The Exeter Entrepreneur: Quanterra Systems

Quanterra Systems Ltd provides a robust and affordable measurement of whole ecosystem flows, notably carbon dioxide and water. These are important for enabling high integrity carbon markets and can provide valuable insights that support the improvement of land management practices.

Quanterra System’s journey started when Dr Tim Clement and Dr Tim Hill were working on developing economical ways of measuring carbon flows. One of their research papers, in Global Change Biology, attracted the attention of a large corporate interested in understanding whether there are more affordable, timely and reliable ways of monitoring soil carbon.

They worked together, undertaking a research project exploring this further. As part of this project, it became clear that they would need to form a company to implement their solution at scale. This was the point at which they contacted the Innovation, Impact and Business (IIB) team.

The IIB team recommended the ICURe programme as a good way to explore options associated with commercialisation and validate their ideas in the marketplace.

Dr Beccy Mitchell, co-founder of Quanterra Systems, said: “The ICURe programme helped us decide on our business model and target markets, as well as helping to identify what further developments would be needed to make our approach commercially viable.”

Quanterra is currently in the process of finalising seed funding and has secured an Innovate UK grant that has allowed them to employ their first members of staff. They’re focussing on continuing to develop their service and business proposition whilst also working on improving the logistics associated with deploying their services overseas.