Innovators hitch a ride on drive for national security

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"It was much clearer to me there was more money being thrown into homeland security in the US, with a lot less restrictions regarding what you had to do in the longer term," he adds.

Although many countries take homeland security increasingly seriously, the US is the largest and most lucrative market. Some estimates suggest that, since the September 11 2001 attacks, Washington has paid private sector contractors more than $130bn (£66bn).

Symetrica took Mr Davies's advice on board and also hired him as chief executive. Persuading the academics to sign up to his vision proved relatively straightforward, he says, although he was an outsider. "There is a degree to which you have to build a certain amount of trust with them. I never tried to fib them," he says.

Mr Davies, the man who had hoped to spend less time commuting, is now travelling "very frequently" to the US.

His arrival coincided with the first fund-raising round: Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), which backs innovative start-ups, put in almost £100,000 in return for a small stake. This was enough to make a prototype device to show in the US.

However, making inroads in this market is notoriously difficult if you are not a prime contractor with an established route to market and a record of large-scale manufacturing. Symetrica recognised this early on and deliberately targeted prime contractors with which to join forces from the start.

But its first foray into the US did not go to plan. The company teamed up with Corus, the steel group, to bid on a government contract. Against the odds, the consortium was chosen as one of five to develop prototypes in 2005. But this initial success held risks: if it was going to make all the necessary parts, Symetrica realised, it would run into cashflow problems, so the founders stumped up £100,000 of their own money. "It was not an easy decision but we were all confident in each other and what we could achieve," says Mr Davies.

The move paid off in that it helped to convince Close Invoice Finance, which assists small companies through their cashflow problems, to provide some much-needed support. Ultimately, however, Symetrica failed to secure what would have been a much bigger manufacturing contract.

Nevertheless, says Mr Davies, the experience helped the company establish "a degree of credibility across the board". Soon after, Symetrica teamed up with UK engineering conglomerate Smiths - thanks partly to Mr Davies's network of contacts - to bid on another US government contract, this time to provide handheld radiation detectors. The joint bid was successful and, although Symetrica is much the junior partner, the deal could prove trans-formational.

Mr Davies says Symetrica staff do not need security clearance now "but I anticipate this will change", adding: "Some staff already have individual clearances, required for access to certain test facilities."

In the intervening time the company has secured more funds, raising several hundred thousand pounds from a combination including Nesta, Tennants Ventures, SULIS, Quester and the South West Venture Fund, but it remains lossmaking on an annual basis. Break-even point "is when we start getting enough units ordered by the end customer", says Mr Davies.

Funding is one area where Mr Davies thinks the UK could serve start-up companies such as Symetrica better: "As a small UK company we do feel like a poor relation to the types of US companies." A US counterpart to Symetrica, he says, would be eligible for small-business innovation research awards that would pay you to develop your products "100 per cent".

"It's a real issue," says Mr Davies

Innovators hitch a ride on drive for national security

By Sylvia Pfeifer for the Financial Times

Published: February 27 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 27 2008 02:00

It was a gruelling three-hour commute between his home on the edge of the New Forest, Tring in Hertfordshire and Cheltenham that was the spur for Heddwyn Davies to seek a new career. After eight years at a venture capital- backed start-up, the former GEC executive decided it was time to take on something closer to home.

Mr Davies signed up as a mentor at the University of Southampton where he discovered a group of physicists working on cutting-edge technology that increases the sensitivity of sensors such as gamma-ray detectors. The company, Symetrica, had been set up two years before, in 2002, by David Ramsden, formerly head of physics and astronomy at the university. At that point, Symetrica was targeting the medical equipment market but Mr Davies had other ideas.

"I looked at the opportunity of the [medical] market, which was great, but the timescale to get properly certified was so long I thought it would be very difficult to rely on funds the company didn't have," he says.