Summary
In this episode, we talk with Neil Morris, co-founder of Kelpi, about his journey from tech entrepreneur to impact leader with a mission to reduce plastic waste through innovative, seaweed-based packaging solutions. Neil discusses the challenges of scaling impact sustainably, including the tough decisions Kelpi has made to avoid partnerships that could compromise their mission. He shares insights into the role of purpose-driven leadership in building a business focused on people, planet, and profit, and why resilience and principled choices are key to driving change.
Join us as we explore how Kelpi is working to create a plastic-free future and the essential role of leadership in shaping a sustainable tech for good movement.
Takeaways
Tech for Good aims to create stronger, fairer communities.
Kelpi focuses on compostable packaging to combat plastic pollution.
Combining science and entrepreneurship is key to innovation.
Regulatory approval is crucial for new packaging materials.
Balancing impact and business realities is a significant challenge.
The scale of plastic pollution requires urgent action.
Difficult business decisions can shape a company's future.
Building relationships with the right investors is essential.
Measuring impact goes beyond just carbon emissions.
Leadership involves inspiring others and making ethical decisions.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Tech for Good South West
01:20 Neil's Journey to Kelpi
03:42 The Science Behind Kelpie's Innovation
06:38 Regulatory Challenges and Business Growth
09:00 Balancing Impact and Business Realities
11:25 The Scale of Change Needed
13:15 Navigating Difficult Business Decisions
16:04 Investor Relationships and Impact Investing
19:48 Measuring Impact and ESG Considerations
22:41 Leadership in Impact-Driven Organizations
26:05 Advice for Aligning Values with Careers
30:46 The Role of Tech for Good
35:06 Showcasing Other Tech for Good Initiatives
38:49 Future Aspirations for Tech for Good South West
Transcript
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At Tech for Good South West, we're passionate about building momentum for the Tech for Good movement across the south west of the UK. Our mission is to amplify the positive impact of technology in tackling societal challenges and creating stronger, fairer and more connected communities. By fostering a regional Tech for Good community, we aim to support initiatives that ensure technology serves the greater good and enable everyone to thrive in the long term.
Throughout this podcast, we'll be joined by a diverse range of voices from across the tech sector, charities, investors, startups and community-driven projects as they share their stories, challenges and hopes in harnessing Tech For Good. Join us as we explore a world of Tech For Good right here in the Southwest, brought to you by Annie, Alicia and Arielle.
Hello everyone, this is Annie here for the Tech for Good Southwest podcast, where we explore how technology can be harnessed to create positive social change across our communities, inspiring people, preserving the planet and creating places. We have a fascinating discussion ahead with Neil, co-founder of Kelpi, a company leading the charge in tackling our global plastic pollution crisis. And doing that through compostable packaging made from seaweed. Neil, it's so great to have you with us. Thank you.
Delighted to be with you today. Thank you, Annie. That's great. I think what I'd love to do is first start with a little bit about your career because it's taken you through many different fields, I think, from media marketing software companies to now really taking on such a big global crisis. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey and I guess particularly to this point of being involved with Kelpie? Certainly.
When my son, now a young adult, was about six or seven and he heard for the first time that his dad was a cereal entrepreneur, obviously he was very excited because I was working on the breakfast foods of the next generation. When he finally realized that's not what cereal entrepreneur meant, I then started to explain to him about a startup journey that for me started straight after university when I set up my first company in the US in the music business. And since then I've continued to
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to flip-flop, if you like, between small and large companies, learning a huge amount as I went along, both in the small companies about how to achieve an outcome through rigorous focus, excluding anything that's gonna distract you from it, and then how to apply that sort of approach to allow larger companies to play their part in addressing the huge challenges that we face in society. So for me personally, my journey has been about both, neither excluding one nor indeed
focusing entirely on one sort of approach to deliver the changes that we need to in our world today. And I guess what was it about the sort of sustainability space and protecting our planet that's particularly captured your attention? I'd always intended that my next startup was going to be around sustainability. And I guess a turning point for me came when I was lucky enough to see
Al Gore speak in London in about 2009-10 and at that point I was only really starting to become aware of the huge challenges that we were facing and that was soon after An Inconvenient Truth came out, the Al Gore film that I think like myself focused a lot of people on the perils of climate change that we were then starting to experience and so since then
I've grown and my natural techno-optimism, which is founded in the belief that technology can be a great force for good and that technology has the power to be able to achieve the huge changes that we need, was then able to be focused on something. if I move on to the beginning of Kelpie, really the essence of Kelpie and what's made us successful is bringing together world-class scientists and those with entrepreneurial experience. It's the...
