Redback-Systems

James Bradley: Welcome, everybody. My name is James Bradley and I will be looking up to this chatroom this evening. I've had the fortunate experience of watching the Redback team over the last six or seven months of their own journey. It's been super impressive to see what they've done in that time and I think couldn't have been evidenced any better than tonight than Matt winning the Stanford Scholarship. We'll start off with a huge congratulations to Matt. That's just amazing news.

Matt Van Breugel: Thank you, James.

James: Yes, no worries. Look, I won't delve into anything about me. It's about these guys tonight so we might just start with a quick 20 or 30 seconds each, if you guys could just introduce yourselves and what you bring to the team, that would be fantastic.

Matt: Thank you, James. My name is Matt Van Breugel, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Redback Systems. My background is in diamond-based nanoscience, so engineering quantum systems. I finished my PhD quite recently and bringing some experimental skills and software development skills across into the team, but also coordinating our strategy towards commercialization in the future. Thank you.

Tobias: Hi, my name is Tobias. I'm as well a co-founder and I'm the CTO of the team. I'm mostly responsible for product development. My background is physics and astronomy. I did a PhD in astronomy, building high-resolution spectrometers which are quite similar to what we're building at Redback Systems. That's what I'm doing.

Lachlan: Hi, I'm Lachlan. My background is in making diamonds glow for quantum technologies. In that, I've worked in labs and built software control systems for many experiments. I bring to this team knowledge of spectroscopy applications and experience with developing software for users to operate instruments.

Thomas Volz: Hi, my name is Thomas Volz. I'm an Associate Professor at Macquarie University in experimental quantum science. I've worked across many different quantum systems and therefore, I've got quite an extended network of collaborators across different fields and in the Redback Systems team. I bring that network to the table and I'm the strategic partnerships manager and look after grants as well.

Christian Schwab: Hi, my name is Christian Schwab. I'm leading the exoplanet group at Macquarie University. We build high-resolution exoplanet spectrometers in my lab, which I'm sitting in. In this lab, we develop the technology that goes into our product. I will provide technology input and expertise in how to do the optics for upcoming products for our company.

David Coutts: Hello, everyone. I'm David Coutts, I'm a professor in optical and laser physics at Macquarie University. I bring 30 years experience of working in optics and lasers working with companies. I'm also a senior academic in the university with a particular interest in intellectual property. I handle the relations between the university and the intellectual property side of Redback Systems.

James: Wonderful. Just a little bit of housekeeping for anyone who wants to ask questions, there's an app that you can go to and pop those questions in there. We will also monitor as best we can the chat here as well. If you could use the app, that will make my life easy and that's always good. We'll start off tonight with a good question was about the big opportunity that this presents in the world. Maybe, Matt, if you could just speak to currently what competition is out there both in the market or what you believe is under development and how you guys separate yourselves from those and what's so special about the great work that you guys are doing.

Matt: There is spectrometer competition but we have the unique skill set of being experts in spectrometer design. Some people in this room have spent their careers building spectrometers. Where we're unique and can highlight ourselves is by being able to achieve such high resolution over such a broad wavelength range. We're currently using the visible spectrum we go. We simultaneously acquired from 400 to 1,070 at approximately 11 picometer resolution. I'll share my screen just shortly to show a bit of the competition out there but just want you to note that our first market is going into physics research labs like we talked about in that video that we just saw. From there, is to use the inherent stability of our designs. We have no moving parts. We're moving towards hermetically sealing the casing. After we roll out into our physics market with our RS50k spectrometer, we then move to develop RS50k-R, which is that same technology further developed for rugged environments. I'll just share my screen for one moment. You can see here, we looked at all the competitors in the field there and we're excelling in both the high resolution and the small footprint of the device. Thanks, James.

James: It really helps if I'm not on mute, doesn't it?

Matt: Yes.

James: A question that's gathered a bit of momentum here is about how you might align yourselves with Sustainability Development Goals, which is an interesting question for a spectrometer. Have you guys got some-- It might be a little bit of new thinking for you but if you've got some thoughts around that.

Matt: Yes, and I'll hand over to David.

David: Yes, there's a number of the goals that are actually relevant to us, particularly as we move on to our second market sector which is looking at pairing our technology with spectroscopy techniques such as laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy for example. Techniques which allow you to look at analyzing materials in the field, for example. That gets to things like clean water, it gets to the sustainability goal of responsible consumption and production. Particularly production, we want to be as efficient as possible in production. It could get to things like even in the introduction we looked at the quality of foods, products, so that gets them through to things like good health and monitoring for that. Obviously, one of the sustainability goals is around innovation and infrastructure and that's what we're doing is trying to build a new industry as well.

