County Durham firm Evince back on track after trip to USA

Mar 4 2010 by Chris Knox, The Journal

A  trip to California's famous Silicon Valley has helped put a clean technology company back on track after it failed to win the £2m investment it had hoped to get from its original shareholders.

County Durham firm Evince is optmistic about raising more money from private investors after three of its main backers decided not to contribute to its next funding round.

 Evince, which is based in Netpark near Sedgefield, has made a commercially viable model of a high-voltage switch that it says could make renewable energy generation able to supply power much more cheaply than current silicon switches.

The four-year-old company has also had positive talks with power companies and train operators about buying the solid-state devices it hopes to start making next year.

And it is confident of winning more financial backing and believes it can begin production early next year followed by the launch of its own manufacturing plant.

Dr Gareth Taylor also recently returned from a trade show at Silicon Valley in the US, where the product picked up a significant amount of interest from potential customers, as well as two European manufacturers looking to adopt the technology within their own products.

The Clean & Cool Mission, which took place during San Francisco’s annual Cleantech Forum, saw Evince chosen from 150 applicants to join 19 other UK companies showcasing their products.

Dr Taylor said: “Obviously, our original investors had their reasons for pulling out of the £2m deal. The way things are in the markets at the moment, investors in the UK want results in the short term before they commit any more cash.

“However, we have been able to source funding from elsewhere, which I believe will help us maintain our growth and begin large-scale production of the devices in the coming years.”

The devices promise to control megawatts of electrical power far more effectively than is currently possible and are designed to be used in renewable power generation systems, play an enabling role in digital energy transmission and distribution networks, and benefit rail locomotives and industrial machines.

Evince says that replacing the silicon devices used today with its switches could generate global efficiency savings equivalent to 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

Directors at the company say they are targeting a £9bn global industry and believe they have the potential to grow their team to employ at least 200 staff once the product takes off.

The firm is now looking for further investment and said it had made a number of strong contacts in the US.

“The UK seed capital market has all but dried up and what remains has become highly risk averse,” Dr Taylor said: “The trip to California gave us a fantastic opportunity to meet investors who we would never otherwise get access to. We hope that this will create opportunities to take the business to places we had not considered just a few months ago.”