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, sepsis & trauma, where substantial unmet clinical need exists. The technology can be applied across all inflammatory diseases, both chronic and acute.
Why did you start your spin-out?
We started Resolomics as a way to accelerate the translation of our work, in the context of companion diagnostics, and adding value to IP generated by Prof Dalli and managed by QMI.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
The truth for us is that, so far, starting Resolomics has been an enormous amount of work for little gain. Our advice would be to make sure you’re aware of what it will take to bring a venture to fruition, that you feel you are adequately supported, and what other options are available to you if this is not the right path.
Kinomica Limited is a pioneering precision medicine research and diagnostics company specialising in cell signalling with patented, interdisciplinary phosphoproteomics platform, KScan®. By combining LC–MS/MS with advanced proprietary bioinformatics, Kinomica can provide bespoke R&D, diagnostic services and derive unique biological insights from proteomics data.
Why did you start your spin-out?
I started Kinomica because I thought we had the potential to help treat cancer patients with the most appropriate anti-cancer drug out of the several different treatments now available. My research team and I had been developing this technology over the last 15 years, but without further development this was just academic. We needed a vehicle to develop these approaches into tests that can actually bring benefit to patients. Kinomica is now developing these tests in a way that one day, in the not-so-distant future, will enable clinicians to make a more informed decision on the best-suited treatment for a given patient.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
My advice to entrepreneurial academics is to keep believing in your ideas despite inevitable setbacks, and keep persevering.
Chatterbox Labs Limited is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that will enable corporations to monitor, manage and improve brand reputation and marketing campaigns by identifying dynamic communities of people who are actively communicating with each other around a product or service related topic. This is achieved using data from social media networks, such as Twitter, where users post tweets containing opinions about brands, products or events.
Professor of Computational Linguistics, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Actual Experience plc is an algorithm-based software tool that works in real time to predict the service quality that is experienced by individual users of applications on a computer network. It also launches instant, automatic diagnostic traces to isolate the cause of problems as they occur. The company plans to become the standard measure for user experience of networked applications.
Professor of Communication Engineering, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Vision Semantics Limited provides unique video analytics solutions that are differentiated from the competition by being more discriminative and robust in defining meaningful semantic tags for wide scale video applications. This includes detecting and tagging objects in a CCTV scene; typical and atypical object movement and type information extracted to profile behaviours captured in CCTV and video; automated semantic-tagging of CCTV recordings based on holistic human presence detection and abnormal event/activity recognition.
Why did you start your spin-out?
I was primarily motivated by the potential of my research to have greater impact, beyond just academic publications, and I wanted to see how my research can be used to make a real difference to daily life. I was influenced by the question my PhD advisor asked me some 40 years ago, “Surely good research is more than just publishing?”.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
Be perseverant, adaptive, detail-orientated and always in control of expectations. On perseverance, two quips from old colleagues that have stuck with me are, “Research is only 3% and making it work is 97%” and “If you haven’t failed at least 5 times you haven’t even tried”. I think these are both correct and linked. Having been involved in four start-ups since 1998, I can tell you none were without many failures. On adaptiveness, let facts lead where you go, not pre-conceptions leading where you want to go. On details, know them and not just the big picture stuff, and don’t assume others will know them for you. On expectations, promise less, deliver more, do what you promise, and do the hard stuff.
BioMin Technologies Limited has developed a range of calcium phospho-silicates for use as additives in remineralising toothpastes and professional products for preventing tooth decay and treating dentine hypersensitivity. The primary activity of the company is the supply of BioMin glass as an additive for toothpaste and professional dental product formulations through developing a global licence holder network for BioMin intellectual property. The company also sells toothpastes directly through distribution channels.
Professor of Physical Sciences in relation to Dentistry, Institute of Dentistry – Barts and The London
Why did you start your spin-out?
