Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 1 April 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 1 April 2025.
Members present: Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; George Freeman; Dr Allison Gardner; Kit Malthouse; Jon Pearce; Steve Race; Adam Thompson.
Question 12
Witness
I: Dan Cathie, CEO, Silveray.
Witness: Dan Cathie.
Q12 Chair: Welcome to the Select Committee for Science, Innovation and Technology and our innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. To inform our work, each member of the Committee takes turns to select an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session.
We have often heard about the challenges facing innovators who are based outside London and the south-east. This week, we are going to hear from a business that has relocated from the south to the north—well done—for better access to talent and resources. Today’s innovator is Dan Cathie. He is co-founder and CEO at Silveray. It is a deep tech spin-out from the University of Surrey, now based in Manchester, that develops flexible X-ray images. They have just secured £4 million of seed funding led by Northern Gritstone, an investment company dedicated to supporting science and technology businesses in the north of England.
Dan will be a witness in our main evidence session, but for now, Dan, I would like to hear your story and how the Committee can help your journey.
Dan Cathie: Brilliant. First of all, thank you very much for having me and for your time. It is a real privilege to be here.
As an individual, I do not necessarily see myself as an innovator, but it is nice to be recognised as one. I will give you a little bit of background about Silveray. That is why I am here. I am not going to talk about myself and my history, but obviously it is relevant and that falls into my role as an innovator.
Fundamentally, Silveray, as Chi nicely said, is a spin-out from Surrey University. I was brought in as co-founder. One of my stipulations, having done a previous spin-out which was moderately successful and sold to a US company, was that this time I would like it to be based near home, please, rather than having to commute from Manchester to Southampton every week, which is what I was doing before.
We based in Stockport, purely for selfish reasons at the time, but what ended up happening was that we started seeing the huge wealth of talent around the region. I would say, from a personal perspective, that hiring the right people with the right skillsets in Manchester was not a problem. It really was quite simple and easy. Most scientists and engineers want to come and move to a start-up and see that they are actually making a difference to a product and to the market with their invention, their ideas and their problem-solving skills.
Silveray itself is a technology business. I will talk about what I mean by deep tech because tech can mean all sorts of different things. Fundamentally, it is a mix of materials. It is two polymers that are doped with nano particles. Those nano particles respond to X-rays and create an electrical charge. The polymers are semiconductor polymers—I’m sure you have heard loads about semiconductors. This is a specific type of organic semiconductor which transports the charge. The special thing about it is that when you coat it on to a backplane, which is essentially like a TV screen—the same sort of technology—you can create an X-ray detector, so, as the X-rays hit it, you capture the charge. Instead of displaying it from a TV, it receives it and transports it to some electronics that you can plug in and get a really good image.
With our material, what is fascinating is that we get excellent image quality—really high resolution, really sharp images, best in class—and, because it is a polymer material, it is at a fraction of the cost. We are talking about a hundred to a thousand times cheaper than established technologies. That is what makes two of the key elements, two aspects of our material, unique. Thirdly, because it is a polymer, which is a plastic, it is flexible.
Those three things combined are what I mean by deep tech. It is a platform technology. With what you do with it and the applications you get, it gives you optionality. That is where the commercial side of things comes into it. You need someone who has a bit of a view, not of the research and the technology and is able to converse in that language, but who can actually use it, adapt it and decide where the best area is to start selling products.
We had a load of discussions in our team around what the first product should be. Is it a mammography detector, where you can wrap it around the breast in order to avoid having to compress it, for example? A lot of people would like that. Is it an intra-oral dental detector—one that you put in your mouth that might feel like a marshmallow rather than those big hard pieces of plastic? There are lots of different applications.
We ended up with the option of using it for weld inspection, for pipelines. The one I have here is a mock-up. It is not a real one, but this is what the product looks like. You wrap it around a pipe. Once you wrap it around the pipe you have an X-ray source, and you can take an image of a weld and check that the pipe has good integrity and you can use it. You need to use it. It is already done today using old-style Kodak film. You wrap it around in a darkroom and then expose it and send it off to Boots and get it back again. That is what they use today for pipeline inspection for nuclear submarines, power stations and areas where you have to make sure that there is full integrity of the joints and no erosion. I will pass this round. Feel free to have a look. Essentially, it consists of a backplane—like a TV screen—with material on top, encapsulated within some carbon fibre. There are some electronics at the back, which we then plug into a PC via a USB to get sharp, high-quality images of welds.
That is the technology. That is Silveray. I will spend the next couple of minutes going through some of the challenges that we faced when we started up the company. There were three in particular. First of all was finding somewhere to set up. As I say, we were a little bit unusual because we came out of the University of Surrey. We could not just carry on using their facilities; we had to find somewhere else. There are loads of great places up north: Alderley Park and the University of Manchester facilities. There is Hexagon Tower, the old ICI buildings and so on, but they are really expensive. When you start up you have zero money. Literally, the bank account had zero in it. I was doing it for free for six months, off the back of having sold the last company. I had a bit of spare cash. I ended up committing to finding an old cotton mill that we set ourselves up in because it was the cheapest place available, and they were pretty flexible about what we did inside it.
That was a great move, but, of course, the reason I raise it is that where you start is usually where you end. It is pretty difficult, once you start buying a whole load of equipment and setting up a facility, to then move. The very first point in time when you are deciding where to go is critical. Ideally, we would have liked to be in the centre of Manchester. That would have been great, easy to commute into and all the rest of it.
The second big challenge was the expense of the equipment. The equipment used for semiconductors and for processing is so expensive. We were a bit lucky. We found a company that was getting rid of a particular tool that we needed. It is normally 250 k and we got it for 25 k. I put some of my personal money in to start it, to get it going. Eventually, once we raised funds, the company bought it off me and they have it now. Fundamentally, that was luck; there was one available.
What we need are shared national assets—semiconductor-type processing equipment and metrology equipment that we can use on the same basis across any institute or any facility where it might be based. To give you an idea, we currently use Royce, NPL, University of Bristol, University Hospitals Bristol, Cambridge Enterprise, University of Manchester, the Geek Company, CPI, STFC in Daresbury and ATI. All of those facilities have a different point person, a different contract, a different NDA, a different way of working and different price points. If there was a fairly easy-to-use and easy-to-access one, we could move straight forward and get much quicker into those. We don’t need them ourselves but we do need to be able to access them.
Thirdly, it is great hiring PhDs, master’s students and capable engineers, but we also have Alisha, Dylan and Caleb, who are 23, 21 and 19 and absolutely brilliant. They are all very capable of going to university but decided not to and have ended up in the business. I am now thinking, “Well, okay, I brought them in as basically a technician and a pair of hands, but I don’t want to lose these people. They are really good. What career path can we offer them, to make sure that they get recognised somehow as degree qualified without currently going through the traditional degree pathway?” Degree apprenticeships are obviously great and that is what we looked at, but they are very vocational. There is no general STEM degree apprenticeship that exists, or that we found, that would be perfect for those sorts of individuals.
Obviously, I would like to talk about a whole load of other staff. I know I will be part of the panel later on, so I can answer any other questions or specifics around those areas. I want to give a big shout-out for Northern Gritstone, which is a really big supporter for us and has helped us get to this point. We are excited to see our first sales later this year.
Chair: Thank you very much, Dan. We will try to make sure that you get your prop example back. It was absolutely fascinating to see that and to hear about your journey and the challenges you have experienced.