James: Really good. There's a question here about resolution. Matt you touched on a number of picometers a moment ago. All of us out there that can't wrap our head around what a picometer is, can you give us a sense of what the resolution looks like?

Matt: Essentially it's at least 100 times better than what we're getting on a conventional spectrometer that we're actively using in our research labs. Let's look at this picture here behind me. This is how we image the optical spectrum here. We go from down the blue and so around 400 nanometers, and we get up into the near-infrared regard to 1070 nanometers. That's the range that we simultaneously acquire. Actually, it looks like this on our camera obviously not in color. Then we're able to break that down into over 100,000 individual data points. One really good way to imagine what this would look like, I'll just share my screen. Again, if we were to display this data on 4K computer monitors, if we mapped one pixel of our data to one pixel on the screens, you'd need approximate 32 4k computer screens to view all that data at once.

James: Matt, you're going to be a mad gamer. [laughs] Sorry, bad joke. There's a question here about having an app. I know you guys have been pretty passionate about having a really good supporting software. Can you guys just speak to that a little bit or maybe Lachlan?

Matt: Sure thing, I'll hand over to Lachlan our software developer for that.

Lachlan: The first thing that I should say right up front is obviously we can't get all of the functionality just with an app. This thing requires hardware and it requires hardware that is much more compact than conventional spectrum. They're suitcase size, this thing is shoebox size but that's still a little bigger than a smartphone or a table. We do need that hardware because that's what breaks the light up into its colors and its measure. Once the signal has been measured onto the imaging detector, then that data needs to be handled and interpreted and processed to be used by the end-user. Given that our first market and our earlier adopters are physicists and research labs, we haven't at this stage been developing apps or mobile devices. It turns out in research labs physicists tend to operate with computers and often operate with permanently installed desktop computers. We are innovating in the way that that data gets displayed for exactly the reason that Matt just showed. Because we capture so much data in one snapshot without needing moving parts and longtime scans, we are developing software tricks that are going to help users look at the parts of a spectrum that contain the valuable information and potentially open pathways for retrospective reanalysis of data by looking in different colors, regions that you didn't originally think had the information. It's certainly possible down the track for this to be partnered up with apps. I suspect that the data is going to be so dense it's going to be awkward to use on a phone-sized screen but certainly tablets and other mobile devices absolutely possible. We'll be doing our best to understand the needs of customers, to listen to them, and to make sure that we can provide the interfaces that help them with the minimum friction possible achieve the task that they need to transform the world.

James: Really good. A fun question here Matt, now that you're going to Stanford, how long until Stanford has one of these in their lab, mate? You've [unintelligible 00:12:06] there's some pressure here, would you reckon? [crosstalk]

Matt: I'll get to know people there. On that question when can we be expecting to see devices in research labs, we're looking to ship out first early adopter devices in October of this year. From them, we'll gather feedback into a full commercial launch in the middle of 2021.

James: Really good. An interesting question about this technology, so this is a fairly transformative technology that potentially unlocks a whole pull of new markets. I'm curious to hear in five years' time, what do you think the application potential for this product is if you thought that through or is there new things coming up all the time? Can you just give us a sense of that?

Matt: It seems to be for most places that we look we discover applications where we can bring out technology. At the start of On Prime about a year ago, we didn't really know where we were going. We knew that we liked this product and we had people who were visiting our labs, seeing our prototypes asking, "Where can I buy one?" Since then, we went and we did a whole lot of market research. A lot of the places we looked there wasn't a need for extreme resolution that we can provide but some places where there was a need, that was really where we have the capability to excel on this. Typically where we are bringing lab-grade resolution, cutting edge optical resolution and we're taking it outside of the lab. Where you don't need vibration control, you don't need air condition, you don't need environmental control with air conditioning. We hope to see ourselves become a provider of bespoke spectrometer solutions to very, very hard to solve problems. That's where we want to be. We want people who have problems to go, "I think I can solve this with spectroscopy. Redback Systems is the leader in developing spectroscopy solutions for adverse environments." That's where we hope to go. Our future is still being shaped and please, I invite anyone listening with questions, ideas about whether they may see the new applications, and new markets unlocked by higher resolution spectroscopy outside of the lab to get in contact with us. You can do that by emailing us at contact@redback.systems or via our website which is www.redback.systems because we are looking for technology partnerships.

James: Someone just popped in a question here about using your device for LIBS. Could you just explain what LIBS is and what market that might unlock for you?

Matt: I'll hand over to David for a LIBS explanation just in summary.