A major toothpaste manufacturer took an option to license our patent, but even after a number of years they didn’t do anything with it. I wanted to see our research on fluoride bioactive glasses translated into products and setting up a spin-out was the best way to achieve this in the end.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
Good science is not enough. Costs and profit margins are critical for business success. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and there will be many setbacks and low points. The highpoints are good though, including prizes, TV appearances and my personal favourite – a picture of myself with the BioMin F Toothpaste on a billboard in China!
Ultima Forma Limited manufactures light-weight, high-strength, multi-functional metallic engineering components using a novel electrodeposition process. Working with a number of advanced technology and engineering businesses, Ultima Forma are developing and manufacturing parts to improve product performance. The business model is to manufacture and supply quality assured parts to industry across a range of sectors and applications.
Why did you start a spin-out company?
It is very satisfying to see academic research translate into beneficial technology. It is surely the purpose of academic research in science and engineering to produce technologies of benefit to society. Some may take longer than others to translate, so when the opportunities arise, we should try to exploit them.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
You must be able to answer this question – what value does your technology bring to the customer? Who are the customers and how will you get your technology to them? Our company’s moto is ‘making it big by keeping it small’. This not only refers to the underlying science but also to the company strategy; get as far as you can with as few resources as necessary to build value before needing investment. Choose the people involved very carefully, a successful technology is of no use if it does not make a successful business. Academics rarely have both science and business acumen, so finding partners that understand the market for your technology is a key to success.
Nemisindo has developed transformative procedural audio technology that aims to completely remove the reliance on sample libraries for sound generation in multimedia content. The Nemisindo technology generates sounds using physics models and can generate traditional sounds and those that have never been recorded. The intuitive sound models enable sounds to be shaped and crafted at the point of creation, breaking through the limitations of sampled sounds. The online platform provides a browser-based sound effect synthesis framework, offering many synthesis models with selected post-processing tools to create your own sounds from scratch. Each of these models can generate sound in real-time, which can be shaped by manipulating various parameters. Nemisondo also offers sound module plugins to the main game engine platforms enabling sounds to be generated in real time in a game environment.
Why did you start your spin-out?
I am passionate about impact from research. For me, its not enough to just write a paper and hope that it gets read and cited. I’m inspired by seeing research make it all the way from proof-of-concept to product, or in some other sense making a difference. Entrepreneurship is a great way to achieve that aim.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
Firstly, the goals of entrepreneurship and academic research are not contradictory. One can publish papers, create open source code and share knowledge while still protecting IP. In fact, academic impact can promote the commercial offerings. Secondly, QMUL offers tremendous support to start-ups and the teams behind them. They’ve supported me on the journey at all stages. So, if you’re interested in commercialising research, its really worth contacting Queen Mary Innovation. Finally, it can be a really rewarding experience. Entrepreneurship is challenging and risky, but absolutely wonderful when it succeeds.
Warblr Limited is an app that automatically identifies birds by their song by matching audio recordings with its database of bird species.
Why did you start your spin-out?
I started Warblr because my research found that machine learning had reached the right readiness level to help people identify bird sounds. With my co-founder Florence Wilkinson we see the Warblr app as a digital way to engage people with nature and the sounds all around them!
Chromosol aims to transform the future of photonic integrated circuits by developing a novel low cost, low power, small form factor and high performance photonics platform to provide integrated silicon based lasers and amplifiers. The Chromosol technology is based on a 2-component organic sensitized rare earth optical gain and sensitizer system which can be co-evaporated on top of a silicon based waveguide which will finally deliver on the promise of photonic integration. The technology is aimed at the £3 billion optical transceiver and optical amplifier markets. The organic optical amplifier material allows fibre optic technology to operate on a much shorter scale, of the order of a metre between racks and servers in datacentres, and on the centimetre scale between silicon chips in devices.
hVIVO is an industry leading services provider in viral challenge studies and laboratory services supporting product development for customers developing antivirals, vaccines and respiratory therapeutics. hVIVO was established in 1989 and in 2020 became part of Open Orphan plc, the niche CRO pharmaceutical services company.
