Show Notes 200: From Flexible Semiconductors to UK Sovereignty: Why Pragmatic Semiconductor's Vision Matters for Britain's Tech Future

Cambridge Tech Podcast hit a significant milestone this week with its 200th episode, and they marked the occasion by revisiting Pragmatic Semiconductor, the company that featured in their very first show. This time, co-founder and CTO Richard Price joined hosts Faye Holland and James Parton to discuss how the company has evolved from a scrappy six-person startup in a Cambridge shoebox office to a 300-strong powerhouse reshaping the semiconductor industry.

The News Highlights

Before diving into the main interview, the team covered two local funding stories:

• Dogtooth Technologies secured £14 million to scale its autonomous robotic harvesting systems across the UK and international markets. The funding mix included equity investment, government grants from Innovate UK, and venture leasing facilities. As CEO Duncan Robertson noted, this will "enable expansion of commercial deployment, strengthen the technology platform and accelerate adoption of autonomous harvesting systems across the global horticulture sector."

• World Model Data, a Cambridge Science Park startup, raised £7 million in seed funding to emerge from stealth. The company is targeting an audacious goal: generating 1 million hours of training data by year-end, compared to the current largest database of just 40,000 hours. That's a 25x increase.

The Main Event: Pragmatic Semiconductor's Next Chapter

Richard Price's journey is a masterclass in deep tech entrepreneurship. Starting with a chemistry kit that "ruined a number of carpets" as a child, he progressed through organic light-emitting diode research before co-founding Pragmatic in 2011 with Scott White and four other talented founders.

What makes Pragmatic genuinely different isn't just clever engineering, it's the manufacturing philosophy:

Key innovations:

• Thin-film semiconductor layers on flexible substrates (not silicon-based)

• Manufacturing cycle times measured in days, not months

• Lower temperatures, less water, fewer chemicals = genuine sustainability benefits

• Current applications in RFID smart labels for anti-counterfeiting and EU digital product passport compliance

As Richard explained:

"We measure our cycle time in days, whereas typically for a more advanced semiconductor product, you're into many months."

The Sovereignty Question

Pragmatic opened an advanced fabrication facility in Durham, a strategic move that attracted royal patronage and serious investment. But Richard was refreshingly candid about the limitations of "sovereignty":

"It's almost impossible for any one country to have full sovereignty of the end-to-end supply chain because of the global nature of the industry."

However, he's bullish about Britain's role. The UK has genuine strengths in semiconductor design (ARM, Graphcore) and emerging quantum capabilities. Manufacturing companies like Pragmatic can complete the picture, creating "trading collateral with the rest of the world."

What's Next?

The roadmap is ambitious. Generation 3 chips launch this year, followed by a CMOS platform at the end of next year, the first complementary metal oxide semiconductor offering from the company. Beyond that lies the "fab as a service" model, potentially deploying manufacturing facilities globally to compress supply chains and boost resilience.

The Bottom Line

For founders and VCs, Pragmatic's story offers valuable lessons: the importance of finding the right co-founder (Richard and Scott have been together 15 years), the critical role of ecosystem and location, and the patience required to build deep tech companies.

As Richard reflected on 2014, the company's toughest year: "Finding the right investor took a long time... but it's 10 years in the rearview mirror and things always look better when you look back."

This is essential listening for anyone interested in UK semiconductor strategy, manufacturing innovation, or how to build genuinely transformative technology companies.

Subscribe to the Cambridge Tech Podcast to hear the full interview.

AI Transcript

00:00

Speaker 1

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00:35

Speaker 2

Welcome to the Cambridge Tech Podcast, talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Faye Holland and James Parton.

01:00

Faye Holland

I'm Faye.

01:02

James Parton

And I'm James.

01:04

Faye Holland

So, James, how was your week off?

01:07

James Parton

Yeah, very. It was a chilled kind of holiday, very much a beach pool kind of holiday, so didn't do a lot, but lots of sunshine, lots of good food, so nice and relaxed, so. And excited to be back for the 200th episode. Couldn't miss that, could we? It is, I mean, wow. Didn't think we'd get here when we first came up with the idea, but it's amazing to reach that milestone, isn't it, the optimism. Well, I think we should give ourselves a pat on the back, but also it's a good opportunity to thank a few people. Let's thank everyone that's offered their words of encouragement and support for the idea behind the podcast. Our guests, obviously without them there wouldn't be a show.

01:43

James Parton

Our sponsors, past and present, Jamie and Tony at Business Weekly, who obviously help us with the weekly news highlights, and of course, Carl and Joe at Cambridge tv, who make us sound semi coherent. So thank you to everyone for supporting us along the way to 200. We've also teased a few changes coming. So from next week there's actually going to be two episodes per week. So what we're going to do is separate the new section from the long form interview. So the news will now drop on Fridays, which will be in both video and audio versions, and the long form audio interview section will continue to drop on the traditional Tuesday morning slot. So it's all an experiment. Be sure to let us know what you think and we'll see how it goes.

02:28

Faye Holland

Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Because we started by just doing the.

02:30

Faye Holland

Long form and then we started adding the updates in and then the news in and then we're splitting it out. So I think it's just a case of let's just keep trying different formats and see which ones work. So like James says, do let us know what you think.

02:43

James Parton

Yeah, absolutely. How was your week?

