 was created in 2015. When I was a researcher at university in UPF, it all come with the research that I've done in my PhD about microwave imaging for medical applications. And when I was at UPF, we were trying to find an application. It's like a technology push innovation, my window. So we had to look for a new application. And we came up to a non-med need that is the colorectal cancer detection at an early stage. And, well, we developed this project to satisfy this non-med need. Basically, what we do in my window is to develop a small radar that can be integrated at the tip of a standard colonoscope. And this helps the doctors to detect the polyps that are the precursors of this cancer. So there's a direct link from your PhD research through to potential applications to patients. I wanted to be able to arrive to the society, to transfer this knowledge to the society, to help patients. And the only way to do so, it was to create a spin-off in order to be able to get resources, to do the clinical validation and all those things. This was not possible at university. And so we had to create the startup and look for a lot of grants, investment, and have more flexibility to do all these things. Yeah, and I think these days it's a far more common route for researchers to go down, or even to start thinking about what is the potential application benefit or the word we use a lot in the UK, the impact of our research. But maybe 20 years ago, that wasn't really the case. But I think there's been a big change in that. So from a general point of view, I've spent a lot of time helping people in your position, trying to set up the spin-off company and thinking about the intellectual property rights, protection, thinking about the business plan, building the team of people that can launch the company. But what was your experience? How did it actually sort of happen? In fact, what you comment, in fact, I think that are the three most important things. And in our case, were crucial. First of all, it was to find a team because myself, as a researcher, I didn't have any experience on entrepreneurship. And I made the decision to look for an experiential to do all these things, because one of the things that you have to do when you start a startup is to negotiate, no? All the shareholders agreement and all these things. And you need a lot of experience and legal aspects and I was unable to do this and it's quite crucial to do this better because instead you can have problems, for example, with investors. They can limit the investors or something like that. So it's quite important to do so. And also the university helps a lot in the first stages to look for grants that you need to start your work and also in the business plan. The business plan is crucial, no? It has to be done in a correct way to convince the investors and I had a lot of support from the university to do so. So the team started with you and then you found a CEO from within the university or someone from outside in Barcelona in Catalonia? He was from outside, but I had the support from the university to meet some people that they already know from the ecosystem in Barcelona. So that was the second person. And the third person? The third person? Yeah, the third person is the endoscopist, is the medical professional that knows about the problem, no? Because one of the most important things before creating the startup is to talk a lot with people that know the problem and make a lot of interviews to know everything. And what's your role now? What's your job title or what do you do? I'm CTO. CTO, yeah. Can you say a bit about how you raised money? What was the story for raising money to support the company? In order to start this project, we had to look for money and the first grant that we get, it was a grant from Catalonia Government that it was for projects with potential to transfer to the society. With this grant, we filled the patent and we started with the market research and all of this and we saw that it was maybe it was the way and we decided to go for it for the technology transfer of this project and then we looked for another grant that there are some here. And with this, we could do the first prototype and the first validation with X-Vivo samples and once we had this and the business plan, we applied for another grant that it was in fact an investor. Yeah, yeah. Then this was when we get this grant, this was what triggered the creation of the company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a big difference, isn't there, between what a grant-giving organization is looking for compared to what a financial investor is looking for. And I mean, in my experience, that's something academics and scientists, you know, that's a big change for them, thinking about how to write a grant application compared to how to write a business plan to try to raise investment finance. So one of the frameworks that I talk about is you have the science and the scientists, which is what you had, and you need to find the money and the management and that's what you've done. So that's great, yeah. So we talk a lot about startups and, you know, spin-off, spin-outs, but then there's also the conversation about scale-up and certainly from the UK, there's been a lot of focus in the last 10, 15 years on startups. How do you get these things going? How do you set up the spin-out companies from universities? And scaling up a business, well, any business, you know, and I'm not an expert to talk on this, but scaling up a business that started from a university. It's a sort of continuation of this transition that we've been talking about from being a researcher, a scientist, thinking about the applications, having to learn about lots of different parts of the world, really. And I think for me it's a continuation of the team building and thinking about, as we scale this business, what sorts of expertise do we need? In a university, you're not going to be sitting there thinking about the sales and marketing activity or the financial function or whatever it might be, but as the company scales up, these are things you need to think about, obviously. But also I think for the founding scientists, it's quite an interesting journey to leave the university, join the company, staying with the company. How your role as a founder may evolve and what particular areas that may take quite often in the sort of general model of spin-out company formation. Generally, it's so much, it's about learning what a business is, learning to be a business, learning what the immediate priorities and the focus is and having the plan to deliver the business goals. So in a sort of general sense, it's not that different to being a scientist probably because you're thinking about the projects, writing the grant applications, pursuing the science, but it's just the focus and the objectives maybe more to the fore of what you're thinking about. For your business, the pathway is relatively well understood, isn't it? It's relatively well trodden. I mean, you need to do this, this, this and then if it works, great, you know what'll happen. In some other business areas, there isn't this sort of standardized pathway of like you say, the regulatory, the clinical trials, getting all of the support. And so I guess that provides you with your track for scaling up. But for many other businesses, there