CASE STUDIES

“ICURe enabled me to devote my time to investigate how our research could address the real problems of the industry. I met with potential customers, including major multinationals in Europe, USA and Asia, and attended industry events to gain insight and fine-tune our target markets – it was a huge eye-opener for us.”

“After the Options Roundabout we had three months to develop the business plan to apply for Innovate UK Aid for Start Ups funding. We followed up several leads that were a direct result of the ICURe project. These were large international companies – Qualcomm, Huawei and Altera. We also started targeting for venture capital funding and building the team.”

“The input that we received through ICURe from the many conversations with stakeholders helped us write a business plan, and when we look back at that business plan eight years later, it’s still relevant. The approach we’re taking to the IP business model, the evolution of the roadmap, progressively adding more and more components until we got to the complete system – all of that is described in that business plan. ICURe also led to Innovate UK funding, which led to us getting mentoring from a colleague who had previously built her own telecoms company, from then we got further investment – so it all came from that incredibly useful ICURe programme.”

“We have now built a great technical and commercial team and successfully demoed our unmatched channel coding technology to the industry. In September 2020 we secured £5.8m in Series A funding to grow the team, drive US and global expansion, and develop our technology further as demand for our digital signal processing IP grows among mobile operators, telecoms equipment vendors, satellite operators and connected device manufacturers.”

“When we started, the company was focused on components of a 5G base station, and now we’ve evolved that to be more of a system level solution. It’s a base station made up of several code layers, and we’ve now got the whole of the most fundamental layer, which converts bits into radio and radio into bits – called the physical layer. Now we can licence the code for the whole of the physical layer to our customers.”

“In terms of revenue streams, the first is through a licencing fee, when we first engage with a customer and give them our IP, and they start integrating it, they pay us a licence fee. The secondary revenue stream is through a support fee, typically 10%. Thirdly, with larger potential is royalties, every time a customer buys, sells, or manufactures a device that has our IP inside of it, they pay us a royalty. We are working with some big customers in telecoms, who are deploying the technology. Our IP has applications in a variety of different directions. One direction we are focusing on is satellite application; a 5G base station in a satellite orbiting around the Earth, connected to 5G handsets on the ground.”

“The focus in 2022 was to get all the integration done to get something that works, now the focus is shifting to proving that it works, and adding greater capacity so that it can serve more users with more bandwidth. Looking ahead, we are planning to secure B round investment to enable the business to scale even further.”

Rob Maunder, Founder and CTO
Accelercomm Ltd