Exciting Instruments: The Sheffield firm on cusp of international science breakthrough

Craggs is a world-leading authority in single-molecule experiments. Now 45, he has crossed continents furthering his research from Yale University in the US to Cambridge, St Andrews, Oxford and Sheffield in the UK.

The University of Sheffield recruited him in 2016 giving him £100,000 for a project. He says: “That was a pretty decent amount for the UK, about five times what others typically get. Although in the US they would receive about £2m.”

The research was spun out into the launch of Exciting Instruments in 2021 and landed the first fully functional instrument on a full paying customer bench within 13 months. Even as it was bootstrapping it was able to generate £1.5m in revenue.

Chief executive Craggs says that is pretty much unheard of for a hardtech business and largely credits chief operations officer Bell for that. He came from a software and project management background and had business acumen from fintech startups as well.

The business produces a ‘marriage of software and science’ with a ‘professor in the box’ that offers the researcher hints.

Single-molecule detection is the ultimate level of sensitivity.

Reflecting on the science discoveries it might enable, Craggs says: “What if the molecule you are detecting is the first cancer biomarker and not the Stage 3 tumour? What if the thing you are detecting is the first aggregation event of two proteins and not the plaque on the brain in dementia? There are drugs for a lot of these dementias but they are only preventative and they slow it down but they aren’t curative. If you can diagnose early enough and give those drugs then our technology could eradicate symptomatic dementia from the planet.

“I can’t talk about any of the detail but we have projects with Tier One pharmas who are using our methods as an essential part of FDA [United States Food and Drug Administration] approval for brand new classes of drugs that aren’t yet on the market and couldn’t be approved without data from our instruments. There will be people who don’t have to suffer from dementia. “We have a working assay for the early detection of Parkinson’s. We have five or six assays that we are working on. So we have a wet lab to develop the plates and then it becomes a razor-blade model where we sell the instrument but also the consumable and that is the recurring revenue which investors are really keen on.”

Most of the first sales of the instrumentation have been to academic researchers because of Craggs’ international reputation in that field. Quite how Exciting Instruments captures its share of the value that the global drug companies generate needs some consideration.

Craggs says: “It is important that the pricing structure reflects the value to our customers and not the cost to us. It will be very much dependent on the use cases that we are selling into because if that use case suddenly creates a £10bn drug we need to be sure how we capture the right amount of that value. We are still at the very early stages of those conversations.”

Craggs was raised in Southampton with a chemistry teacher father and medical doctor mother. He was an accomplished violinist and even funded his last Phd year through orchestral performances.

Thinking about the life skills of music, he says: “One of the key things I learned was collaboration. When I did a fellowship at Yale, my adviser Kathy Joyce said it is great that you are collaborative but unless you are the best in the world at something, why is anyone going to choose to work with you? I really took that to heart because it’s great that I want to work with other people but what do we really bring to the table?

“That is now the motto for everything we do at the company. It sounds arrogant but also has a lot of humility to it as well because it recognises that if you are the best in the world at something you are not the best in the world at almost everything else and therefore, you need to work with those people. And that’s fun too because if you are working with the best people in their field, everybody wins. For me, the magic happens at the interfaces and always has. We are now pretty much the best in the world at single-molecule detection.”

Craggs created his instrument with two Masters students, James Baxter and John Cully. Some help then followed from post-doctorates Elliot Steele, Exciting Instruments’ lead engineer; and Mahmoud Abdelhamid, its current lead scientist.

At the end of 2024 the business was backed by investor Northern Gritstone, Empirical Ventures, NPIF II – Praetura Equity Finance and serial entrepreneurs Stan Boland and Jonathan Millner to the tune of £4m.

Cambridge-based entrepreneur and investor Boland, who sold semi-conductor business Icera to Nvidia for $367m in 2011, was the first investor to get behind them.

Craggs says: “It was the first cheque we got and Stan has been there for us when we needed him. Having his backing has given us credibility.”

Having raised the £4m they moved into new premises at the Pennine Five offices off Tenter Street, Sheffield, in June. That has emerged as an innovation hub at the city’s former HSBC offices.

Craggs says Sheffield itself is an exciting base to be: “A lot of places are great: Cambridge, Manchester and London. But if you’re going to put a pound on a place, put it on Sheffield because we are at the start of the curve. Other places are topping out. Unlike, say, south Cambridge, we don’t have a critical mass of biotech but the quality of graduates here is excellent.”