David: LIBS is when you fire a laser at something and it causes a spark at the surface if you fire a pulsed laser. You can look at the color of the light coming from that spark, you can actually tell what the thing you fired the laser at is made of. An example of this is the ChemCam on the Mar's Curiosity rover that fires a laser at Mar's rocks, it can tell what the rock is made of. We're very enthusiastic about the ability to take this technique out into the field rather than having to take a rock back to a laboratory to analyze its mineral composition. We can be able to take this out into the field so you can do measurements on-site in a mining environment.

James: Great. I imagine LIBS is used for a whole bunch of other kinds of things as well?

David: It's a very powerful technique for analysis of materials. It can be used for example in a production line making metals to analyze composition in metals all the way through to looking for contaminants, pollutants. Use it in life sciences. You can use it in exploration minerals. It's a broad applicable spectral analysis technique for looking at composition of materials.

James: Matt, can you talk to me a little bit about so you've been through a pretty amazing seven months at the team. What do you think the next 6 to 12 months is going to look like given what the last 6 or 12 months has looked like?

Matt: If we've learned anything out of the last 6 or 12 months, we have learned that things change very, very quickly. What we anticipate doing is rolling out our earlY adopter program to up to 10 early adopters in Australia and internationally and gathering the feedback from those users, incorporating it before full commercial launch in the middle of next year. Now, we've also unlocked some funding to accelerate market research into our second market segment which we are looking to be minerals exploration. We're going to start R&D in that segment as well and try to connect with other infrastructure markets inside Australia. Looking to connect with the defense industry as well we hope.

James: An interesting question has popped in on the Zoom chat here about big data. Obviously, you're collecting a lot of data with the samples. Is there an AI play with all of this to do some deeper learning do you think? It's a left-field question, apology. Lachlan, this is on you, mate. [laughs]

David: Lachlan on mute?

Lachlan: Sorry about that. I think that there is some scope there and it's something that we are at the very early stages of exploring. We've got some work to do before then. I guess one thing to point out is when people talk about big data as a phrase, they often mean data sets that are far, far bigger. Our data is big for a spectrometer but it's still essentially a one-dimensional list of values. That's a lot smaller than the data that might be collected at a radio astronomy telescope measuring hour on hour on hour of radio signals coming from space. Those sorts of things. However, the fact that we're recording the entire color spectrum all at once does mean that you have the option to go back and look for information in your data that you weren't looking at when you first recorded it. I have done this with our early prototype of that device on experimental data that I recorded in our research lab. I know it's possible and it's a really transformative way of thinking about how you're recording that information. Yes, the scope of AI, artificial intelligence and lots of clever algorithms finding interesting features that you might be overlooking to make that more accessible and more normal accessible and more normal is a very important way to move some of the science that is done with spectrometers forward. Frankly, it could actually be surprising how much new, interesting, innovative science is discovered because of clever algorithms looking at long, large data sets that we're going to be recording by default.

James: Great. It's probably a good segway into what kind of things have you used this device for so far? So far, where has it been?

Matt: Let me actually show you instead of just talking. I'm just showing now our current prototype. This is prototype one. What we had before prototype one was prototype zero, which was actually a device developing in Christian's lab for exoplanet detection that was developed in Christian's lab by Tobi. Prototype zero was, like I said, a fully-fledged research spectrometer used for the identification of exoplanets around foreign stars. You need extreme wavelength precision and accuracy looking for small shifts to go, "Hey, there's a planet orbiting around that star." That prototype was about probably 40 centimeters by 60 centimeters. We miniaturized that. What you can see in your screen, that's prototype one, and that has a physical footprint more than an A4 piece of paper. We have that prototype running in active research labs. Chris is holding it up there. That is doing experiments in research labs. For those scientifically minded, here's just a sample data set that we're gathering there. That's a measurement just across two nanometers. It's really important to recognize that we are not just recording across two nanometers, we're recording from 400 up to 1070. You can zoom right in and you still get really, really nice resolution there.

James: Wonderful. If I was to ask you to sell me one, how much am I looking at at the moment do you think?

Matt: What we're looking to do is roll out our early adopter program, like I've already spoken about, but we'll take up to 10 early adopters, and we'll put one of these in those people's laps for A$30,000. After we wrap up the early adopter program for those first 10 users, we'll look to go with our commercial device, which we'll incorporate all that feedback. We'll sell middle of next year, and we're looking to put that on the market for between 50 and A$60,000. Sorry to cut you off there. [crosstalk] What is really important to us as researchers is to deliver this product which really has specifications which are put in the envelope, and to give it to any research group. Not just those that are really, really well funded. We want anybody to be able to get one of these in their labs.