isn't and one of the things I've seen with quite a lot of startups is initially the breadth of the opportunity is huge. We've got this amazingly exciting technology. It could do this, it could do that, it could do a very wide range of things. So how do you focus? And that's one of the common challenges for a spin out is instead of trying to do everything from a technical point of view, thinking to satisfy the investors. For you, the pathway is relatively well understood. But even so, you have to understand how you're gonna get into the clinic at what stage is somebody gonna pay money to take your technology and replace something else. So use yours instead of something else or use yours in addition to something else and all of the challenges of that. Yeah, you have to do the things very easy for the people who is using this and communicate a lot what is the benefit of using your tool instead of what is in the hospital. And in our case, for example, our device is a complementary device, so the hospital will pay more to do the same thing. But we have to convince them that finally, there is savings because you are treating better and you are detecting more cancers. And finally, the savings will be in terms of treatment because you have to not treat cancer people. I know from my own personal experience, having been involved with UPF for five or six years now, that UPF as an institution provides a lot of support and really wants to encourage researchers to get involved in all sorts of knowledge exchange knowledge transfer and technology transfer. And I know you've said you've benefited from that. Maybe you can tell me sort of what was it like for you? Yeah, in fact, it was very, very helpful having the university behind because they help a lot in identifying the grant that you can apply. They help you in the proposal and they, for example, when we had to fill the pattern, they give you support with this. And this is the business shuttle unit? Yes, the business shuttle. And then when I was in the middle of the project, the UPF Benchers was created and it was very great because we were like the first project and they put a lot of effort with us. And in fact, they develop our business plan and it was great. Yeah, I think that the support is crucial because as researchers, we don't know how to do this. I mean, in one word, I think the word is impact. And this is certainly the dialogue in the UK for the last sort of 15 years. It's universities thinking about how they can generate a positive impact on society. And that's talked about in terms of benefits to society. And the impact can come from all sorts of different benefits that it might be economic. So we might be talking about business and economic impact, but crucially, we're also talking about social impact, cultural impact, policy impact. And so I think this is something that is relevant to every activity in the university. And technology transfer started really within the engineering, physical science, life science departments. But as the concept is broadened from technology transfer to knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange, sort of thinking far more broadly about how universities impact society and deliver benefits to it. And I think that's what universities want to do. I mean, that's where this is all coming from. It's thinking it's, we're not just sitting here in the university behind the closed doors, publicly funded institutions need to be able to demonstrate the benefit, the impact that they're having on society, is that sometimes, and this is what I say quite frequently, sometimes the commercial route is the best way to deliver benefits to society. And yours is an example of that because sometimes you've got some great ideas, some great prototypes, some great plans, but unless you can get private investment to come in and develop it, it's just not going to get through to market and work with people who know how to get things through to market. So sometimes within this broad concept of generating impact and benefits to society, sometimes the commercial route is the right one. And as we were saying, the motivation isn't the money, and that's a possible by-product from it. In the UK, the universities are independent charitable bodies. So they're not actually owned by the state, they're not state entities. So the people who work in them aren't government employees, they're not public sector employees. And I think there are two important points about that. One is to do with the sort of the culture, the way researchers think about the possibilities of doing things independently and getting involved in knowledge transfer. And the second is quite simply some of the rules and the bureaucracy and the regulations about who is allowed to do what. And I think a consequence of that is that maybe tech transfer got going earlier in the UK. But now what I've seen, and that happened because of the independence, because of the possibility to do it, the desire to do it, and the relative lack of sort of bureaucracy. Whereas now I think from what I see in Spain and Italy and elsewhere where they are public sector employees, public sector institutions, that change has happened and culturally now it's more acceptable, completely acceptable for public sector researchers here to decide to get involved in knowledge transfer. But I guess you've lived this experience, haven't you? And probably in the last few years it's been okay and it's been a lot easier to do than say 15 years ago. But I wonder if you recognize any of that in your experience. Yeah, in fact now I've seen changes. Maybe it's like eight years ago or something like that that I began to think about transferring my research into the society. And at that time maybe there was no so much experience as now. And personally I could felt a little bit what you are saying that maybe is not ethical, let's say to do so, no? Because people think that you are going to make money of your research. But now there are many, many, many startups that are coming from university. I agree that things are changing. In fact in Barcelona above all for these health projects is a very good place to be because you have a lot of first range hospitals, for example to do your validation. In case of pharma, for example, you have also very big pharma around. And also you have investors, local investors that could help in the first stages. And you have, for example, these grants or these training programs that there are quite good programs and above all focused, for example, in the health sector. And it's very helpful at the first stages. Yeah, I mean I've seen, I think in the last say 10 years but certainly the last six or seven years that I've been coming here quite a bit. I think the Barcelona sort of tech community has developed enormously. And I think it's a combination of what the universities have been doing but what the Generalitat, the local government's been doing to actively decide to support this. And there's a number, as you say, there's a number of agencies providing support. There are a number of ways that you can access money but it's about so much more than that. It's about the people. It's about the community of people and the networking. And you go down to the waterfront of Barcelona Tech City, you know, you've got this sort of physical manifestation of the buzz that's going on here.