Small Business Q&A: Tim Cummins from AltraTech

With last year’s horse-meat scandal still affecting the way we shop, meat companies are turning to fast and effective ways of finding tainted meat before it leaves their factories.

Tim Cummins and his company AltraTech are looking to disrupt this testing market with an alternative which aims to cut test times and costs.

What is AltraTech?

A new start-up company we founded last year in 2013. My own background is in the design of silicon chips. While working in a separate company I helped develop silicon chips which could be used to detect fractional changes in temperature.

I sold that company and have now developed AltraTech as I still love the idea of using cheap silicon chips to provide high quality results. So we’ve developed this chip which can detect variances in meat and detect if there is a problem. It will be a kit that companies can use and it will be contained in a box with a USB unit no bigger than the size of a small lunchbox.

This will have a cumulative cost of €3m-€5m in development?

Yes that’s right. We recently received just over €900,000 from the Kernel Capital Fund which will get us just to the next stage. Total investment for the development of the project will be much bigger. This is because this a project which will need to scale up and maintain the quality of the product and when you’re dealing with silicon chips that standard has to be maintained. After that, the export opportunity is huge and will mean a scaling-up of employment and premises.

So people may look and see investment in the millions but the return for that investment will be much greater and we are looking at a global industry here. Major chip manufacturers would append twice, at least, just to get a new chip off the ground, so this is all relative to us and what we’re going to achieve.

Many tech companies look to build and exit, but you want to build and keep an Irish company?

Yes; having said that, every venture capitalist wants to exit within a few years. But what has changed in Ireland over the past five to 10 years is that scale-up funds now exist for businesses to grow and build their company.

Enterprise Ireland has been instrumental in developing companies which now have a choice which wasn’t really there before. You can exit or maintain and grow. I want something that my children might find employment in and where graduates can turn for a job.

We’re ideally situated in Shannon with an international airport 10 minutes away. But that choice is one we’ll make when we come to it. Right now we have the task of taking the company to the next level.

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