How Exciting Instruments went from university spinout to first instrument on a customer's bench in 13 months | Tim Craggs

**Tim Craggs** (0:00)
Mahmood sent me this now famous text that around 11:17 PM, not around, it was 11:17 PM, right? Basically just saying, Tim, you can rest now, it's working. And there is this video of single molecules on the instrument.

**Brett** (0:22)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, the show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers, where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, we're speaking with Tim Craggs, CEO and founder of Exciting Instruments. Tim, welcome to the show.

**Tim Craggs** (1:01)
Great to be here, thanks, Brett.

**Brett** (1:02)
Exciting Instruments, I already love the name. Talk to us about what's so exciting.

**Tim Craggs** (1:06)
So it's actually a little bit of a pun which we lean into. Our instruments excite molecules with lasers, but they're particularly exciting because we can literally detect one molecule at a time, which is really the meaningful limit of detection, right? So imagine that molecule is the first cancer biomarker not the stage 3 tumor or the first aggregation events between two proteins and not the plaque on the brain.

**Brett** (1:33)
How would you explain what you do to a fifth grader or to me?

**Tim Craggs** (1:39)
Well, what we do is we build a benchtop instrument that's now pretty much a black box. It's a bit like what taking the mainframe computer, right? This is something it used to take up a whole room and needed its own operator for. We've done exactly that for our field, which is to take what was literally the size of a room, had to be under laser safe environment, lock and key and in the dark, and we compacted it into a desktop, well, benchtop version that any scientist can use without being the expert. So that's the analogy. They've got mainframes at the desktop. We've gone from massive laser room to every scientist benchtop.

**Brett** (2:26)
Talk to us about the history of the company. I understand it was a spin out from a university?

**Tim Craggs** (2:29)
That's right. So the company was spun out from my research lab at the University of Sheffield. We span out in September 2021, nearly five years ago now. My goodness, it flies by. We actually bootstrapped our way for the first three years or so of our existence, which is kind of unheard of for a company that actually makes a physical instrument. But we did that with debt finance guaranteed against mine and my co-founders houses, which was a little exciting as well.
But really then by selling the instrument itself, my co-founder Robert Bell would come from a bit more of a software background, where this is a little more common that you build and sell ahead of actually having the thing ready to go. But that really spurred us on and so we actually had our first two sales before we built the first instrument that worked. We've always been pushing on the boundaries of the possible.
I guess the key catchphrase for us at that point in time was, as long as we're not breaking the laws of physics, we think we're okay.

**Brett** (3:34)
Why do you think those first two customers gave you a chance? Obviously, you have a very strong academic background. I would imagine that helps. But why did they give you a chance? Why did they trust you?

**Tim Craggs** (3:44)
I did have a very strong, and still do, let's be clear, a strong reputation academically.

**Brett** (3:50)
Hasn't gone away.

**Tim Craggs** (3:52)
No, that's fine in the field.
That's totally reasonable. I still have a strong academic record in the field, an international reputation in this space. That was clearly a part of it. But we did have a prototype instrument, which we operated, again, in a dark room on a massive optics table, that kind of stuff, which we were able to get preliminary data to prove that our physics worked even if we hadn't solved all of the engineering bits yet. I think that was really the trick that we were able to convince people that we could get them usable and useful data even if we hadn't yet quite got it in the compact form that ended up being on their benchtop in.