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Business and innovation

Business and innovation

Making their mark

14 May 2020

Martin Booth, Patrick Salter and Andrew Rimmer describe how fundamental research on adaptive optics led them to start a company based on creating microscopic marks inside diamonds and other transparent materials

Tools that were originally designed to enhance optical microscopy proved key to developing Opsydia's laser-etching system.
Technology transfer Tools that were originally designed to enhance optical microscopy proved key to developing Opsydia's laser-etching system. (Courtesy: Opsydia)

Your company, Opsydia, started out as a research project at the University of Oxford. What did that project involve?

Martin Booth, co-founder and director: Our fundamental interests were in the development of adaptive optical systems. We’d originally used this technology on microscopes to correct for aberrations, but the same techniques also have applications in laser fabrication, because when you focus a laser beam inside a material you get aberrations there as well. We’d been doing a lot of work on transparent materials such as glass and crystals, and we realized that diamond was another crystal we could work in. 

After that, we found that when you use short-pulse lasers to focus into diamond, you can convert some of that diamond into a graphite-like substance. Initially, we used this to demonstrate why we needed aberration corrections – we created graphite-like structures with and without corrections to illustrate the benefits of correcting for aberration. But once we’d done that, we went looking for other applications, and we found that if you can create graphite-like structures inside diamond, which is an insulator, you can make electrical circuits. We also realized that you could use this same technology to create colour centres inside the diamond, which could have applications in sensing or be used as light sources or single-photon emitters.

The third thing we realized is that if we could write very small visible features inside industrially produced diamond crystals, we could also do it inside gemstones. That led us to talk to diamond producers, and we discovered that we had a unique and valuable capability: we could make marks inside a diamond, not just on the surface. Using lasers to mark the surface of diamonds is quite commonplace, but these marks can be polished off and changed relatively easily, whereas if you can create marks deep inside the diamond, it becomes nearly impossible to remove them. So this work we’d been doing at the fundamental end of optics eventually led to a practical application in industry, and that’s why it’s attracted attention.

Patrick Salter, co-founder and director: I was the one in the lab twisting the knobs, trying to make it all work, and from my perspective the project was all about taking a technology that was being used reasonably widely for bioimaging in optical microscopes and transferring it into laser processing. Initially, as Martin said, it was just an interesting demo, but as we developed our adaptive optics and the associated algorithms, we started collaborating with people at CERN and Diamond Light Source who were interested in building radiation detectors inside synthetic diamond wafers. We also collaborated with quantum physicists at the University of Oxford and the University of Warwick who were trying to make scalable sources of quantum bits embedded inside diamond.

(left to right) Opsydia chair Alastair Smith, Martin Booth, Andrew Rimmer, Patrick Salter, and systems engineer Lewis Fish.

At what point did these ideas coalesce into a company?

MB: The turning point was really when the diamond firm De Beers, which is now a major customer, asked us to do demonstrations for them. That made it apparent that there was a commercial opportunity. Universities are very good at doing research, but they’re not well equipped for commercial operations, so for the project to continue, we knew we had to set up a company.

Andrew Rimmer, chief executive: After those initial engagements with De Beers, we started taking a process that had been developed and refined in a university lab and translating it into a process that would work in a high-volume industrial manufacturing environment. From there, we put together a package that we could pitch to investors and gain the seed investment we needed.

Going to pitch was a bit like Dragon’s Den, but without the cameras or theatricals. The two investors that agreed to put in money very quickly were Oxford Sciences Innovation, which has a fund that supports many Oxford spin-outs, and Parkwalk Advisors, which is a London-based fund. Between them, they provided us with £1.9m to set up the company, recruit a team and undertake the initial development projects.

What was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome?

PS: On the technical side, it was the massive speed-up needed to make the laser-marking process commercially viable. When we started the company, we had a process that worked in a university lab and produced a mark that the customer was happy with, but it took 10 or 20 minutes to mark each individual stone. By bringing together a team of skilled engineers with different backgrounds and different expertise, we were able to reduce that by an order of magnitude.

AR: Commercially, the biggest challenge was getting that speed up accomplished quickly enough. In contrast to a lot of start-ups, we had our first customer – a De Beers spin-out called Lightbox Jewelry – lined up right away. That was great, but it also meant we had to develop our product very quickly.

Within a year of starting the company in 2017, we had a prototype that could mark a stone in about one minute, with all the safety and other features needed for a semi-skilled operator to use it. Since then, we’ve shipped machines that can mark 100 000 stones per year, and we’ve been talking to customers about other applications that might require more than double that. To go from a university lab to a fully industrialized machine that can be shipped overseas, commissioned and made operational, all within about 24 months, needed a lot of focus from the team.