The joining of the two that really creates the momentum from which Kelpie benefits and from which we're able to harness the best of each world. The science without the entrepreneurship would simply be brilliant research producing fantastic data. The entrepreneurship without being underpinned by science would be another way of just representing the world as it is, perhaps in a more efficient business model.
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So for me, it's the two of them moving in concert together that really allows us to be able to change the world. Yeah, that's fantastic. Could you tell us, maybe just delve a little bit more into the sort of science and innovation that is at the heart of Kelpie? Sure, certainly. Perhaps, Annie, if I could start with the story that gave rise to the company. And having for months and years as a cyclist cycled across the lanes of Somerset and Gloucestershire,
looking at the mounds of plastic litter, single-use plastic packaging that had been thrown aside into the ditches and hedgerows as I cycled, determined to find a better way to package food and drink that didn't persist in our environment for hundreds of years. My network then led me, when starting Kelpie, to put the office of Professor Chris Chuck at the University of Bath. And Chris, who became one of three co-founders,
alongside myself and Murray Kennes, was the scientific inspiration for us to be able to focus on seaweed and its potential to replace fossil fuel plastic in single use packaging. And Chris developed from the outset, based on his thinking, not necessarily his university work, around the opportunity to extract the right carbohydrates from seaweed and
by mixing them with fatty acids create the pliable or plastic material that would act as well as fossil fuel plastics in offering a water barrier, but critically be biodegradable at the end of use. And it was his focus on that, his ability to then recruit a team that helped us progress that thinking into laboratory and then pilot scale work that really underpins the science and the business. And how long has that journey taken?
Well, from the start in 2020, Kelpie was very much a child of Covid lockdowns, to today, four years on, we've gone through initially working out of laboratories at the University of Baths and then over the last now two years, been working at the Science Creates Technology Hub in central Bristol. We've been able to grow the team now to 18 people.
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most of whom are scientists still working on material development in the lab and with our scale up CMO or contact manufacturing organisation partners. And then the rest of whom are working either on the commercial side, helping us engage with clients or on supporting our growth as a company so that we can address the at scale demands of some of the world's biggest users of fossil fuel plastic packaging. And where is Kelpie focused right now? So what is your
I guess your biggest focus, your biggest piece of work or project that you're focused on right now. As a consumer, as we all are, you'll be glad to know that the new packaging material that we've devised has to go through very strict regulatory approval before it can be used to package food and drink. And so we're now about a year and a half into what will have been a two and a half year process of submitting our materials for regulatory approval. So that means in around nine months,
from the FDA, the regulatory authority in the US, and from its equivalents in the EU and UK, we'll start getting the regulatory approval. So that by this time next year, we should have that approval in place and be able to actually start shipping product. Until then, we continue to work on the production scale up, but at the same time, working with some of the largest users of packaging in the world, cosmetics giants L'Oreal being one of them.
and drinks giant Diageo being another with whom we've each been working with for over a year now in order to adapt and prove our materials in the context of their specific requirements. It's a long, I can tell obviously it's a long journey to get to this regulatory approval but also really building those relationships with such big organisations and obviously the change that they need to make longer term to their products.
I'm interested to explore now a bit about the sort of challenges that you face as Kelpie when you're balancing impact and the impact that you want to have around addressing this, the plastic pollution challenge with the realities of running a business, because even that sort of regulatory journey that you've just described is a long one and people need to be paid and there needs to be space and all the rest, those costs of running a business. It's a really good question because it's such, it goes to the heart of
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what I think startups need to be able to achieve to really be able to scale their impact on the world. We work with a sort COD formula that I've developed which says that science and innovation are the power to deliver change in our society, but it's entrepreneurship that amplifies that power and allows it to reach scale.