James: How do you feel about the scalability from if you make 1,000, is there a scope for this product to become normal in price, the cost with high values?

Matt: I'll turn it over to our hardware guys. Tobi, perhaps you could discuss.

Tobias: Sorry, could you please repeat the question?

James: Yes. Sorry. In the future as you start making more of these, how scalable is the price point? Is it likely to get cheaper or there are some fixed cost in there that don't mean that the price will come down with volume?

Tobias: Absolutely. It's scalable and it can be cheaper because at the moment we buy in low quantities. Especially the tech was quite expensive, but we are planning to integrate that into the device. If you start purchasing more, the price goes down with all the parts and bits and pieces. Even machining of the enclosure and everything else which is involved, 100%. At the moment, we do around 10 early adopter devices which we cannot drop in price much I think .

James: There's a question about the availability of your pitch during the videos here tonight, which I believe the on team will be making available later on just for everyone today. It probably raises a question. For people who want to get involved with you guys and understand what's happening, how is it best for people to come and interact with Redback Systems at the moment?

Matt: People who would like to get in contact with us straight away because we are looking for technology partnerships and a very small amount of additional early adopters, not much room left in that 10 person limited program, you can email us directly right now with contact@redback.systems. We have our website as well where we have some renders of our device. There's a contact us form there. If you drop us a line through that form, we can shoot you through a spec sheet of the specifications that we will be delivering next year. Of course, we set up a LinkedIn as well where we try and post some regular updates, but it's also a channel for you to reach out and get a spec sheet. Just Redback Systems on LinkedIn. Primarily after this, if people are interested in seeing a spec sheet on what we're going to deliver, reach out to us via the website which is redback.systems.

Lachlan: Given the theme of the night, if you're on Twitter, you can follow us @redbacksys.

James: Perfect. Wonderful. What's the hashtag, Lachlan?

Lachlan: Hello. [laughs] The hashtag for tonight is ONDemoNight.

James: Very good. I know you guys totally hate technical questions, and I love them. The technical question here about scaling into IR. Is that possible? What does that look like?

Matt: I'll throw that over to Christian.

Christian: Sorry, can you repeat the question? I'm trying to answer questions in the chat.

James: Yes, all right, mate. The ability for the system to scale into the mid-IR range. Someone's asking about infrared.

Christian: Yes. Optically, that's certainly possible. Some of us have worked in optical systems for the mid-IR. The mid-IR the problem is always the detector. The underlying technology that really separates how we build spectrometers today compared to 10 years ago is largely detector technology. We make full use of the new capabilities in large, multimillion pixel detectors that can be read out fast to make our product do what it does, record a lot of data fast. I don't see this happening right now in mid-infrared detector technologies. That's a bit different in near-infrared detector technologies. We have indium gallium arsenide detectors here. Actually, the black box behind me contains one. It's a fairly new product, so we're exploring the wavelength range between something like 950 and 700 nanometers near-IR where there's a lot of molecular spectroscopy happening. For the mid-IR, we can in principle adapt our technology and make it just as small but the detector power is just not there right now.

James: Hopefully whoever asked that question understood the answer. [laughs]

Tobias: You need more pixels, or you need a lot of pixels to do exciting stuff. That's the underlying thing.

James: A question, so what's your mate? Obviously, you've got a really highly skilled team who's built a great product. Given that it's likely that it's going to do great things, what stops another team from just following in right behind you? What's the thing that allows you to keep ahead of the competition?

Matt: We have an IP strategy. I'll just display what I've got here, and then I'll let David talk on that.

David: The key core technology of the type of device we're producing has been around for a long time. It's only in recent times there's been some technologies available that let us build something that's compact and affordable. What we're doing is protecting the core IP through the key algorithms. These are ways that we have to calibrate our device because calibration is key. There's no point having data if it's not actually calibrated and you don't know what you need to learn. One thing we're doing is we calibrate in-house and then we can ship a device with a calibration file but the calibration process and algorithms remain as trade secrets within Redback Systems. That's how we can protect our core technology. The other thing of course is just getting in early to market with a product that people will love. That's the thing that got us most excited down this pathway. When people saw what we could do in a lab and a compact device and say, "I want one," and we say, "We're going to deliver."

James: Yes, great. Sorry I had to duck out there because all these good things at home, children coming running into the room and I didn't want to be that guy. You've spoken about your early adopters and future markets. Now, I imagine that at some point you'll need some funding to reach future markets. What does your future funding look like as far as raising or how do you think you're going to play that out?