02:45

Faye Holland

Normal week, to be honest, James, just very busy. I went to a dinner. I was invited by Manchester Airports Group to go to a business dinner. So I did that last week. It was very hot in King's College, but really interesting evening. A lot of the more traditional businesses were in the room from the east of England. The mood was quite negative. A lot of the talks were very much about the state of the business environment at the moment. I kind of sat there going, oh, we all know it's rubbish, but can we have a bit of resil here as well? So that was quite interesting, but it was. It was great to be with the people from Manchester Airports Group. I was back up in Manchester. It's very hot in Manchester. The sun always shines when I go to Manchester.

03:27

James Parton

Is that official? Is that the new slogan for the city or something?

03:30

Faye Holland

Could be, could be. I'm thinking of also starting an eau de parfum of the different. Like when you get off the train in Manchester. I think I've said it before, you get a really different vibe and I feel we could bottle that. I'm not quite sure how that fits into the overall strategy, but maybe we could have a Cambridge Manchester fragrance as well. Okay, I've gone off on a tangent.

03:51

James Parton

Well, we know what that smell, right? It'd be rhubarb. Rhubarb fragrance, would it?

03:55

Faye Holland

Rhubarb.

03:57

James Parton

Oh, no, it's not rhubarb. You're into his licorice, isn't it? It's licorice, yeah.

04:00

Faye Holland

I mean, you've gone way.

04:02

James Parton

Yeah. What did I think it was? Rhubarb. Maybe something else I hate. I don't know. But yeah, And I'd have to be licorice, not flavoured smells.

04:10

Faye Holland

No, I don't think Manchester's known for licorice.

04:13

Faye Holland

No.

04:14

James Parton

Anyway, okay, we'll scrap that idea then.

04:16

Faye Holland

Yeah, scrap. Just scrap all of that.

04:18

Faye Holland

What else? What else? Yeah, we've been prepping, we've got our big summit, so we've got an innovation summit and an Investor Summit on the 8th of October. So put that in your diaries, people. So just. Yeah, just a normal busy week. Nothing of any huge consequence. Just pretty normal standard week, which is good, considering how flipping hot it's been.

04:37

James Parton

Yeah, no, exactly, yeah. And I guess reflected of that, there's only two pieces of news to share this week. Dog2 Technologies have raised £14 million to scale in the UK and international markets. The funding is a mixture of equity from 24 Haymarket EMV Capital plc acf investors with grants from Innovate UK and a venture leasing facility from Keno Finance. Doppler Technologies was founded to address one of agriculture's most significant challenges to identify ripe fruit and harvest delicate crops at commercial scale. It has developed autonomous robotic harvesting systems that combine advanced computer vision, AI and precision robotics. Their commercial readiness was recently demonstrated with the delivery of its systems to dyson farming.

05:22

James Parton

And CEO Duncan Robertson says the £40 million funding hall will enable it to expand commercial deployment, strengthen its technology platform and accelerate the adoption of autonomous harvesting systems across the global horticulture sector.

05:36

Faye Holland

Dogtooth is such a great story as well of perseverance. They've been going quite a long time. I remember I met them when they were in Barker's Eagle Lab years and years ago, but it's really great. They've stuck to it, they've kept focus. I saw them on the news with Dyson recently, so they're doing really well. So congratulations to the team there. So the second piece of news is from World Model Data. They're a Cambridge Science park startup based in the Bradfield centre. They've raised 7 million in seed funding as they emerge from stealth. The round was led by ionastar, a London based venture capital fund focused on early stage companies operating at the intersection of AI, data and technology.

06:21

Faye Holland

The business was founded by serial entrepreneur Ray Lucas, who is aiming to generate 1 million hours of training data by the end of the year, compared to the largest current database which has just 40,000 hours. So huge target there for them. It's delivered as curated data sets. The next gen technology is said to give customers such as Frontier Labs, physical AI systems and robotic companies a powerful foundation for training models that need to understand dynamics, predict outcomes and make safer decisions in the real world. So well done to World Model Data.

06:59

James Parton

Yeah, fantastic news. Okay, so let's move on today's episode.

07:10

Faye Holland

So our first ever episode was with the lovely Scott White. It seems only right therefore to have our 200th episode revisiting pragmatic Semiconductor. So I think we need to insert some bells and whistles and things there. This time we have co founder and CTO Richard Price with us. So Richard, welcome to Cambridge Tech Podcast.

07:33

Richard Price

It's a privilege to be back. Congratulations on reaching your 200th episode. That's a great milestone. And it was Scott last time and as the other co founder, I'm really happy to be here and talk about the progress since then.

07:45

James Parton

Let's get to know a little bit more about your background. Have you always been into science and technology from a young age? What was your kind of inspiration, your academic path. What were those early years like for you?

07:56

Richard Price

It's always been something that I've been interested in and good at, if you ask my parents. I had a chemistry kit and I used to randomly mix various potions in my bedroom and ruined a number of carpets as a child. And then after studying maths, chemistry and physics, I went on to do chemistry at the University of Durham.

08:18

James Parton

And I believe you've got more than 25 patents, is that right?

08:23

Richard Price

I've got a number of patents. They're a team effort. So that ranges from some of my early career when I was working on organic light emitting diode materials, into what we've done at Pragmatic, and a range of things across devices and processes and various materials.

08:40

James Parton

And you're also a non executive director at the Henry Royce Institute as well, which is the UK's National Institute for Advanced Materials Research. Can you maybe just give us a little insight in terms of how that role came about and the role of the institution?