Science and innovation themselves create the context through which we can address climate change and other critical areas of impact. But it's entrepreneurship, it's the ability of a small business to be able to focus resources very determinedly in a specific area that allows us then to amplify that change across society. So it's only really by having worked with large companies, I've mentioned L'Oreal and Diageo.
with whom Kelpi's been working for more than a year, that we're able to not just eventually beat a pathway to our market, but more importantly, validate the work to date to make sure that as we achieve that regulatory approval, we'll have the clients ready to be able to roll this out at scale. If not, we'd have been working in the dark, if you like, in the laboratory, hoping and believing that our material had the capacity to change the world, but not knowing for certain that it would be taken up by those clients.
So what you said in your question is a challenge and you're right, it is a challenge, is also the secret of our success. The need to be able to validate our approach in paid R&D contracts with the likes of L'Oreal and Diageo is the very reason that we know that we can, once we get regulatory approval, roll this material out at scale. You talk about scale and you talk about changing the world. How big can the change be and how quickly?
Do you think you, we can get there? The scale is huge. It could be intimidatingly huge, but we can't allow ourselves to be intimidated by the size of it. To give you a couple of numbers here, let's start with a really big one. 171 trillion. That's the number of microplastic fragments that are at large in our world today.
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Fossil fuel plastic single-use packaging is by no means the only source of those microplastic fragments, but it is one of the most significant sources. And therefore we need to eliminate fossil fuel plastics from our food and drink packaging entirely as quickly as possible. We're talking therefore about the need to move into not just the thousands of tons, but the millions of tons over time in order that we can...
continue to enjoy the benefits of packaging, food shelf life, extending our food security, knowing that our food is packaged in an effective and hygienic way, whilst at the same time no longer relying on fossil fuel plastics to do so. So to get to millions of tons requires the approach, the flexibility and the scalability that you can't achieve if you're building all your production plants yourselves.
I could not possibly raise the investment necessary to reach that sort of scale. So instead, from the very outset, Kelpie set out to use third party contract manufacturing organisations to do the synthesis of our material and work with existing huge packaging manufacturers to then apply that to substrates like paper, card and dry moulded and wet moulded fibre. So in terms of this kind of long term scale,
and the impact and ambition that you have as Kelpi, can you perhaps give us an example of maybe the most difficult business decision that you faced recently? Because I can really kind of sense it as well, this kind of real balance where we've got massive ambition. There's obviously a huge scale that many would feel intimidated and do actually do nothing at all. But those kind of micro decisions that you have to make along the way in terms of running a business, but also
those ones that are really going to influence the impact you can have, but still make sure that actually you are running a business that is sustainable in its own right? Certainly. We recently faced a huge opportunity with one of the world's largest companies, a conglomerate across a whole number of areas of food and drink. And we've been in discussion with that conglomerate for about a year.
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They'd extensively tested our materials, had come back to us and said that the materials performed beyond their expectations and they were very interested in pursuing a relationship with us. And they would have been a significant leap forward to the at-scale deployment of our materials that would achieve our impact, progress towards our impact goals. However, the commercial terms that they presented
in particular the claim that they sought over our IP, our intellectual property or the know-how of the material that we've developed, as well as their demands for exclusivity, would have meant that although they would have represented a huge leap forward for us in scale, they would also have consumed the entire business. We would have become beholden to one single client. So it was a very difficult business decision to...
