With their experience of working at Cambridge Silicon Radio, Paul Egan and his co-founders decided to use their knowledge and expertise to build a new business.

In 2010, after a few months of brainstorming in their living rooms, they decided to focus on connectivity for the Internet of Things or machine-to-machine type communication.

After three years of development, Neul’s technology is now being tested by network provider BT.

In the year ahead, the company plans to engage with other operators around the world to move their business to the next stage.

Q&A with Paul Egan, co-founder of Neul

We asked him about his experience and reflections on starting up.

You started off in Cambridge – did you think about moving to the startup hub in London?

I have never considered London to be a startup place for hard tech. I don’t know if this is personal, borne out by experience, but places like Cambridge seem to have a cluster which is less afraid of failing. I think for us, in terms of the business, we’re going to have to probably leave the technical development there, but the commercial side I think will probably gravitate down to London where network operators, multinationals and large enterprises are. We think if that’s ultimately where our market is going to be then we need to be near them.

Is it an advantage having experience in the tech community before starting up?

We certainly relied on the network of people we’d had previously. So most of us, certainly the commercial team and the technical team, leant very heavily on a lot of favours that we had from people that we know.

How did you go about choosing investors and the right type of funding for your startup?

It’s always a very good idea to take money from people that can stand their money in any future rounds. If you’re saying you’re going to need three rounds of funding, say, first round five, second round ten, third round 20 million – whatever the numbers happen to be – you need to make sure you can bring your investors along with you and they’re able to actually keep contributing; because the worst thing is to have to get the different set of investors in each round.