Why did you start your spin-out?
Retroscreen, now hVIVO, was one of the first medical school companies, which I cofounded with an external business-oriented scientist. The idea was to help formalise collaborations with pharmaceutical companies when we first started screening for anti-HIV drugs. The company has since expanded into clinical trials, hence the name change.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurial academics?
I would advise interested academics to consider bringing in commercial expertise early on. We benefitted greatly from the appointment of two well-experienced advisors who helped raise finance. I enjoyed my time as Scientific Director, but a company has a life of its own and is a lot different from running research grants!
Why did you start a spin-out company?
I started Keratify because there were limitations with human skin testing and I knew I had a good concept that could resolve the key issues globally. Publishing on its own would not achieve that level of outreach. As a researcher, I’ve always been naturally drawn to translational and industry-funded research. I wanted to run my own business, thought there was a strong commercial opportunity, and the timing was right both personally and in terms of support to kick-start the business.
What advice would you give to aspiring academic entrepreneurs?
Work out how you can generate revenue as quickly as possible. There is a huge focus on achieving investment rounds or winning grant funding with university spin-outs; this is great initially but it doesn’t form a sustainable business on its own. Be prepared to work fast and iterate as you go – perfection is not the key, desirable and good enough will provide the platform to reach perfection.
Business Activity
Resolomics is a biotechnology company developing innovative, high-value companion diagnostics and a novel cell-based therapy. Resolomics initial product focus is on: Rheumatoid Arthritis, Cardiovascular Disease, Sepsis & Trauma where substantial unmet clinical need exists. The technology can be applied across all inflammatory diseases, both chronic and acute.
Founding Academics
Prof. Jesmond Dalli and Prof. Mauro Perretti
Business Activity
Stealthyx Therapeutics Limited has developed a novel LAP (latent- associated protein) Prothyx biologics delivery platform. The company’s approach is to develop a safer delivery system – lower doses of drug that are specifically targeted to the site of disease.
Founding Academic
Yuti Chernajovsky, Professor of Molecular Medicine, William Harvey Research Institute
Business Activity
Emdot Limited has developed an electrostatic fluid dispensing technology which is potentially superior to existing piezoelectric inkjet dispensing devices. It offers controlled drop-on-demand dispensing at a drop size ten times smaller than can be achieved with existing technology.
Founding Academic
Dr Mark Paine, Dr Matthew Alexander and Dr Katharine Smith, School of Engineering & Materials Science
Business Activity
VaryDose Limited is developing a dry powder dispensing technology. The technology has the potential to become an enabling manufacturing process in the pharmaceutical industry for dispensing pharmaceutical powders and drugs that are currently in product development pipelines and for which there is currently no dispensing solution. VaryDose has the potential to displace conventional capsule and blister filling technologies.
Founding Academic
Dr Shoufeng Yang, School of Engineering and Materials Science
Business Activity
Degrasense Limited has developed a novel thin-film hydrogel material that can be used in disposable, instant protease sensors. The material can be adapted to detect different proteases and/or be used in sensor arrays where the detection of complex mixtures of proteases is required.
Founding Academic
Dr Steffi Krause, Reader in Electroanalytical Systems, School of Engineering & Materials Science & Dr Mike Watkinson, Professor of Synthetic Chemistry, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences
Business Activity
Chatterbox Labs Limited is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that will enable corporations to monitor, manage and improve brand reputation and marketing campaigns by identifying dynamic communities of people who are actively communicating with each other around a product or service related topic. This is achieved using data from social media networks, such as Twitter, where users post tweets containing opinions about brands, products or events.
Founding Academic
Matthew Purver, Stuart Battersby, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Business Activity
Warblr Limited is an app that automatically identifies birds by their song by marching audio recordings with its database of bird species.