to refuse to embark on such a contract with them, demand that we got terms which better worked for us as a startup and for our investors. And as a result, we've gone back through two iterations. The prospective client has conceded quite a lot, but not yet sufficient for us to embark upon that contract. So I hope we will in one day be able to find common ground. But until we do,
needs of the business which are that we can continue to really meet scale by addressing the needs of a large number of big companies continue to need to be matched against our ability to achieve the impact goals that we set out. Fascinating and you mentioned around the investors obviously the Kelpi investors also kind of part of that decision making process and how does that kind
practically work and involving the rest of the business. You're a small team, as you say, you're kind of nimble, you're kind of in that sort of startup, but unable to kind of be flexible. Really interested to know the kind of investors, I guess, involvement and responsibility in that decision. Certainly. I think from the very outset, in my experience as an entrepreneur, as a startup chief exec, I've realized that developing the right relationships
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with critically the right investors has also been as vital as developing the right client relationships and technology in the right way. And I've stressed the right investors because from the outset, we've been able to work with, identify first and then seek investment from and work with investors who are aligned with our goals. We've been evaluated by investors who I felt were perhaps more from a
software background or a background where they were expecting very high financial returns with limited risk and they weren't the right ones for us to work with. Whereas the investors with whom we're now working combine at least one of climate tech experience with deep tech experience used to investing in science-based companies where the returns will take longer even though they will be very significant. But also that recognize that the triple bottom line
that you and I are so familiar with, that some investors would perhaps pay lip service to that triple bottom line of aligning people, planet and profit as equally important is something that some investors truly buy into and others are prepared to pay lip service to until, of course, their own financial returns might be threatened. So it's been critical that we've developed relationships with the right sort of investors from
our pre-seed round where we were delighted to have BPEC, Bristol Private Equity Club, come on board as our first significant investor pre-seed. So the seed one round of 2.4 million closed in 22. Right up to the seed two round we closed earlier this year at 4.35 million. And through that time we've mixed investors with a base here in the southwest.
investors like SCVC, Science Creates Ventures Capital Arm, as well as Quantex and Maven, with others from around the UK and Europe. Companies like Blackfinch and Cadmos. So it's the combination of those that have allowed us to be able to grow with our expertise. But I guess probably the best investor for me to call out in particular has been Green Angel Ventures.
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which combines both the benefit of being an angel syndicate focused on climate tech investments, but also acting like a VC with its own VC fund associated with it. And so Green Angel Ventures was our co-lead alongside SCVC at our Seed One round. And they were the largest single investor under Black Finch as a lead investor in our Seed Two round.
Yeah, we've talked, you've talked a lot about building the, you know, building those relationships. It's obviously really taken time and actually really finding investors that deeply understand what you're trying to do as Kelpie, both from being a sort of science-based startup and an innovation organization, but also that sort of deep tech and climate tech understanding. I'm interested to, I guess, get your perspective more broadly on the impact investing sector.
And what we hear a lot of and talk a lot about within our sort Tech for Good Southwest community is where are they? Where are the impact investors? But particularly also in the Southwest and really trying to understand what they're looking for, but also how we can build those relationships. It'd be great to get your perspective on that. Sure. I guess I'd start by saying it's never too early to start building the relationships that you're going to need to understand fully, be in the middle of in order to succeed in your next round.
So to give you an example, although we only closed our Seed2 round in May of this year, I'm already speaking to one or two new investors each week and going to events and exploring the potential to open up dialogue with other new investors. So that I'm already planning our Series A round, even though it'll be around 18 months before we even open that round. So building relationships early allow us to...
to spend time exploring the thesis, the philosophy of the investor and the individual, because after all, you could be spending a lot of time in the boardroom in discussion with that individual, during which you'll have to develop and make some pretty critical decisions for the business over the coming years. So that's the key to being able to understand whether that investor really is committed to the impact focus of the business as much as they are to the potential financial.
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returns. Kelpie works on the triple bottom line, the three P's of planet, profit and people all being equally important. And so it's important to us when we first start talking to an investor to use that initial relationship opportunity to really get to the bottom of whether they too feel like that. I do think here in the South West we've got a fantastic strength in that there is a smaller number of investors based here.
but a greater proponents in my experience for those investors likely to be interested in impact investing. So by being interested in impact investing, we can therefore start to work through and look at the particular areas that are relevant in their thesis and our company. I've spoken to some very good impact investors who have quickly realized that because we do not quantify carbon emissions saved,
in megatons, they're not interested in investing in Kelpi. They're fabulous impact investors, but we needed to establish that straight up so that we weren't going along a pathway which one or both of us would have ended up being disappointed by. Yeah, for sure. let's talk about impact. I mean, we're talking about impact investors, but impact in terms of what it means to Kelpi, both from a people perspective.