08:52

Richard Price

So that role came about, really. It was opportunistic. They were looking to refresh the board. So actually the Royce is now 10 years old and as you say, it's a national institute. It's actually a network of materials science institutes and departments across the uk, with a hub in Manchester. And they'd gone through the early phase, which was investment in capability, and really my experience was around translation and representing the SME community. And it was an opportunity to help to shape the second phase of Royce over the last five years. And we're now at a point where we're really leaning into that translation of advanced materials. And actually I'm almost six years into that role, so I'm about to step down at the end of this year.

09:36

James Parton

You're obviously a technologist, you're the cto, but you wear multiple hats. So you're a scientist, an engineer, but you're also a key part of building the actual business side of things. So how have you developed those three different muscles and do they feel like separate jobs or is it all intermingled into one role now?

09:53

Richard Price

It's definitely a mix and I guess it reflects my career journey. So I started after a PhD, which was quite academic, actually, looking at synthesizing organic chemicals and looking at X ray properties of those and the structure. And I think I realized after that period of my life that I wanted to go into something more applied and that led me into working on materials for oeds, which were pretty new back then, obviously in Cambridge. Here we had Cambridge Display technology. But a lot of the activity was going on in Asia and that gave me an insight into commercialization. But from the scientist side I was very much at bench there, but I got an insight into intellectual property and raising funds and so forth. That business didn't work out. I guess another learning point and useful one.

10:47

Richard Price

But it led me to a role in Manchester where I was working in the technology transfer office of the university, working on identifying new opportunities to spin out or license and that taught me a lot of the ways to build up businesses. I knew at that point I wanted to go into startups. That interface really of emerging technology through into commercialization is a passion of mine and it allowed me to engage with early stage investors and start to shape business plans from the business side of things. Primarily things like program management, project management and so forth. And then through meeting Scott, we worked on a business in Manchester.

11:32

Richard Price

Again didn't quite work out, but that led to Pragmatic and we intentionally set Pragmatic up here in Cambridge because of the ecosystem, the talent, the network of investors and we had a relationship with the university and then my role flipped from I guess primarily the kind of business side business management to then taking over operations and the CTO role. Whereas Scott was very complimentary skill set in CEO finance, raising money and so forth. And that kind of learning period and particularly in the very early stages where you're teams of six, you have to wear multiple hats and it's only later when you start to specialize and you have the identity crisis of what am I going to do now that there's people who can do the jobs I was doing much better that comes forward.

12:24

Richard Price

That's where I think a lot of the experience and that kind of muscle that you talked about came from.

12:29

James Parton

Did you ever consider maybe moving into something like venture capital? Because like with your technical background and then that academic experience and then working in the spin out office at Manchester, was that ever an option or was it always you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

12:41

Richard Price

I think definitely things like entrepreneur in residence and so forth I think could be still options for me in the future. Although maybe time's ticking away from that perspective. But yeah, I think that could have been another pathway for me. But as I said, I really enjoy that kind of startup and being in the business and working with people as well.

13:02

Faye Holland

It's always really interesting that a lot of the successful entrepreneurs are the ones that have that multi approach that do lots of different things. So I think you're probably testament of that as well.

13:13

Richard Price

Well, well hopefully. And I guess it also depends how you measure success. So I think looking back, there's a lot to be proud of. We're in Pragmatic, but I think the next five years we're looking to do even more. And for me it's that, I guess striving for the next thing as well, which I'm sometimes struggling with in terms of my own sort of how I recognize success for myself. But I think we've achieved a lot. But the next five years, I think we're going to achieve even more and.

13:40

Faye Holland

We're definitely going to start on picking that. So let's start at the beginning for those that may not know who Pragmatic is and what the story is. So just give us a little bit of that top level introduction about when it was started and what its objective was from the outset.

13:55

Richard Price

So as I alluded to earlier, there was a kind of prior business in Manchester. That's where Scott and I first connected. And that really brought together a bunch of ideas around. Can you put electronics into places where it doesn't currently go or didn't do at that time? And there's a lot of focus on packaging and labels and printed electronics, as it was often known at the time, was a kind of flavor of the month. We saw actually some real commercial opportunities there to start to engage with consumers and to provide value to brands, whether that's in helping to protect their brands from counterfeit and so forth, or engaging more intimately and intelligently with consumers by providing information from packaging that customers could interact with. That was the commercial vision really for setting up Pragmatic.

14:53

Richard Price

We set it up here in Cambridge because we could bring together the people, the sort of background of similar but different businesses and technologies across the university and related SME community and really the proximity to finance as well. It's well connected to London and not particularly far away. And that was an intentional place to start, Pragmatic. But we had to rethink our approach to the technology were going to develop so that we had a little bit of a starting point. We essentially started from scratch. So we put together a very small team here. It was six people, myself and Scott and Catherine Ramsdale, who was one of the early employees at Plastic Logic, and Neil Davis, who was at Cambridge Display Technology, and James Wiltshire, likewise, and Anna Jewelska Chapman, who was at the University of Cambridge in the engineering department.

15:51

Richard Price

And that six people, the founding team. This is late 2010 into early 2011. We were working in a kind of shoebox of an office in the electrical engineering building on the West Campus, that was pretty new at that point, just next to the Cavendish and the Nanoscience Center. And we started accessing facilities within engineering and nanoscience and where that didn't quite meet what we needed. We also had a relationship on the continent with imec, with TNO in Eindhoven, building on those kind of really strong semiconductor research at IMEC and tno, very strong from the kind of Philips legacy in large area electronics. Some of that was around lighting and displays, but a lot of crossovers into the thin film materials that we were looking to develop. And that was really the bits that we brought together at the start about early 2011.

