Plastic Logic: The most important company in Britain?
Plastic Logic is the big punt of UK venture capital. It's got revolutionary products in a red-hot sector. Yet serious questions remain...
Plastic Logic: Most important company in Britain?
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Kate Pritchard is managing editor of Real Business
Imagine being able to read all your business documents, books and magazines (including Real Business) on a flexible sheet of plastic, about a third of an inch thick and weighing less than a pound. Unlike your laptop screen, it won’t flicker. It won’t glare in the sunshine. And it won’t shatter if you drop it on the floor.
This was the vision shared by Sir Richard Friend and Henning Sirringhaus, co-founders of the British (yes, British) technology firm Plastic Logic, way before Steve Jobs dreamt up the iPad, way before Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gave the nod to the Kindle, and way before the Sony Corp boys started tinkering with the Reader.
Cambridge-based Plastic Logic has gone from researching an idea in a laboratory, to manufacturing a product, to building a global sales and marketing team, without – so far – sacrificing its independence. This company is on the brink of becoming one of the great British technology companies of our generation. The question is: can it reach its potential or might it become another tale of UK innovation thwarted by the commercial marketplace?
The Plastic Logic story starts in Cambridge University, where many of the UK’s technology greats were born: Bluetooth developer CSR; computer processor developer ARM; semiconductor business Vitara; telecoms billing software company Geneva Technologies; and enterprise software giant Autonomy. “You’ve got a higher probability of finding a $1bn company – and true global leaders of massive new markets – in Cambridge,” says Simon Cook, chief executive of private equity firm DFJ Esprit. “It has a lot of the conditions you need to generate new companies: a good technology base, managers with experience and a well-organised business angel community.”
It was in the university’s Cavendish laboratory that self-confessed “mad physicist professors” Friend and Sirringhaus discovered a way of making transistors [an essential component of computer circuitry] on plastic.
For the past 50 years, practically every single transistor in the world had been made out of silicon baked in high-temperature furnaces. Friend and Sirringhaus’s manufacturing method, by contrast, involved inkjet printing and was far cheaper.
They took their discovery to Dr Hermann Hauser, the legendary co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners and one of the most prolific investors in UK technology, to see whether he would invest money in the commercial development of these plastic semiconductors. Hauser recalls visiting the pair in the late nineties: “They only had a few transistors working at this time and when they stopped working they prodded them with toothpicks!” Sophisticated? No. Groundbreaking? Yes.
In 2000, Amadeus Capital Partners, together with Cambridge Research & Innovation and Dow Chemical Ventures, stumped up £1.75m of start-up funding, allowing Friend and Sirringhaus to set up Plastic Logic and start the journey from academia to commerce.
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