but also fundamentally the planet and how you think about measuring impacts to both your investors, but also in terms of measuring your progress and your scale towards those goals. Sure. I'll take the second half of the question first, because I think it's a really interesting one. As ESG has come up the priority list for so many investors and with the startups needing to be recognized in this space,
So we've ended up with a lot of metrics, some of which boil down to some relatively simple impact measurements. But I think it's important not to get so focused on quantifying the data that we lose sight of the total impact that we can have as organizations. So we work very closely with some of our key investors, people like Quantex based here in the Southwest, as well as One Planet Capital.
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based in London, who have their own experience in helping startups report on ESG and impact whilst aligning it with their particular business focus. So moving on to how Kelpie looks at this then, my own personal view has always been that whilst carbon emissions are the most important aspect that we need to address in seeking to mitigate climate change,
they're not the only aspect that we need to address. If we were to be able to go net zero tomorrow, we would still be facing an existential crisis of toxicity. Toxicity caused amongst other things by our overuse of plastic. And so therefore to look at impact, boil down simply to carbon emissions and carbon footprint would be to miss some of the other equally important areas.
on which business needs to focus. So Kelpie is a business by focusing on eliminating the use of fossil fuel in plastics is instead able to focus on an equally important area which is perhaps otherwise in danger of being overlooked. There are 171 trillion microplastic fragments estimated to be on our planet today from the top of Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
They are in your and my blood in our lungs. They're in maternal placenta in human testicles. These represent a huge challenge for planetary and human health. And we're only now really starting to understand the implications of the toxicity of plastics in affecting human and planetary health. So it's now that we need to start to develop the alternative materials that can replace the fossil fuel plastics that we're overusing and thereby turn off the tap so that
other technologies can continue to come to the fore to address the pollution that we've already created. It's amazing. I love the passion in your voice as well in terms of the challenge, but also the journey that Kelpie are on. And as an impact leader, yourself as representative of Kelpie as well, you're not just looking to address and solve these problems, you're also about inspiring others to do the same. And that's what we're really passionate about, why we do.
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The podcast, why we do some of the work through Tech for Good Southwest as well, is really kind of showcasing different stories and inspiring others to do the same. How do you sort of approach leadership in this context? What advice do you have to people, to businesses, to leaders who want to have their mark on creating change on a larger scale? Really interesting question. And I think it goes right to the heart of how we really do change things in society. I think there are a number of ways of looking at leadership.
One way of looking at leadership is not being the leader of an organization, but rather taking ownership and leading on a particular topic or an idea. So for me, speaking at TEDxBristol, a TED talk that was published just very recently on the subject of microplastics was an important, as important a part of leadership as perhaps the work that I do directly at Kelpie and working with brilliant organizations like Tech for Good Southwest.
is an equally important part of that leadership so that we can spread the word but engage people who have passion to devote their energies towards addressing these huge issues for us. Then I go on to say the second aspect of leadership is the approach that you take in an everyday context. And so it would be wrong to suggest that you have to be a chief exec or even C-suite in an organization in order to take leadership.
positions on the subjects that matter. And I certainly think that we've built at Kelpie a very strong team of people who are prepared to act as leaders in specific areas of the business, who don't wait for a task to be delegated, for authority to be conferred upon them for a particular area, but rather they're already jumping in, rolling their sleeves up and getting on and acting.
And then I guess the third area is about how as leaders, those that do have a leadership position in an organization, be it a startup or a large one, we do need to act very responsibly, authentically, make sure that our decisions as business leaders really reflect where we're going. So Kelpie has had possibly valuable commercial opportunities put in front of them.