16:51

James Parton

If you can go back to those formative days, this is like a two part question. I think one is related to those early employees. Did they come to you? Did you go to them? How did you inspire them to leave what they were doing and get involved with such an early stage idea? And the second part of that question is related but more external focus. Like when you're creating almost like a new category and you're at the forefront of a new technology area, there's a burden that comes along with that in terms of educating the market, especially educating investors. So how did you tell that story both to attract those early hires, but attract external attention as well.

17:30

Richard Price

So on the early hires it was a combination. So I'd Met Catherine probably 18 months, several years previously and just been struck by how impressive she was. And it just lodged in the back of my mind that this was somebody that could really help us to move the business forward. It coincided with a time in her life that worked for her and how do we convince her to come on board? I guess maybe some naive optimism on my part to sell a vision of we're going on a quest, we don't quite know where we're going, but it'll be interesting and hopefully exciting. And likewise, Neil. I'd had engagement with Neil probably 6 or 12 months prior to that and similarly thought Neil could be a really key pillar from the process development side. James loves the startup, especially in the early bits.

18:24

Richard Price

Day one we gave him a kind of broken laptop and he's like, go and fix that. That's your laptop. And he's the kind of guy that just make stuff work and really you need people like that at the very early stages of startups that are willing to roll the sleeves up and do what's necessary. And Anna, she was at the university and it was a little bit opportunistic. But you could see from engaging with Anna that she's just such a deep thinker to think through problems in the right sort of way. That's also really important that you're grounding the work you're doing in the right way.

18:57

Faye Holland

I love the fact you said it's about going on a quest and you all just mucking in. And it must be very much because you're creating something so fundamentally different and new. But you've got to get the technology working, you've got to protect the assets, you've got to do all of those kinds of things, but you've also got to take everyone else along on the journey. So how did you manage doing all of those things? And was putting thought leadership and educating people part of that overall plan from the start?

19:27

Richard Price

I'll come back to the second piece, I think taking people. So we go back to, I think James asked about customers, which I didn't sort of come on to the second point which I think also links to your question, Faye. So we had customer engagement even at that early stage. It was a combination of prototypes and piloting and mock ups of simple things like Greetings Cars with flashing lights on where were stripping away the kind of hand assembled wiring and going to something that was printed with flexible electronic components on end to show the kind of difference that you can make in the form factor, but also actually the economics of that. And similarly we did a number of things on primary packaging, on things like bottles of alcohol primarily. That's not a reflection on the team that we work with.

20:15

Richard Price

It was just the opportunities that came along. But again showing what would be possible in packaging and trying to bring that alive and that was working with pretty sophisticated sometimes tier one brands there and looking at how we could start to interact with their packaging and help them to convey messaging. And they were willing to go on that journey because they could see that over time there was going to be great value in what we could bring. The kind of thought leadership I think has grown over the years and in the early stages you look at marketing opportunities on basically 0 pounds of marketing budget of ways of showcasing something and getting it into a trade press or something like that and getting what wasn't then called but is probably now called viral marketing on the back of that.

21:10

Richard Price

But as we've grown then we're more intentional around how we do that thought leadership. I think I've grown as well in that I can separate myself as Richard from CTO and what I've got a better understanding and Appreciation of what I need to do as CTO on behalf of the business, to project that thought leadership and to engage and to be an ambassador for the business.

21:36

James Parton

So let's talk about the technology then, because, you know, you see semiconductor in the company name and you might start thinking of silicon chips in cars or phones or computers, but it's obviously not that. So could you describe. Because there's actually no silicon in the product, is that right? Yeah. So can you describe the product and why it's so different maybe than compared to say, traditional electronics or silicon?

21:59

Richard Price

Sure. And I'd probably preface it by saying that it's not yet those chips in cars and other things. But essentially where we started from is how do we simplify the design and the manufacturing of semiconductor chips? So we use thin film materials. So these are precisely grown layers of semiconductors and other parts of a chip which can be deposited very quickly and we build them up on a flexible substrate. Now, in some cases, that flexible form factor is incredibly important when you're trying to bend or flex around certain curvatures or into things like AR VR headsets, for example. In other cases it's less important. But the thin film and the fast process times is really important because it means as an end to end manufacturing cycle time, it's very short.

22:55

Richard Price

So we measure our cycle time in days, whereas typically for a more advanced semiconductor product, you're into many months. It means that we have much less WIP with our fab, but we can also move from design to test much more quickly. There's another benefit of that as well. It's because of the types of processes we use. Again, because we don't use a lot of material and it's thin films, the temperatures are lower than would be typical and we use less water and fewer chemicals. And you put all that together and you end up with something which is actually very sustainable as a manufacturing process. Again, looking at many of the products that we're currently going and applications we're currently going into, that sustainability is really important. You don't want to be adding a significant carbon footprint onto packaged consumer goods as an example.

23:53

James Parton

And to bring that to life, what kind of applications are you currently working on? Because it kind of triggers thoughts about processing power, the compute power, heat produced by the chips, the power consumption, how does that compare to traditional chips that you might envisage? And what kind of applications does this unlock that wouldn't be possible from those more traditional approaches?

