Having shown huge promise and potential among investors, ioLight has almost finished its crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube having overfunded by 11 percent of its target.
ioLight make laboratory grade microscopes that fit in your pocket, allowing scientists to capture beautiful high-resolution images onto a tablet or phone in the field rather than back in the lab.
“As well as improving the quality of science, it saves the cost and time of returning to site to collect better samples.”
ioLight has been popular among many customers, including the Eden project, universities; schools, vets, pathologists and micro-engineering companies.
According to Cambridge university, ioLight “produces high-quality images for rapid and high-resolution inspection of many samples, and is extremely convenient to use.”
The science startup forecasts sales of over £30k in the period ending March 2017. Microscopes are priced at £700 with gross margins of 55-70 percent depending on the sales commission.
Having already raised £158k in March 2015 from friends and £242k in autumn 2015 from Crowdcube for the project, the company have been put up to a good start. They also received 85k of InnovateUK Smart award and a £42k R&D tax credit.
The use of this round of funds will be to recruit sales and admin people, sales and marketing PR and exhibitions and product development to increase sales.
Regarding an exit strategy, the founder and CEOs of ioLight know there are plenty of possible options.
“Kano Computing makes kits for children to build computers and learn to program them using the same Raspberry Pi processor as ioLight. Kano was founded in January 2013 and closed a US$15 million funding round in May 2015 with a pre-money valuation of $31 million. ioLight plans to follow a similar trajectory.”
The business have one day left on Crowdcube having overfunded their £250,000 target. They offer an equity of 13.75 percent.