Matt: Thanks, James. I'll hand over to Thomas to address this question.

Thomas: Thanks, Matt. First of all, I think we should also mention our first funder which really made all of this possible which is the Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems which three of us are part of. We received an early batch of funding for that through the transitional research program and that was really helpful to get us going and develop our prototype which only made this whole endeavor possible. We hope to work with them in the future and we also hope to apply for another round of funding. Beyond that, we have just recently submitted a funding application to the New South Wales Physical Sciences Fund. We'll see how that will turn out. We are going to seek also other funding sources through grants to keep us going which then will allow us to bootstrap our first science market. Once we've established that and we're confident and have a ruggedized version of our product, we'll then go out and seek funding to scale into the bigger markets, into industrial markets. That is currently the plan.

Matt: Thanks, Thomas. That funding when we do look through our second market, and we're looking at a range of options be it venture capital, angel investment or a technology partnership directly with somebody who has a problem to be solved. We are looking to provide bespoke solutions so we want to work with technology partnerships.

James: Great. Have we got any more fresh questions? I'm reading so I'm going to share your screen, all your questions disappear.

Matt: I might add then while you have a read.

James: All right, mate.

Matt: We are very happy to be featured in CSIRO's quantum roadmap just earlier in the week. We're also really looking with our scientific technology, our lab technology to be a supporter of Australians' future, not just scientific industries but our future quantum industry that we hope to see grow and we hope to support that as much as possible. We are located in Sydney. Plenty of opportunities with spinoff companies coming out of universities in the Sydney Quantum Academy going forward.

James: Great, thank you. Obviously, in order to progress this technology in the future, you're going to want some pretty good partnerships with people using-- I think you spoke a little bit about it before but if you could name your top five people to come to you tomorrow afternoon with an email saying, "Hey, I want to partner up with Redback Systems to do some really cool work," where do you think they would sit potentially?

Matt: Potentially, we'd love to connect with people who are in minerals exploration. People who want to do materials analysis in environments outside of a lab so look to realtime or near-realtime solutions in the field. On top of that, we'd love to connect with a larger technology provider perhaps in the defense industry. As we know, we really feel in bringing this resolution outside of the lab into something which is tolerant of temperature changes, humidity changes, vibration, and dusty atmospheres. That's where we're interested. Those are two there right now where we're interested. Now, I'll also hand over to Thomas who could perhaps comment on food and water monitoring.

Thomas: Yes. Certainly, there is scope to be in process monitoring. We've talked to people who indicated that maybe in battery production there could be a market to monitor battery production and food processing, farmer industry maybe. These are all markets that we can go into potentially in the future. The first core markets are really mining and minerals exploration, we've got contacts there already, and also the defense sector which we're really looking to link strongly into. We're aware that we don't provide a full solution to their problems at this point but we want to partner up with some of their partners to provide our specific spectrometer solution that can help to enable full systems for them. That's where we stand.

James: Something that you guys have mentioned a couple of times that's probably worth delving into a little bit is about the resilience of your product and its ability to withstand vibration and out of the lab environments. Can you just set the scene a little bit as to the difference between the standard spectrometers out there and what you're able to offer as far as a resilient, tough product?

Matt: Yes. What we see is for spectrometers that are already operating outside the lab, you're not achieving high resolution. There's a lot of playroom with just when we say high resolution, different industries think high resolution is different things. We see devices that are really you can pick it up and use it with your hands but lower resolution. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have devices in research labs. They can be one meter by a meter or they can be what Chris has got behind him there that's about two meters by one meter. Those are the devices which are achieving what we classify as high resolution. That's what we classify as physicists. What we're able to do is pack it down into a box. Chris, if you could just hold up the device there behind you. This device, we haven't gone through formal testing. We put this in our backpack actually when we went to show it to some people in Sydney late last year.

Christian: [crosstalk] in my backpack today.

Matt: Yes, with no case around it. We're talking about a device that can really-- It can measure at 11 picometer spectrum resolution and we're just put it in a backpack. It wasn't even going into a case when we were moving that around.

James: I believe you took it on the Sydney rails which is as an environment, pretty rugged, right?

Matt: That's right. [laughter]

Thomas: We should probably say that our secret dream is to put it one day on a Mars Rover to replace the current spectrometers that are out there. That's really the vision but we don't tell that to anyone outside the team.

James: The secret dream of every physicist ever, right?

Thomas: That's right.