24:15

Richard Price

So we have primarily two operating models as a business. So one is what's called an idm. So that's a company that designs, manufactures, markets its own products. That's primarily where we operate at the moment. And then another is a foundry, which an example, albeit much bigger than us at the moment, TSMC in Taiwan. So our IDM business at the moment we're focused primarily on radio frequency identification. So we've developed a number of products in that space which are smartphone readable. So we can put a unique code or ID onto any object. And consumers can interact with smartphones. They can be read at various touch points through the life cycle of a product and you can capture data and aggregate that. So legislation coming through like the digital product passport in Europe.

25:09

Richard Price

It's important to have that end to end transparency at the item level, whether that's in pharmaceutical packaging or other related very high volume consumer packaged goods. We're also adding additional features to those products. Because our process and design cycle is relatively short, we can do derivative products in a very straightforward way. So they will use maybe 90% of a design or reuse 90% of a design. And then we'll tweak part of that for maybe a center interface or a tamper evident product. We're about to launch next week. And that essentially gives you the ability to say, okay, I've opened my bottle of wine and the code's changed and it's irreversible. So I know that if anyone refills that bottle with something that's different, it's already been compromised or other types of products. And we're seeing a huge amount of traction in that area.

26:11

Richard Price

And then as I said, adding in sensing capabilities so temperature, chemical humidity. So that's the kind of base where we are ramping at this point. We then got a technology roadmap which is releasing the next generation of technology at the end of this year. That's a build on Our current generation 3More optimized and improved performance, we measure in a very similar way to you would for a silicon chip. So it's power performance area and cost and generation on generation. We're doing improvements on those. And at the end of next year we move into an even bigger opportunity. It'll be our first CMOS platform. So for those listeners that aren't sort of aware of CMOs, it's essentially been the driving force of the silicon industry for more than 30 years. It stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor.

27:07

Richard Price

You have two opposing types of semiconductors and they're in balance. And it allows you to be really power efficient when you design things. So that essentially when the Product's not in use, it's not consuming power. And you're only consuming power when you're doing some kind of compute, functional switching. So that moves us much more towards mainstream design. It will unlock much more of the foundry side of the business. And we got a roadmap beyond that, where we continue to evolve the performance and open up more and more applications in a similar way that Moore's Law in silicon has driven that industry for best part of 50 years. We have a roadmap, but on a much faster time frame than was done in silicon.

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28:42

Faye Holland

I mean, I think you've given some great examples there and really brought to life how pervasive the Flexic can be. I guess the thing that's sitting in my mind at the moment is the cost side of things to other equivalents. Everyone wants everything to be cheaper, more efficient and all of those types of things. What's that model look like? How competitive is it, what you're offering?

29:05

Richard Price

In some applications, cost is incredibly important. So when you're putting smart labels onto billions and eventually trillions of objects, then that becomes really important. And we've got a very competitive offering in that space. But there's much broader benefits as well that we see. In a number of cases, it's the form factor that's really important, thinness, flexibility, and also what that brings. So we've seen a new area of applications emerge over the last 12 months, something we call Flexic interconnects. And this intersects with some of themes in broader electronics and the semiconductor space around things called 3D packaging and chiplets, where you have multiple components that are perhaps manufactured on different technologies and they come together within a single system. And that system is assembled on a substrate. Often it's a printed circuit board or a Flex pcb.

30:06

Richard Price

And we're seeing more and more traction there. And what we can deliver by allowing miniaturization of some of those things. So take for example, a wearable device like a continuous glucose monitor, the future generations of those we can enable to be thinner, more comfortable, smaller, reduce the number of components that are needed on that actually drive the total cost the bomb cost of that down as well. And that's important because you can then democratize that so it can become available to many more people, not just in the western world for the kind of worried well, or the people that genuinely need that, but across the developing world where maybe the healthcare systems are less sophisticated, there's less testing, but you can give that power to the individual to interact as well.

30:55

Richard Price

So we see quite a lot of applications in that space, not just in healthcare, also in other kind of wearable devices as well. And we're adding in more functionality over time. So it's not just a replacement for a printed circuit board, but we can put in capacitors, resistors, active circuitry, building on our core technology that take away some of that heavy lifting from maybe a more sophisticated high end silicon chip so you can optimize the whole system in a better way.

31:29

James Parton

And you touched on the sustainability side of the manufacturing process. What about the kind of implications as electronics are added to product? You mentioned packaging and stuff like that, maybe clothing, those kinds of things as they're discarded. What are the implications on the kind of recycling process for those garments having those electronics included inside them? Is that a conversation you're having with the industry generally?

31:52

Richard Price

A really important conversation as well. So there's the. There are different ways in which those things might occur. So in garments it's typically within the kind of wash label, sometimes that's separated after purchase, but it's not always. So we have. And then eventually it's possible to make things compostable. But there's a kind of balance there of durability and composability. We've done a lot of work on different recycling processes and outcomes. So mechanical recyclability, we got good compatibility there. We've got a nice actually picture of a chemical recycling process. So you take a label with one of our chips on it on an. In this case it's an aluminium antenna or aerial to make the RFID tag. And you can chemically reclaim the polymer materials so they can be reprocessed.

32:47

Richard Price

And you get left with a coil of aluminum with the chip stuck on it as like the kind of waste products. And then it's probably not economically viable to be recycling that, but it's an easier separation at that point through some kind of filtration process.

33:01

Faye Holland

And you think that's something the people you're working with. So the Avery Denisons, they're all conscious about their net zero footprint as well, aren't they?