Founding Academic
Dan Stowell, Senior Research Fellow, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Business Activity
TouchKeys Instruments Limited is a technology for adding touch sensing capability to a piano-style digital keyboard. Measuring the movement of the fingers on the key surfaces greatly expands the expressive range of the keyboard, allowing techniques like vibrato, pitch bends and timbre changes to be played easily and intuitively. Unlike other products in the musical controller market, TouchKeys retains the traditional look and feel of the piano keyboard, making them more accessible to pianists, as well as providing a unique solution for piano tutoring and learning.
Founding Academic
Andrew McPherson, Associate Professor in Digital Media, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Business Activity
Augmented Instruments Limited focuses on commercialising QMUL tech-based digital audio technology that have no natural licensee but could have significant sales as products, either direct to customers or through established distribution channels. The first product Bela is an embedded audio processing platform based on open source.
Founding Academic
Andrew McPherson, Associate Professor in Digital Media, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Business Activity
Vision Semantics Limited provides unique Video Analytics solutions that are differentiated from the competition by being more discriminative and robust in defining meaningful semantic tags for wide scale Video applications. This includes detecting and tagging objects in a CCTV scene; typical and atypical object movement and type information extracted to profile behaviours captured in CCTV and video; automated semantic-tagging of CCTV recordings based on holistic human presence detection and abnormal event / activity recognition.
Founding Academic
Professor Sean Gong, Professor of Visual Computation, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Business Activity
FXive Limited has created sound synthesis software models that allow interactive, real-time generation of a wide range of sounds, and over a hundred presets for specific sounds. The software is time-saving and has performance benefits to professional film production but, with an appropriate user interface, enable amateur video producers, such as those using YouTube, to improve the quality of their product.
Business Activity
BioMin Technologies Limited has developed a range of calcium phospho-silicates for use as additives in remineralising toothpastes and professional products for preventing tooth decay and treating dentine hypersensitivity. The primary activity of the company is the supply of BioMin glass as an additive for toothpaste and professional dental product formulations through developing a global licence holder network for BioMin intellectual property. The company also sells toothpastes directly through distribution channels.
Founding Academic
Robert Hill, Professor of Physical Sciences in relation to Dentistry, Institute of Dentistry – Barts and The London
Business Activity
Chromosol Limited is developing an organic sensitized rare earth optical amplifier technology to enter the £3 bn optical transceiver and optical amplifier markets. The organic optical amplifier material allows fibre optic technology to operate on a much shorter scale, of the order of a metre between racks and servers in datacentres, and on the cm scale between silicon chips in devices.
Founding Academic
William Gillin, Professor of Experimental Physics, School of Physics and Astronomy
Business Activity
LANDR Audio Inc is a software technology company involving automatic music mixing algorithms that mix together individual channels of sound, for example the instruments in a band; effectively replacing the need for a sound engineer and mixing desk. The first product is a hybrid of this for automatic mastering of music.
Founding Academic
Joshua Reiss, Professor of Audio Engineering, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Business Activity
hVIVO is pioneering a human-based clinical trial platform to accelerate drug and vaccine development in respiratory and infectious diseases. Leveraging human disease models in influenza (flu), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human rhinovirus (HRV) and other respiratory indications. The hVIVO platform captures disease in motion, illuminating the entire disease life cycle from healthy to sick and back to health. Based in the UK, market leader hVIVO, has conducted human challenge studies for multiple clients, both large pharmaceutical and biotech and in a range of challenge models using differing virus challenge agents.
hVIVO recruits volunteers in the UK to take part in its clinical human challenge studies using the ‘FluCamp’ brand.
Founding Academic
Professor John Oxford, Professor of Virology, Blizard Institute
Business Activity
Actual Experience plc is an algorithm-based software tool that works in real time to predict the service quality that is experienced by individual users of applications on a computer network. It also launches instant, automatic diagnostic traces to isolate the cause of problems as they occur. The company plans to become the standard measure for user experience of networked applications.
Founding Academic
Professor Jonathan Pitts, Professor of Communication Engineering, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Business Activity
Biomaterials for nerve repair.
Founding Academic
Prof John Priestly, Blizard Institute