The two week Leicester Innovation Festival continues today with the 2022 LeicestershireLive Innovation Awards.
The awards – headline sponsored by Morningside Pharmaceuticals, De Montfort University and the University of Leicester – recognise the best businesses in Leicester and Leicestershire when it comes to innovation in areas such as space, life sciences, education, manufacturing, food and drink.
Previous winners include materials specialists Hive Composites, edible bug company BeoBia and air quality monitoring company Earthsense.
Last year’s innovation in technology award went to Loughborough spin-off company Tzuka, which is developing what founder Tom Jelliffe says are the world’s most durable sports earbuds.
Working with two UK design houses, he has developed an advanced prototype which also works underwater and has its own built-in MP3 player.
He said it had taken four years to get to this stage which, he said, had included lots of work convincing investors of the financial return on an innovative product.
He said: “We’ve almost completed our third funding round.
“We have now raised several hundred thousand pounds and taken our idea to the brink of the market.”
Tzuka’s backers include Wilkinson Future – the family-owned investment fund of the well-known high street retailer.
As the owner of what is currently a small business, Tom said it took some creative thinking to get the product moving.
At one point, with all his savings invested in Tzuka, he said he painted the house of an electronic engineer in return for his professional advice.
The start-up is a member of LU Inc. – Loughborough University’s incubator for accelerating the growth of graduates, academic spinouts and external founders with innovative ideas.
His first funding win came from a university grant for high potential start-ups.
That enabled a specialist team to be formed at the Coventry-based Manufacturing Technology Centre to further develop his idea. But there was still lots of work to be done.
An initial investment round for Tzuka took seven months and the second, which raised almost twice as much, took six weeks.
Encouraging others to persevere with innovative ideas, Tom said it only takes one investor to show an interest for others to follow. Value can then be added between rounds to build the offer for the next injection of funding.
He said: “You have no idea where the investment might come from.
“I had three in-person meetings with one investor, who ended up pulling out, and a single phone call with another who did invest.
“I kept an Excel spreadsheet of progress during the first funding round.
“It was colour-coded – red for a no, orange for a maybe, green for a yes.
“At the end it was red almost the entire way down. But there were two greens and that was all we needed to hit our target.”