33:11

Richard Price

Yeah, I mean ESG with many of Our discussions is not just ticking boxes. It's very much central to the planning of what we're doing over the next several years for us and with our customers. We've got internal goals, committed to continuing to reduce the footprint of our manufacturing, but also enabling our customers to do that as well. So for example, where it makes sense, moving from polymer based labels onto paper and then that starts to become compostable for some of those products as well.

33:45

Faye Holland

Okay, I just mentioned Avery Denison and ARM there. So I want to move us on to a little bit more of the broader market conversations if I can. So ARM is a shareholder, Avery Denison is a customer and a strategic investor to you. So they're obviously very conscious decisions. The growth and partnership as well. What does that actually mean to you having that level of partner involved? Has it made it easier to develop and deploy? There been any challenges associated with that?

34:17

Richard Price

So they've both been really pivotal to the last 10 years in I guess similar but different ways. We worked for many years with ARM research and in the early years they just transformed the way we thought about design. We were a very small team, probably had two designers in the company. We were doing manual layout of circuits and the complexity we had at that point was single transistors, complexity of circuits. And they helped us to think through the methodology of actually how we set up our design flow, putting together process design kits and codifying that in the right way, putting in design rules and so forth. That collaboration was really key, I'd say, going back years. And then over time we changed the nature of that into what were targeting. So we had a stretch goal of could we implement Cortex M0, arm core.

35:20

Richard Price

And it took us a while, but we did get there. And that was published in a pretty prestigious journal, Nature. And a number of the people from ARM have since joined Pragmatic and continued a lot of that work internally with Avery Denison. They've helped in a number of ways. So defining the use cases, the product specifications so we could get that kind of product market fit in appropriate shape. We've worked collaboratively and with some of their broader ecosystem on what's called the assembly process. So this is the process that takes the flexible chips that we make and it connects those onto eventually the smart label. So that involves using certain types of adhesives that are conductive adhesives. It involves handling a flexible chip.

36:14

Richard Price

So this is a tens of microns thickness compared to a silicon chip, which is typically hundreds of microns, so fractions of a millimeter compared to Hundreds of a millimeter in scale. And it requires different approaches to handle that for success. So we've worked hand in glove with them for several years to get that process so it's fit for high volume manufacturing, which is where we are today.

36:44

James Parton

And when you think about the kind of market opportunity, I think you put out a predictions piece at the beginning of the year where you talked about this shift to real time data on individual items. So for decision makers in sectors like retail, logistics, healthcare, etc. What should they be thinking about to ensure that they're positioned for that transition?

37:03

Richard Price

So there's a number of ways that can play out. On the simplest level, it's possible to connect let's say item level information with maybe ambient information from the environment. So that might be again things like temperature, humidity, and if you have some perishable goods you can, okay, we're going to refresh the pricing and make sure that the oldest goods are sold first. Try and drive down things like food wastage. You can have dynamic price labels. So that's one of the opportunities. Looking at electronic shelf labels that are updatable, linked to that on the item level as well, looking at simple decision making. So can you add machine learning at the item level, operating at what we sometimes call beyond the edge or extreme edge.

37:57

Richard Price

We can hard code some of the kind of weights there from a training set so you can really simplify the design that's needed onto the product level. And again, you're engaging with the environment. So that could be agriculture, where you're trying to optimize at the plant level, yields from a crop. So if you imagine like a polytunnel of tomato plants or something like that, you can gather information about when it's best to try and deploy irrigation or things like that and optimize from that perspective and so on, where you're starting to connect data that you're gathering maybe at the edge or device level with simple decision making beyond that at the item level. And you can move that again into the home environment as well with the connected home.

38:51

James Parton

And I guess my supplementary question there is trying to understand the kind of maturity of the market. Are you finding that the customers or potential customers are quite sophisticated in their specification of their need? Or is it still more of an evangelizing of the possibilities of the technology you offer into the customer? Is it a push or a pull kind of situation?

39:12

Richard Price

Right now the deployment into identification sends locate is pretty well established. So you can make business cases around, for example, you get much greater inventory visibility. So Reduce the. Reduce your losses through that and drive efficiencies. I think the next wave beyond that is going to intersect with what we're seeing around deployment of AI. And I think we're a little immature at the total system level to understand all the benefits that can derive that. But that's where we'll go next is that kind of extreme edge where you have simple decision making at the item level. You've got the layers of the stack in place, but you're not pushing data further up the stack than you need to. But it's. We're not there yet. This kind of ambient I o the new name for the Internet of things or the Internet of everything.

40:09

Richard Price

And there are some things there around what are the right communications protocols. So all the systems communicate with each other and they're interoperable. But that's where I see the next three to five years that we'll get to as we get more and more data and connectivity with deployment of AI.

40:27

Faye Holland

That's great, Richard, because you said earlier on about, you know what the next five years grow. So I think you're starting to give a little bit of a tease of some of the things that you're going to be focused on. So I want to move on and talk about Durham, but before I do, I have a niggle that I'm just going to throw out there. So in my new role, I'm the Cambridge Manchester Partnership director. You met in Manchester, the original concept Manchester, then you moved to Cambridge. I know you've gone to Durham. What about going back to Manchester? Because that had really helped me and I know James always says that the world doesn't revolve around me and that my husband says the same, but I just like to check whether there's any opportunity there.