Lachlan: Technically, James, that ruggedness is enabled in large part by the fact that our product has no moving parts. I know Matt already mentioned this and Tobi and Christian have already mentioned this. A lot of big spectrometers have gradings that have to scan, internal mirrors that have to move. Ours is entirely static parts and that really opens the door for all sorts of rugged applications and rugged builds. The prototype that Christian held up that survived city rail in Sydney is just an early product type. It's not even anywhere near a final production case.

James: It is a question you guys have answered in text here around putting these things on drones for exploration and whatnot. I guess it raises what ranges of field of view can this thing handle? Does it need to be a foot away? Can it be any distance away? Can you just speak a little bit about the practical application of it?

Matt: That's where we look to become, an OEM supplier, an Original Equipment Manufacturer of a larger system. Our device is something that goes at the end. The light comes into us and we can break it down for the analysis. We'd need to partner with a larger system to build the light collection. Specifically, on drones, we are keeping size, weight, and power in mind. For the devices going into labs, they don't need to be that light but it's all in mind. We're targeting between three to five kilograms, low-power dual as well just to keep those swap requirements in mind.

James: Is there a scope down the track to make this smaller or is [crosstalk] limitation?

Tobias: Absolutely. We are already planning to have a device that has a little bit less than resolution but potentially a quarter of the size. We're still having a high-resolution capability and the snapshot of the entire wavelength range from the visible incident in the infrared, that's in the planning but most likely push to next year. We are busy with our early adopter products.

Matt: That's right. We're really focusing on getting the zero product so say out the door and onto people's lab benches, so we can learn from the resources interaction with our devices as well. Really important to note also, we touched on infrared earlier. We were capable of reworking this design to work in the infrared. For that, we needed a partnership or a funding pathway forward.

James: Fantastic.

Christian: If I can chip in on the drones, we also have strong capability within the university for people who do drone exploration in the school of engineering. I work with some of them. This is a very interesting topic for sure. There is a lot of interest within the university, but also in the general exploration sector of being able to fly your analysis equipment to where you need it. The distance from the object that we look at is not a problem for the spectrometer or for the optics in front of it but it's hard to cover a large field of view working in charts. That is an interesting trade-off that we already have looked into for actually the system in front of it. I've done a study like this before.

James: We've got another technical question while you're going, Chris. How accurate is the wavelength calibration in your spectrometer?

Chris: [chuckles] That's a tough question. My native research is a lot on wavelength calibration. We always try and do better than what's been done before. The prototype as is is probably stable to a couple of picometers out of the box. We can do better. We certainly can do better. We can do better in the lab. A lot of that is expertise in the software and trying to really figure out what the spectrometer is doing rather than put a lot of work into this. With calibration in the lab and enhanced calibration procedures before the measurement, we really should be able to push that down well below a picometer. The precision of these devices is factor 10, factor 20 higher than the native resolution. If the resolution is 50,000 then the stability is about a million or so when we really pull all the tricks up.

James: Cool. Very good. If they look at you guys seven months ago when I first met you, a bunch of fresh, broad-eyed researches from Macquarie University, you'd give people a sense of how you all see yourselves in the next little while is going to continue research, is Redback a full-time, part-time. Just so people have got some idea of what post-Accelerate looks like.

Matt: Thanks, James. We're looking at an agreement with Macquarie where we can start to operate and work closely with the university in a bit of a short-term partnership. Then as we slowly grow and move away, we look to be moving eventually off-campus and setting up for operations nearby because we want to stay closely connected. We've identified which team members will jump essentially into a full-time role, and which team members will move to a hybrid model in half academia, half industry, and which team members will stay at the universities but still affiliated and advising and inputting strongly to our company. We never want to move away from our research heritage and where the device has been seeded from. We want to continue to work closely with our home institution. Yes, we have identified people who will jump into a company full-time in the very near time future.

Lachlan: If I could just in there, James. For some people in the team who are not planning to jump entirely out of their academic careers having worked pretty hard to get where they are, the ON program and the training that we've had, and the experience and exposure and mentorship that we've had actually has transformed and improved and enhanced our ability to function even just within the academic case. For all of the investors out there, you've got to realize that working as an academic, as a professor, getting research grants to continually fund the operations in the lab, it's almost like being a startup founder continually stuck in a cycle of series A funding applications.

James: Brutal [laughs] . I guess it raises an interesting question. Dave, you might have some thoughts about this as to the shift potentially in the way that academia and research is moving. It's a little bit left-field but moving towards this model where research is starting to look for application.

