People: Getting investors hooked

Professor Mike Thwaites and his Hampshire neighbour Barry Holton are tapping wealthy backers for £1 million to advance their company, Plasma Quest, which claims to have the new generation of thin film technique, able to provide ever thinner layers that are exact in microscopic depth and able to put materials onto heat-sensitive plastic and other surfaces. Current technology, involving a process known as ‘sputtering’, has helped develop the thin film business into a little-known but vast global industry with global turnover of £200 billion and applications ranging from spectacles and computer hard drives to solar energy.

However, it cannot cope with newer demands now being made for coating plastic and flexible surfaces for the flexible electronics market, argue Thwaites, a former scientist with BOC, and Holton, an engineer. This, they contend, is where Plasma Quest’s technology comes in and so they have launched  ‘Project Purple’, seeking partnership and/or funding to bring the company’s ‘Planer Plasma Source’ equipment to market, with help from Tony Williams of Wessex Ventures, now a non-executive director.

Thwaites founded Plasma Quest in his home town of Hook in 1998 after leaving BOC and taking much of his laboratory equipment home with him. From next door, Holton was intrigued by this and joined the company a year later.

Since then, Plasma Quest has been developing and refining its technology, with government grants, income from hardware sales to the UK, the USA and China and contract research and development, using local students. ‘We are known as the University of Hook,’ boasts Holton, who suggests a stock market flotation or trade sale could provide backers with a profitable exit.