41:06

Richard Price

So I'll let you into a couple of secrets. So, first of all, I live in Manchester, so that's home. It has been for the past 20 years. And actually what's been fantastic in living in Manchester, just seeing the transformation of the city and the confidence actually that Manchester has when you go there, it's a great place to live. It's less great when you're working in Cambridge and Durham from a perspective. But I've made it work and as my family were pretty young when we started Pragmatic, that was the decision that we made. So that Manchester, Cambridge corridor or connection has always been pretty strong. And I think there are opportunities to build out for Pragmatic there potentially over time as well. We've actually got a number of Other people who are based in Manchester and work between the two. And then Durham was.

41:58

Richard Price

Well, actually I studied in Durham so that isn't why we're based there, but I did my degree and my PhD there. I love the city, it's a hidden gem and if you get a chance and you've not been there just to walk around the palace green where the cathedral and the castle are in the evening. Pretty inspirational as a place to be. Cambridge is great. Has a place in my heart as well actually. My wife's from Cambridgeshire and her family have farmed here for hundreds of years, so there's sort of pretty deep roots here as a family too. But Durham, Manchester, Cambridge, that's a pretty strong triangle for me, but probably not the one that's most common or most talked about.

42:39

Faye Holland

Well, thank you for your insights there and I'm definitely going to be tapping you up, I just know it. No, we've connected. Just going back to Durham though. I mean, what an achievement to have such a big program, project fabrication line up there, Real investment. You obviously had considerable support to be able to do that. Princess Royal opened it, which is again fantastic. Lots of big ticks there. But I think the key one for me is about sovereignty and the fact that we've got this, the ability to keep some of our semiconductor supply chain in the uk. How important do you actually think that is?

43:19

Richard Price

A few things I'd say in that. So one is that it's almost impossible or it is impossible for any one country to have full sovereignty, even China, of the end to end supply chain because of the global nature of the industry, whether that's from the design tools, the chemicals, the equipment or the fabs. It's important therefore that in the UK we have significant value to offer the rest of the world as well as making sure that we're partnering with right size like minded countries around the world as well. We have an opportunity at Pragmatic actually to go much further than we ever thought.

44:02

Richard Price

So if I think back 15 years ago to what were thinking about, it was very simple electronics going on to labels and packaging and we're now talking about over the next five years and we can potentially go quicker with the right kind of investment starting to really overlap with some of the capabilities of admittedly older generations of silicon, but ones that still have significant value and presence in the marketplace much beyond what were thinking about. And I think having that in the UK and that manufacturing capability, it can help in some areas of resilience, but it also gives us the elevation of what we're offering to the rest of the world.

44:46

Richard Price

In semiconductors we've got obvious strengths in design companies like ARM and Graphcore and we've got companies like Fractal that are coming through and huge strengths in quantum these build off semiconductors as well. We need to build out more in the manufacturing space. Companies like ourselves and the other businesses that exist here all around the uk, not just in Britain, but also into Northern Ireland, which is often forgotten as well. And strength in areas like South Wales. We can build these and grow them from the base they have and then we've got trading collateral with the rest of the world and the ability to partner, as I say, with right size and like minded economies around the world as well.

45:35

James Parton

And am I right in thinking that you're offering this as almost like a fab as a service so it's actually open to other companies to use? And if that's correct, do you then envisage this kind of creating like an ecosystem of UK semiconductor companies?

45:50

Richard Price

So the FAB as a service, actually the kind of third operating model which I didn't talk about said the Foundry is the second one. That's essentially where we provide a process design kit. Any chip designer around the world can take that. It's standard software design tools, EDA tools that they can use and we will manufacture those chips for them. The FAB as a service is actually one step further. So this is where we can deploy a factory anywhere around the world. So we can put that onto a customer premises where it makes sense and we'll operate that on their behalf to manufacture chips due to their specification that's available today.

46:36

James Parton

Or is that a roadmap kind of thing?

46:37

Richard Price

That's a roadmap thing, yeah. So we've been focusing for the last several years on really bringing up high volume manufacturing at our Durham site. We're going to continue our investment in Durham. It's a real hub for our global presence. Very important for us that we have a UK hub and that's what we're committed to. But as we continue to build, it will make sense to regionalize some of the production. Resilience being one reason, but also if you imagine we're selling tens of billions of volumes into certain territories, then we can localize that production and compress the supply chains so they're much nearer to each other.

47:18

Faye Holland

So we're coming to the end of the interview, Richard, so we're going to go for a quick fire round with you. Are you ready for this? These are a selection of very Random questions, but I expect quite insightful. So the first one is you've raised $390 million. You built this company of 300 plus people, you've opened the fab. But it's not easy building a deep tech company in the uk. What has been the hardest moment for you?

47:47

Richard Price

Probably the hardest moment was 2014. So just in the lead up before we got the first venture funding from Cambridge Innovation Capital and arm, who co led that just running the business there where were at the point where we knew we could start to move into low volume pilot scale. We still only had about 12 employees at that point, but were operating within the CPI facility in the northeast, which is in Sedgefield, it's quite close to Durham. And just keeping the business running and trying to manage everything through cash flow and so forth to get to that point. Because first of all finding the right investor took a long time and I'd say that was really important to find the right investor and CIC were definitely the right investor for us.

48:41

Richard Price

And then it always takes longer than everyone wants and expects to get through the back end of that. So that was probably the most stressful year of my life if I was to sort of reflect back. But it's 10 years in the rearview mirror and things always look better when you look back than when you live through them.

48:56

Faye Holland

Indeed.

