ACES Winners: Where are they now?

The gifted winners of the ACES awards in 2008 and 2009 continue racking up scientific achievements, growing sales, raising capital and finding commercial partners.

This year the international business school INSEAD in Fontainebleau will launch a study of the growing pool of 45 university spinouts named as ACES finalists, to better understand the success factors for high-growth science based entrepreneurship in Europe, and to understand how these promising start-ups develop in coming years.

ScienceBusiness will publish the results of INSEAD’s research. The study will be carried out by INSEAD’s Maag International Centre for Entrepreneurship.

For now, here is a snapshot of some of the individual milestones achieved by ACES alumni.

Class of 2008

Only a year after his win in the chemistry and materials category in the inaugural ACES competition in 2008, Andrew Lynn sold his Orthomimetics Ltd. to TiGenix of Leuven, Belgium for €16 million euros in stock. Orthomimetics, the first spin-out from a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specialised in the biomaterials used for cartilage-and bone rebuilding.

In making the acquisition, TiGenix said that it hoped Orthomimetics would help it take a leading role in regenerative medicine.

Lynn is the co-inventor of ChondroMimetic, an off-the-shelf, absorbable implant for the minimally invasive repair of small osteochondral defects – those in the cartilage and bone that might be the result of sports injuries, surgery or other trauma. The product received the CE Mark approval in 2009 (allowing free movement of products within the European Union) and was granted a US patent in 2010. “We expect further geographical expansion of ChondroMimetic’s intellectual property protection in the near future,” said Lynn, who is now chief business officer at TiGenix.

Even before he won the 2008 Energy/Environmental award, Adel Sharif, a professor at the University of Surrey, had merged the university’s venture, Surrey Aquatechnology, into Modern Water, a publicly-traded company. Its manipulated osmosis desalination technology subsequently won two patents, in 2010 and in 2011.

Other alumni from the awards class of 2008 include Gandert Van Raemdonck and Hjalmar

Van Raemdonck, whose company, Ephicas, makes aerodynamic side skirts for truck trailers that reduce fuel consumption and thus CO2 emissions. The two brothers won in the “Fast Start” category for individuals who have created a promising but still unproven spin-out based on ideas developed at European universities, in their case, the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the TU Delft. In October 2009, Ephicas won €100,000 in the finals of the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge, a worldwide competition that attracted 313 detailed proposals to reduce CO2 emissions.

Class of 2009

For Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, whose company Novacem is a spin-out from Imperial College London, winning the Energy/Environment award in 2009 was just the beginning. The company has subsequently been recognized as a technology pioneer by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the World Economic Forum. No wonder. Novacem’s product is cement with a carbon negative footprint.

Though the cement industry currently produces five per cent of the world’s industrial output of CO2, Novacem’s process for making cement absorbs more carbon dioxide than it emits. That technology has attracted £2.5 million in funding from such investors as the London Technology Fund, Imperial Innovations, the Royal Society Enterprise Fund and most recently construction group Laing O’Rourke.

In 2010, giant building materials maker Lafarge became the first subscriber to Novacem’s Green Cement Bond, which aims to engage major cement makers in accelerating the development and commercialisation of Novacem’s technology. Companies that subscribe to the bond for a nominal £1 million (through a combination of non-refundable engineering fees and convertible loan notes) are likely to participate in Novacem’s next funding round.

Jochen Mundinger, an ACES runner-up in 2009, is the chairman of routeRank, a travel-planning search engine that promises “the fastest and cheapest way from A to B.” By integrating rail, road, and air connections, a single search can find and rank the best possible travel routes. Users can then sort them according to price, travel time, and even CO2 emissions.

Based in the science park of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, the company also offers customized software to corporate customers and organizations, including the Swiss government, Nokia Green Explorer, and Travel Helper, which was developed for the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The MIT Technology Review selected Mundinger as one of the world’s top innovators under age 35 in 2010. That same year, it included Novacem among its Top 10 emerging technologies that will change the way we live and do business. The journal also recognized Orthomimetics’ Andrew Lynn as a top young innovator in 2009.  But all these were ACES winners first.