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which in one case was from a company ultimately owned by a tobacco company. We turned it down as soon as we found out about their ownership. They're not the right client for us. In another case, the ultimate parent of a company that we working with in the food industry had significant links to Amazon deforestation. So again, we walked away from that. It's important that even if those had been lucrative contracts, that we're authentic as leaders, that we
follow through on the philosophy, on the belief in our systems and not just simply follow the money even where that money would have been particularly helpful to us on the day. had a great, we actually had a Tech for Good South West, Tech for Good meeting in Bath yesterday and it was all about sort of purpose and profitability and really what the
I guess what the stats are showing that really purposeful driven businesses are making higher profits than many other businesses. And I think that that's what we obviously want to see more of. And we've talked about leadership. guess, you know, many people, we all, think, in our, in our heart of hearts want to do something meaningful. But I think many people struggle to connect that to their careers and what they're doing now. If you've got a piece of advice that you would give to others that really want to align their.
their personal values and what they feel really passionate about in the world with their professional lives and careers? Yes, certainly. We'll just go back to an earlier point in your question, which was about how purpose-driven companies are increasingly seen as not unequally, but possibly even in some cases more profitable. think purpose-driven companies also are punched way above their weight when it comes to recruiting staff. Yeah.
because who wouldn't want to do a great job that means something that has purpose and about which you can hold your head high when you go to the pub at end of the week. that leads me on to the answer to your question. If you're looking to get into a company like Kelpie or others, I think being determined is the reason that you'll get spotted in the first place, but not expecting to be able to simply drop in and act.
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the way that you might have acted in different larger organizations, but to really understand and own that sense of purpose, to take personal responsibility in leading it within the company. And I look at the fantastic team that we've got at Kelpie now, and from those most senior to those most junior, a lot of them came to us, not because we were advertising for a particular position at the time, but because they...
spotted not only a business that they wanted to work for but a way in which they could add particular value would determine but also showed the kind of entrepreneurial approach that is so important in working for a startup because to want to do good, to want to apply your skills in a business with purpose is clearly a very large part of it but it's also to make sure that you're aligned with the kind of attributes needed for to succeed in that sort of organization.
And some people are best able to deploy their skills in larger companies where they've got the support systems around them. And others like the agility of the startup in which they can work. I'd like to just use a visual metaphor, which isn't going to work very well, on a podcast, but I'll give it a go and you let me know if I Give it a go. So I don't know if you...
have ever or remember seeing the Road Runner cartoons? Yes. Right, well then Annie you'll remember and hopefully everybody listening will remember that at pretty much every point in every cartoon there is one point where Road Runner chases Wile E. Coyote off the edge of the cliff and in the laws of cartoons Wile E. Coyote then stands there suspended for several seconds whilst considering his options and usually option one he plunges to his
death at the bottom of the ravine, although obviously after having been pancaked by the fall, he'll then get up and walk away. The second option is that after gravity has been suspended for five seconds, he then gets to run back onto the cliff. And the third option is that someone obligingly comes along with scaffolding to build out the cliff under his feet, also whilst gravity is still suspended. So I think being an entrepreneur and working in an entrepreneurial organization is that
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confidence to run off the cliff, but the ability to do so not so far that the scaffolding can't be built out to reach you before gravity takes action. So we've got to have courage. We've got to run off the cliff in order to change the world, but we've got to do so. And here it's where the metaphor might start to break. But while the investors cash is built out to give us the scaffolding underneath our feet, while the client engagement
does a similar thing in order that we can then go ahead and change the world. And that, going back to your question, is not necessarily for everybody. I recognize that. You've got to have a certain approach to be able to succeed in an environment where you are expected to run off the cliff in a metaphor. Yeah, and I love that. I love the metaphor. But I also think that it's not about necessarily just, as you said as well, just being in a sort entrepreneurial environment and being at the beginning of those.
journeys of purposeful businesses, but it's also really advocating from within perhaps those larger organizations as well, you know, what you're really passionate about, what you want to see them doing and how, how they can kind of impact change as well. And I think you meant to use the word courage and complexity. It's having courage to try to learn from what you try to do and then try again. And I think having that kind of mindset, which
It's kind of how the world is now anyway, isn't it? Super complex. There's a lot that we're having to deal with and face on a day-to-day basis, but you know, all playing our part in terms of how we can have impact and influence change is so important. I've got a couple of final questions for you. What does Tech for Good mean to you? Ever since my first business at the age of 22 and throughout the other businesses that I've set up or run, I've always believed that
Business can be a powerful force for good in society and different businesses are able to achieve that in different ways. without the ability of business to match human need and demand around the opportunity to fulfil it in an effective environmentally and socially responsible way, then I don't know that we'll be able to achieve the huge changes.
