Oxford PV started in the University of Oxford’s lab by printing solar cells on tiny pieces of glass. In 2010, the startup spun out of the university and won £100,000 from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), winning an innovation award based on a two-minute pitch.

After licensing their product, founders Paul Vickery, Henry Snaith and Kevin Arthur quickly moved on to securing various seed rounds from venture capital and business angels – £500,000 in 2011 and £5 million in 2013 - to develop their technology further.

In the year ahead, they expect to grow their workforce, raise series B funding, and begin licensing agreements with customers to eventually turn glass-covered, commercial buildings into power stations.

Q&A with Paul Vickery, co-founder of Oxford PV

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

Looking back, what was challenging in developing a startup like yours?

Raising the first million or so is difficult, but not as difficult as the next £5 million. There are lots of enthusiastic angel investors - but if you’re in the world of materials science, physics, and obviously biotech is another order of magnitude, you don’t get very far with a million, you just get started.

Who are your competitors?

It’s a global race and our competitors are startups and universities trying to find the best way to use this breakthrough technology. Larger companies are showing tremendous interest in what we are doing and our objective is to license our technology to those leading global players.

Has Oxford been a good location to start up?

Oxford is already an established technology hub with many technology businesses and a world-class university – this all means it has an excellent talent pool. The ability to go somewhere very local is a huge advantage, particularly when you’ve got engineers talking to other engineers in a different company.

What questions around government interventions would you like to see answered?

What’s the point of government intervention if the startup is eventually bought by a foreign company and goes overseas? The UK has fabulous technology and enough funding to launch a company, but where is the manufacturing done? That will be in Germany, the US, China. I would love to see a new policy that develops financial models to enable advanced pilot manufacturing plants in the UK. For example, funding capital investment in manufacturing through leasing rather than grant funding so companies have access to production facilities but in a way which mitigates the risk of failure.