48:57

James Parton

This one might be an interesting question, but you've been with Scott as co founders for 15 years. That's a long time. How have you, how have you managed to maintain that relationship?

49:08

Richard Price

I guess it started on the basis of kind of mutual respect and we've got complimentary skills. We're both pretty calm and pretty resilient as well. I mean you already know that Scott runs ultras and he's gone from running sort of weekend ultras to kind of week long events and stuff. So yeah, he's incredible at just being to get through tasks and just keep going. That's inspirational as well as his ability to think strategically and raise money and so forth. And similarly, I'm not quite in the same league, but I do marathon running. That's been something that's come to me over the last 10 years and it helps me to decompress and actually I like the process of it. It's a 16, 18 week block and you've got to be pretty disciplined about it with a go in mind.

49:58

Richard Price

So those kind of things have kept that going.

50:01

Faye Holland

Have you held your meetings whilst running marathons?

50:05

Richard Price

No, no, thankfully, no idea. I want to think about, we rarely run together. It's probably because mine are quite short jogs compared to Scott's training runs.

50:15

James Parton

How far is it from Cambridge to Manchester? Is it O'?

50:17

Faye Holland

Brumb?

50:17

Richard Price

It's about 200 miles there.

50:19

Faye Holland

That's quite a long.

50:20

James Parton

Yeah, that's quite a way.

50:22

Faye Holland

Okay, next question then. You've talked a lot about the Cambridge innovation ecosystem already. I'm not going to go through that again. But actually what I wanted to ask you was going more onto your societal responsibility. What does Pragmatic do to give back to the Cambridge, Manchester, Durham communities? Is there anything you can share there?

50:44

Richard Price

So we have an equity network within Pragmatic, so that's both internal and external focus. We have regular events for colleagues. In fact, there's a picnic happening today at lunchtime. We do awareness around various health issues, so we have men's health and women's health. We encourage employees to be open and candid and hope we provide a safe space for that to happen. And then also engaging outside. We might sponsor, for example, one of our employees, junior football teams, as an example. We do the Chariots of Fire race each year here in Cambridge, usually get a couple of teams into that. We encourage volunteering, whether that's donating blood or other events that colleagues want to do. So there's more that we could always do and I think that's part of the ambition as we build over the next several years.

51:40

Richard Price

But I think we're off to a pretty good start and I have to shout out to my colleagues in our people team and our ESG committee and the stakeholders across the business that we bring into those.

51:52

James Parton

Just going back to your introduction and the time you spent at Manchester University, I'd just be really curious about your view or your scorecard of UK universities and their role in entrepreneurship and creating companies. What's your take on. On the current state of play and what more needs to be done to maintain kind of UK leadership role globally?

52:14

Richard Price

So my reflection would be there's been a big improvement since I was doing that, I guess, nearly 20 years ago. I don't think there's ever been more spin outs created than there are now and currently. So that's positive in terms of filling the top of the funnel. And we're actually doing quite a lot of work at Royce in this at the moment, looking at what we call two valleys of death. So it's a known kind of scale up one which hopefully is being addressed through some of the Mansion House accords. And essentially that's a capital problem getting More capital and more UK capital deployed into scale up. The other one is the kind of seed and the surrounding ecosystem of that.

52:58

Richard Price

So how do you get companies the right advice, how do you connect them to think about the commercial use cases and to connect with investors and so forth and build those cases together. So I'd say we're doing better. And you can see again, just if you look quantum, the kind of amounts of money going to series A, B and C just in the last month is pretty incredible. There are pockets, I think, where that's obviously stronger than others. And the Golden Triangle is, I think, doing very well. And outside of that, Northern Gritstone is pioneering outreach more into places like Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and up into the Northwest as well. You only have to look at the numbers though of the investments to see there's still a big disparity by proportion of where the money's going.

53:50

Richard Price

So I think there's more to be done there to actually leverage what we're developing from the science and technology basis. I've just taken a role actually on the EPS Science Engineering Technology Board where that's earlier in the pipe of what we're doing. But even there's greater awareness now of how that then connects through to economic growth, industrial strategy and so forth. For parts of that early stage research, not all of it, but certainly for.

54:22

Faye Holland

Parts of it's vital that we do address that because if we're going to be innovation led, we're going to go for innovation led economic growth, then we need to be addressing some of those shortfalls, don't we?

54:35

Richard Price

Absolutely. And it's also where we start to pull through talent as well, where you can show people that there are opportunities, then I think people will follow. And it won't necessarily be the case that graduates will be attracted into the city or into jobs in tech, but actually deep tech. If you can show that there are jobs there that are going to flow through into businesses of the future that have substantive presence and scale here in the uk, I think that's going to be really attractive for young people today looking at their choices.

55:13

Faye Holland

Brilliant. I mean, it's been great talking with you, Richard. Thank you so much for coming in and joining us for the 200th episode. And we'll just get you booked in for the four hundreds.

55:23

Richard Price

That sounds good.

55:23

Faye Holland

That'll be almost five years. So you'll have all those updates as well by then.

55:27

Richard Price

Absolutely. No, it's been a pleasure and again, congratulations on your 200th episode.

55:32

Faye Holland

Thank you.

55:38

Speaker 2

Today's show was produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV and supported by our media partner Business Weekly. The Cambridge Tech Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms and on cambridgetechpodcast.com if you've enjoyed this podcast, please give it a five star review. It'll really help others discover the show.

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