David: Absolutely. Look, this coming from many different directions at once. The government introduced the engagement and impact assessment of universities and that's looking at what a university is doing to encourage and foster impact. The universities have risen to that challenge. We have the ON program helping us to achieve that. Macquarie University is really supportive of groups like us going down this pathway. We were very excited to have two teams in the ON Accelerate program this time with the hygiene team, as well as Redback. Look further to Lachlan's point, one of my roles is around supporting commercialization within the university. I've learned a huge amount here. I've been an evangelist for the ON program from the outset and it was time to join it myself. The university wants this to happen. I think it's really good, exactly as Lachlan said, it's actually good for us as researchers to be thinking about the full past life of research from a clever idea all the way through to where we can actually deliver that impact ourselves or in partnership with others. This kind of program, the Accelerate program, the opportunity that the university gives us to start a spinout company they're hugely valuable and really exciting. I think it's actually a great transition for Australia to be going down this pathway. I'm really excited to be part of it.

James: I'm glad that was recorded. That was really good, Dave. Thank you. I guess you want to continue. How's the, for what you can talk about, the exit strategy from the university? How's that looking from partnerships with the university formally? Can you speak just for people who don't quite understand that process? Can you speak to that a little bit?

Matt: I will but I'll just speak briefly on it. It's quite an in-depth answer. It's been quite a healthy relationship with the university, which we really want to look to continue to the future. We'll work hard for that. We want to, like I said, not forget where our heritage is. We're in negotiations with the university's tech transfer office, and they're progressing quite well. We're very happy with where we're going.

James: Really great.

Matt: James, if I may, we actually got a question via email. I'm just going to read that out and then throw it over to Chris to answer. We received the question, could your spectrometer be used to sense trace gas concentrations in the air? I'll throw that over to you Christian.

Christian: Thank you. This depends on what trace gas you're talking about, but in principle, absolutely. This is what the spectrometers that this one stems from originally it's meant to do. We're looking for biomarkers in exoplanet atmospheres. We're looking for oxygen, for carbon dioxide, for methane. As soon as we overlap with the spectral bands, we can see it. The high resolution often really helps because it enhances your signal if you have a fairly narrow line and isolating this from all the light around it really helps to make it pop out. It's something that we have deep expertise in because we literally look for traces of gases in the atmosphere, not of our planet but other atmospheres. It's the underlying technique that spurred a lot of the development of this technology. I see Philjust now posted that he's interested in methane and methane is something that we can look at and we have looked at. It depends on which line you actually talk about and from wavelengths, but it's something that this thing can do.

Matt: Thanks, Chris. I think that also highlights that we are really interested to create bespoke solutions. If people have a problem, we want to hear about it because we want to be able to take what we know and translate that to solve real-world problems.

James: Fantastic. Matt, I think we'll wrap up on some good news. You've won the Stanford scholarship. You've spent seven months going, I believe from Emory. You submitted your PhD just prior to starting this whole process. The last seven months, if we're talking about rollercoaster rides, it's been one hell of a ride for you. What do you hope to take from your experience at Stanford?

Matt: From the experience in Stanford, I'm really interested-- One of the courses on offer is leadership in innovation. I want to personally become someone who is able to work really closely with my team because that's one thing which is fundamentally important to me in Redback and in any of my outside life as well, is being able to work in a team and lead a team. That's very important to me. I'm really interested to go and learn about that, and how that works in startups, and particularly in these high-tech research-driven startups, and how we can move most effectively to not lose what we have, and in fact, we continue to grow stronger. I believe that further harnesses the technology that we can deliver. By being a better team, we can make better products, we can reach more people, we can learn more problems and create more solutions. That's where I'm really interested in.

James: Sorry. I'm just going to quickly flip to another technical question, Christian. How is concentration measured along a line? I'm assuming you know what that question means. [laughter]

Christian: We can project a line of sight onto the input arbitrary-spectrum. Our spectrometer can measure what the normal spectrum looks like and we can subtract what a spectrum looks like across a column of gas that you have in front of you. I see the question is, can this be scanned across a domain, for example across a lake? Yes, but it depends on the input optics, whatever lens system you have to collect the light. As long as the geometry there works out, our spectrometer can go behind it. It's fiber set normally so it's easy to integrate with any scanning or imaging system and because of the good enhance stability in flat-fielding of the spectrometer, we should see a tiny change in the spectrum. If we don't have a particular line-of-sight defined in the lab, I don't see off the top of my head how we can give a percentage per meter in concentration but we certainly can measure the concentration of an absorptive gas in very small concentrations if the line-of-sight is long enough, if that answers the question.

James: I'm assuming it does, Christian. [chuckles]

Christian: We can take that offline and discuss it. Do tell me if you want to.