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that we need to in society. So not every tech for good company is working in the area of climate change or its related areas like ecotoxicity. wherever, field that you're working in, to be able to ensure that we're trying to improve our world, not merely turning a profit, regardless of the environmental, social or other impact of it.
is a key to making sure that business can continue to lead from the front in addressing climate change and addressing the other challenges that we must do so. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Is there another sort of Tech for Good project or initiative or story from the South West might be in a different field, as you say, that you would really like to just raise here? I think the great thing about the South West
and I feel very passionate about this, is there are a huge number of businesses that are doing some quite extraordinary work. It's difficult to single any out, but we've worked closely with a company in Bristol called Matter, which has developed a filter for your domestic washing machine, which will filter out the tiny microplastic filaments that are shed each and every time you do your laundry. They're a brilliant company that's already changing the world.
by allowing us all to do our bit and not release microplastics into the environment just through doing our regular washing. And then to take another example, there are a host of companies that we work alongside in the Science Creates ecosystem in Bristol. One such company, Encylitech, has developed a fantastic way in which they can encapsulate vaccines to reduce the need for refrigeration with
quite profound impact on how vaccines could be used in the developing world. And they're just one of a number of companies from Extracellular, based in Bristol, who are working on cellular agriculture, through to others working on vaccines, on RNA treatments, a host of health tech, med tech companies, alongside those in pure climate tech, all doing some really quite incredible.
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leading work and often spun out from universities like Exeter, like Bristol, like Bath, which are producing groundbreaking world leading thinking and which we just need to find the way as organizations like SETSquared often do to be able to then turn into the successful startup businesses of tomorrow. Yeah, those are great examples and we have such great innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem here in the Southwest and it really is to be
proud of and I think it's really important that people are aware of this innovation, the level of, know, Tech for Good that we actually already have and already need to kind of showcase. What would you like to see from Tech for Good Southwest? I think coming together and working on some of the common problems that we have, the areas where we can truly promote not just
individual businesses but the southwest ecosystem to make sure that we continue and I believe we're in a very strong position to do that. That we continue to recruit the best talent in the world not just in the country that we can continue to use our excellent university research sectors from Exeter, from Bath, from Bristol and from others to be able to spin out new companies and that we continue to hold events and
network together to be able to work out how by joining up we can be even more formidable on the world stage. often say that Kelpie is not a South West company, we're a global company, very very proud to be based here in the South West of England and I think for us to change the world we need to act on a global stage but starting here in the South West, in our case in Bristol, is the best possible place.
in my view, to start. 100 % agree with that. Absolutely. Thank you so much for that. Before we wrap up, can you just share with our listeners a little bit more, well, a little bit about how they can keep track of the Kelpie journey? It's a very exciting stage that you're at with your latest raise earlier this year, and we would obviously love to more from you. How can people keep in touch? Certainly. Well, please do go and have a look at our website.
Tech4Good South West (40:15.918)
Kelpie.net. Have a look at our LinkedIn profiles, but we're also keen to continue talking to people in person, much as the online communication works very well for efficiency. There's nothing quite like being in the same room. whether we're at an event that you're attending or whether you'd like to invite us to attend one of your events, then I think that's a great way for us to get together, network under the umbrella of Tech for Good Southwest and continue to...
to engage on the subjects that really matter to us. Well, we'll be definitely inviting you to an event. So we'll just get planning around that. Wishing you and the team incredible success. And we very much look forward to following your journey. And we'll have you at an event soon as well. Thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Hugely valuable. And I know people will probably want to dive into them in a lot more detail. So maybe that's something we can follow up on. Thank you so much.
Great, thank you, Annie. It's been a pleasure talking to you today.