Episode Transcript
Julia: Simon, firstly, thank you so much for hosting us here today at Paragraf. It's really great to be here, so let's leap right into it. Why is Paragraf the future of microchip technology?
Simon: Well, today in the the world, the lifeblood of everything we do is the microchip, whether it's your mobile communications, whether it's the computers you're using, or even the control of new electronics and EVs. That microchip at the heart of what we do has been around for about 70 years. And since the start of the inception of that device, it's really used one material called silicon. And silicon has been really pushed to its limit. With new technologies like AI and machine learning, we're demanding ever more performance from our devices, and silicon just can't keep up. And the way we can resolve that issue is by bringing new materials into the frame. And graphene is one of those materials. And Paragraf is one of the pioneers of device scale graphene. And even in the early days, when we were looking at graphene, there wasn't really an idea of what we could do with it, other than prove that we could make it in the university. But once we'd made it, it then became apparent that graphene could do so many different things in the world, so many beneficial things for the world. And that's when it came to the forefront that we thought we really should be allowing the world to access this technology. I think that the way you need to think about graphene is not necessarily how current materials work, but what additionality you get from having that new material. Our first product is a magnetic field sensor. That magnetic field sensor is going into cutting edge applications. So we're in quantum computing. We're enabling error correction at very, very low temperatures. EV manufacturers create new battery control technologies, battery manufacturing technologies, and an end of line battery repurposing, which is a real big subject at the moment. But we also put our sensors into new drone technologies, into satellites. Places where you couldn't put standard magnetic field sensors in the past are now possible because of what graphene is offering. So we're opening up emerging markets, but we're also improving technologies that exist today. And the benefit from this, of course, we are reducing carbon footprint simply by sensing how a battery works and enabling the companies to control them better. Or we're helping people in medical applications, putting our magnetic field sensors into MRI to make MRI cheaper and to give higher resolution scans. If the graphene components we're designing right now go into MRI, MRI will be widely available.
It's very, very difficult to get MRI. At the moment, it's very expensive. Having an MRI system in every clinic, for example. It will save lives. If we can integrate graphene, with its hugely improved performance characteristics, into the standard world of electronics manufacturing. You can then use the properties of graphene in everything, and that's the big goal. Get graphene vertically integrated with the semicon industry. So it becomes a standard toolset, it becomes a standard material. We have a great history in the UK of creating new materials, but it's about getting to that commercialization point.
We lead the world in some of our publications from labs, we show what can be done. But moving that from lab to fab, as people call it, is a really difficult journey. Imagine just taking what you have on a small scale from a university lab and then getting it to a point where, for example, you're like intel or TSMC and you're producing billions of devices a day. That's a big gap to get from one point to the other. There's lots of intermediary stages. Can you spin the business out? Can you fund the business? Do you have the facilities? Do you have the talent? Have you got the international trade relations to bring components in and ship things out? So it's a complicated process, but the combination of government, private capital, inbound investment, the UK is a really great place to do that.
Julia: So you're raising capital, where are you deploying it? What are you wanting to do?
Simon: So, for the past couple of years, we've been working with customers, we've developed products, and now we're at the point where those customers have come back to us and said, yeah, we like this. We have written confirmations from customers looking at or asking us to deliver millions of units.
We can't do that currently. However, it's a really nice challenge to have.
Julia: Yes, I was going to say that's a good problem to have.
Simon: The next phase is to get to that point where we can deliver that volume that the customers are demanding. So, growth of a manufacturing facility here in the UK, and it will be the world's first two dimensional materials foundry. And we should think about that. Having graphene come from Manchester, having a lot of different labs in the UK prove what we can do with graphene. We will then have the first foundry for 2D materials in the UK as well. It's a great story.
The whole goal of the new site is purely production, and manufacturing facilities is what we need to do, and that's where the capital comes in to allow us to grow those capabilities. These size tools will be in that site. At the moment, we've got three of them over there. That allows us to get to a scale of millions of devices per month.
Julia: What's your long term vision for how you want to finance yourself and how you want to position yourself as a company?
Simon: We are a capital intensive business, there's no doubt about it. And continual access to capital for growth at speed. And to make sure we maintain that differentiation from the rest of the market, that leading point, we need to make sure we keep investing. I want to grow Paragraf. To be a global corporate, as large as we can possibly get it. So therefore the public markets has to be where we go. Eventually, we may have a couple more rounds of private financing to get to the level where we can prove to the public markets that there's confidence in what we're doing. But I would say in the next handful of years, that's where we will be looking. The only way we can weave at the rate that we need to.
Julia: One of the things we talk about at London Stock Exchange a lot nowadays is how we help the UK create globally consequential companies. Now, I think in terms of your global aspirations and the consequences of the nature of the product that you produce and how transformative it can be, I can't think of anything that puts those two things better together, actually, in terms of what it can do. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for having us here again. It's been fascinating. I think we could talk for hours.
Simon: No problem at all. Thank you for coming along. Appreciate it.