James: Yes, if it sounds like a lighter. We've got a whole six minutes left. I'd love for you guys to take this opportunity potentially individually, just to briefly summarize what the last six or seven months has meant for you, because I think there's probably some pretty powerful stories in there. It's your last chance to record it, tell everyone what you've been doing.

Matt: The last six or seven months for me has really ignited a passion for commercialization. To take something that we've seen operating in our lab and been using for experiments and turn that into a product which we can share and enable research and other applications. I've learned so much over this last 7 to 12 months and it's really in that passion I look forward to continuing to learn, to never stop learning.

James: Great. I'll nominate Tobi next.

Tobia: I'm sorry, could you repeat that?

James: Just for everyone, what has the last seven months done for you?

Toby: Oh my God, a lot. We started off with a great idea, but we haven't had much knowledge about how to even contact a potential customer, how to get to know what the customers need and what are the needs and if they really need our device or not, and what applications can this device be used and such on. Of course, Accelerate was pretty insightful with all these courses we've been through. Learning so much new skills and even learning how to pitch in a much better way than we did on Prime. Although for myself, I didn't pitch that much but I quite enjoyed it when I had to. It definitely added a lot to the personal development of each of us, I guess. I hope we have a bright future and a lot of customers are coming and buying our devices.

James: Christian?

Christian: Let me unmute myself. We learned certainly a lot on many fronts, for example, how many hours you can squeeze out of a week, it's only two for some of the week. It was immensely satisfying to see how real-world applicability of something that was developed that I was involved with, a technology that I've spent 15 years working on, that normally for me is very much another world, looking at exoplanets. That this can be made to a product and that this generates a lot of opportunity for growth for us, for the university, for the research lab. A lot of learnings for how to do that was the next idea. It was really amazing. Also, the spirit of the ON programand just see how everyone really jumped in and tried to help between the teams and facilitate us and be our mentor, I think that was a great experience for me, I think for all of us. It's unfortunate that it couldn't be in person all the time, but I think we made the best of it. It was an experience that really changed the outlook on many things in my main job here in the lab. To have gone out of this a bit was something that I would recommend a lot more people should try to do.

James: Wonderful and Lachlan, you've got about 20 seconds.

Lachlan: It's called ON Accelerate. I think it's highlighted the ability and the importance of going fast, pushing outside your comfort zone. It's so valuable to just do stuff that you really need to concentrate on and to learn new things. I think the other thing that it's highlighted for me is just the power of a team. We've been through some really tough challenges, but we've done it together as a team. We've grown together, we've built relationships, we've had tough conversations. That's valuable, whether you're in a startup or anywhere. It's really, really cool to see that highlighted.

James: Awesome, and Thomas.

Thomas: For me, it was just enjoyable to get out of the usual academic life to see how to bring something into the real world, to meet all the people. Also you James thank you very much for your mentorship and your help all the time. That was great. Just meeting all the people of the ON team and hearing their stories, hearing the stories of the other teams, just is very inspiring. I really included a lot of the learnings through the ON program already in the everyday life. As Lachlan pointed out before, it's really been a game-changer for me. I can just recommend it to anyone really. It's fantastic.

James: Finally, a couple of words, Dave.

David: I think we had no idea how much we didn't know about this whole journey. No idea at all. Let's try and sell this thing. Sure. That'll be easy. No, but it's been a fantastic journey I think of learning. It's really good. I echo everything that's been said by the team. It's really good. I really recommend it to anyone.

James: Awesome. We're just about at time. I'll reflect at the end of this, of meeting you guys seven months ago. I believe I may have been guilty of saying I've got this group of Sheldon Cooper physicists wanting to commercialize a product, but they're amazing. They've just dived in and having a crack at everything. I think it is true. We've taken a group of core physicists, and you guys have come out with a product and just goes to show what can actually be done. It's been pretty amazing to just be a small part of it. You guys have done all the work. I've just sat in the background and watched and clapped. Fantastic job. Well done.

Matt: Thank you, James.

James: We’ll wrap this up.

Matt: We owe you a big thank you for your guidance and mentorship along the way. Now, we also thank you to our other mentors that we've interacted with. Big thank you to CSIRO and the ON team, ON facilitators, and ON staff for making everything possible. We really need to thank also our home institution, Macquarie University, for the support that we've received, and to the Center of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems for their ongoing support as well. Thank you to everyone involved, to the team. Thank you, James.

James: All right. It seems a really great way to wrap it up. Thanks to everyone who joined us. Please, get in touch with the Redback team. Thank you. All right guys. Have a great night. [01:02:47] [END OF AUDIO]