Members of the Opsydia team with Oxford West MP Layla Moran (centre) and Institute of Physics (IOP) vice-president for business James McKenzie (right).

What’s next for Opsydia?

AR: The first work we were doing in the diamond gemstone industry was about being able to produce the right mark – a hallmark, if you like – for Lightbox Jewelry inside their laboratory-grown diamonds. It provides a visual identification of the stones as being laboratory grown, while at the same time assuring consumers that this product has been manufactured to high standards by a world leader in this field. But the diamond industry is made up of many different operations, including the miners and producers, manufacturers who cut and polish, grading laboratories, and of course the jewellers who produce the final piece of jewellery.

Around 10 million stones per year receive a grading certificate, and the current verification process relies on linking that certificate to a serial number that’s been laser etched on the edge of each stone. But surface etching is not secure: it can be counterfeited, it can be removed. And in the diamond industry, that matters. People want to know that the stone they’re buying is what it says it is, and increasingly they also care about its provenance – where it was produced, where it was mined, the whole journey. So if we can be the glue that links a stone’s identity to the story behind it, we think demand for our product is going to increase. With that in mind, we have done trials on gem materials other than diamond – rubies, emeralds, sapphires, jadite.

But if we step away from the gemstone industry, one of the other patents we’ve licensed from the university and Martin and Patrick’s team is about using adaptive optics to control a laser at very high speed to simultaneously write multiple features into plastics and polymers. This enables us to write security features and holograms inside plastic as opposed to on the surface. Finally, as Martin and Patrick alluded, there are applications in sensing. Being able to write circuits inside diamond opens up the possibility of using diamond rather than traditional silicon semiconductors as a substrate for electronics. That work is very much still in the research stage, but we certainly see future applications that could be very important.

Opsydia’s technology makes it possible to etch microscopic features like this array of dots inside a diamond gemstone.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started?

PS: From an academic perspective, I didn’t necessarily know quite how much work it would be on an ongoing basis. I knew there would be a big flurry of activity when the company formed, but I thought it might drop off a bit after that, whereas in fact it’s been fairly consistent. Also, there’s sometimes a feeling within academia that industrial work will get a bit dull relative to academic research, particularly after the company’s been running for a short period. But I don’t think that’s the case. There are always interesting new challenges arising and difficult problems to solve.

MB: Often, when people ask questions like this, what they’re actually saying is, “What did you do wrong, and what should I do better?” But I can’t answer the question in that way. I have previous experience of spin-outs, and I was surprised at how smoothly this one went. I think the reason is that we already had a big customer ready and waiting to go. That makes a huge difference. So I would say that my experience with Opsydia confirmed what I’d already suspected, which is that the optimum time to set up a company is when you’re pretty certain there are customers out there who want your product.

Pay attention to your intellectual property and think about it in a commercial sense rather than a scientific sense

PS: Another important thing was getting commercial expertise early on. You see a lot of spin-out companies where a PhD student or postdoc tries to run the company despite not having any previous commercial experience, but we got someone with a lot of commercial experience – Andrew – right at the beginning. That made everything much, much easier.

MB: We also had help from our chair, Alastair Smith. So before we even went to speak to investors, we had two people with significant commercial experience on board. That was incredibly valuable.

AR: I hadn’t started a company before, but I’d been involved in early-stage companies in engineering, so I’d seen the challenges and rewards. But the other thing I’d like to mention is the set-up around the University of Oxford. They have an organization called Oxford University Innovation that helps with licensing and spinning out technologies into new companies, but they’ve also got connections to investors who are used to investing in those spin-outs, as well as lawyers and accountants who deal with the legal processes and agreements many, many times a year. It was hugely beneficial to have that sort of support.

Any advice for people thinking of starting their own company in optics or photonics?

AR: Be very sure about the market demand for your product. Can you make it at a price where it’s going to be accepted? What are the potential barriers you’re going to have to overcome to get into that market? Because you can have the best idea, and you can have big demand for it, but if there’s some fundamental barrier – regulatory hurdles or something like that – it’s so, so important that you know about it. Those barriers are going to drive your behaviour, the priorities for your team, and the timescales for getting to market – and therefore how much money you need to raise.

PS: Pay attention to your intellectual property and think about it in a commercial sense rather than a scientific sense. You often look at a patent and think, scientifically, that’s not very good. But commercially, it can still be incredibly valuable, so you shouldn’t discount it.

MB: Following on from that, don’t assume that your best scientific idea is going to be your best commercial idea. In fact, it’s highly unlikely that those two things correlate.

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