Winner: elcella

elcella stood out to every one of the panel as a brilliantly exciting product and team which exemplifies everything this award is looking for. An exceptionally strong product with a distinctive offer, elcella is a brilliant women-led team who have developed as leaders and entrepreneurs alongside their business. They have shown an amazing ability to pivot when faced with the need to change their business model and relaunch the business to secure investment. A runaway success which has already sold out and looking to scale up production, this was underpinned by years of professional growth, entrepreneurial learning and team-building, including Dr Madusha Peiris taking the risk of an academic sabbatical to launch the company. The elcella team still find time to give back to their community at QMUL, and were praised for their collegiate and inclusive values. 

Highly Commended

AeroSolar is a spin-out led by Professor Joe Briscoe whose customer solution fit has been found after a long journey, showing the importance of resilience and working hard on your offer and business model. Focusing on the customer has taken an improvement to existing manufacturing processes and developed it into a business that is poised to disrupt the solar industry by making  perovskite cell manufacturing consistent and affordable at scale. Joe's determination has bridged the gap between writing interesting research papers to selling a stand out product to others.

Investable Nature-based Solutions, led by Alex Henshaw and Gemma Harvey with support from David Miller of QMI, has huge potential to translate into a strong consultancy, providing strong offers to some of the biggest players in the water sector in the UK. A great example of humanities and social research commercial applications. 

Shortlisted

PharosAI