Agritech
The world is impatient. Concerns about the environment and food security are becoming more pressing by the day. The agricultural sector is responding by actively researching and adopting transformative processes and systems across the value chain.
What we do
Regenerative agriculture
We apply a combination of optics, fluidics, chemistry and engineering skillsets to build novel sensors and systems. Moving beyond modelling, this provides industry leading measurement technologies to underpin regenerative agriculture practices.
Biologicals production and application
Additionally, our innovation consultants provide strategic guidance for building new digital farming platforms and defining the implications for next-generation products and services.
Precision agriculture and autonomous equipment
Featured insights
Our expertise
Understanding and optimising the flow of liquids, gases and heat can be critical design parameters. By understanding how heat will flow and how fluids and gases will interact with the proposed system, the time and cost of iteration and testing can be greatly reduced.
One of the earliest examples of our success in this field is inkjet printing, from which we created numerous spinouts, including billion-dollar companies Domino and Xaar.
Our consultancy teams are adept in nanofluidics, microfluidics and multiphase fluidics, with particular strengths in aerosol generation at a range of temperatures. We’ve also made significant progress in DNA liquid aerosols and nebulisers.
CC covers everything from high-reliability sensing for ultra-harsh environments to low-cost, low-power consumer devices. With broad expertise and a technology agnostic approach, we deliver optimal solutions across the whole spectrum of sensing.
Our work includes physical modelling (computational flow dynamics and finite element), analysis for new sensing principles and the development of innovative machine vision and machine learning systems.
Inexpensive yet powerful microcontrollers and GPUs mean more value can be derived from commodities like CMOS cameras, accelerometers and magnetic sensors. Through value engineering of established designs, and by using novel DSP algorithms to extract more data, we deliver huge leaps forward in performance while reducing costs.
We have the world’s largest independent wireless development team. It spans radio frequency, communications protocol, digital signal processing, power-optimised analogue and digital electronic design, embedded software, user experience and mechanical design.
Our consultancy expertise has led to the creation and development of several major wireless technologies and delivered a steady stream of disruptive breakthroughs. They include RF and satellite telecommunications to the world’s first wireless pacemaker and the ground-to-air radio system that controls more than 50% of the world’s air traffic.
We understand the extraordinary business potential of synthetic biology, as well as how to integrate it. In protein and metabolic engineering, our focus lies in bioengineering. Specifically, in translating cutting-edge AI research into practical applications at a prototype scale, enabling in-vitro growth and comprehensive testing.
We craft custom proteins by modifying their structure and sequence to change their function. We decode existing genetic codes/ ‘recipes’ to guide future designs, storing all variant designs and sequences on the cloud, so we have a library of ‘recipes’ for different applications. We also test variants under diverse conditions to ensure they remain effective and stable for different tasks.
We help synthetic biology start-ups get innovative biodesign products to market and help mature organisations already engaged in synthetic biology to build consistent and predictable processes for the rapid and cost-effective development of new products and services.
Markets and technologies evolve rapidly and unpredictably. Very few companies can afford to develop all relevant technologies, so tough choices need to be made. We help identify opportunities to ‘build, borrow or buy’ new technologies in anticipation of market requirements.
Business transformation is typically driven by a combination of internal, industry-related, and external factors, often rooted in technology. And whilst technology-based disruption is nothing new, the speed at which new offerings have built scale has been unprecedented.
The expertise we employ as technology strategy consultants has been in existence at Cambridge Consultants for decades. Because our consultants are engineers and scientists with deep technical insight, they can identify golden opportunities and recommend an innovation portfolio or technology roadmap.
We ensure that not only is the technology understood, but that the business model, market offerings and operations are all set up for success.
Our work
Our facilities
Optics labOur suite of optics labs enable us to build complex and high-precision optical layouts, typically for testing prototype designs and novel techniques before deployment. Featuring six high-spec optical benches with configurable interlocked controlled areas for high-power (class 4) laser work and specialist facilities for interferometry, spectroscopy, low-noise fluorescence imaging and photon counting. This space can be split into separate laser-controlled areas, allowing multiple experiments to run simultaneously, giving our optical engineers the capability to develop creative solutions without instrumentation restrictions. |
Electronic productionCC’s flexible, responsive and agile manufacturing facilities are ideally suited to electronic and electromechanical product builds, enabling us to rapidly build short product runs to an extremely high quality. We can build our own PCBAs using industrial representative equipment to ensure manufacturability during design. Having our own EPD facility is also extremely helpful in development, driving out DfX activities in eCAD and feeding test results back into the design process from an early stage. |
Synthetic biology labsOur state-of-the-art bioengineering and molecular biology facility excels in leveraging metabolic and protein engineering techniques to create innovative biological products tailored to our clients’ needs. Predictive modelling using large language models significantly improves our forecasting of outcomes, feasibility, and costs for bioengineered improvements. AI integration is then used to assess the fitness of variants with intended performance and boosting overall potential and accuracy. We’ve gained approval for 10 advanced techniques in leading scientific publications, such as the UPT mutagenesis method and software toolkit, which accelerates variant generation. Our platform yields licensable IP, encompassing genetic sequences and enhanced organisms. And our Patsnap platform assesses this IP’s value from $0.3-3 million per discovery. |
Anechoic test chamberOur custom anechoic radio and antenna test chamber is a highly sophisticated 5m cube. Inside, we carry out automated 3D measurements and visualisation of wireless device behaviour and test body-worn technology using body phantoms or real live test subjects to optimise real-word RF performance of products such as smart implants (including implanted telemetry), connected drug delivery devices and wearables. Our anechoic test chamber is available as a standalone service for industry and academic research. Explore the facility and find out how you can access this state-of-the-art service. |