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21 February 2024

Two King's entrepreneurs receive Innovate UK Awards

King's entrepreneurs are amongst 233 recipients of Innovate UK’s £6m boost for UK’s innovation talent.

Photo of Francis Jones and Gemma Archer
Francis Jones (founder of STEM@Home) and Gemma Archer (co-founder of Researcher Searcher)

Gemma Archer, co-founder of Researcher Searcher and Francis Jones, founder of STEM@Home have been selected amongst 233 innovators across the UK to receive support from Innovate UK.

Through the competition, Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency has released £6.2 million in grants to tackle some of the UK’s biggest societal challenges. Depending on the stage of the business, winners have either been awarded a £5,000 grant, plus £10,000 contribution to living expenses or a £50,000 grant. Winners also receive tailored business support to help them grow and thus stimulate the UK economy.

Researcher Searcher (previously Linkovate)

Researcher Searcher is a search engine, using advanced NLP technology to make it easy to find relevant researchers across all disciplines. It aims to speed-up time associated with finding researchers based on their area of expertise, fostering better collaboration, innovation and knowledge exchange.

It's co-founded by Gemma Archer, an epidemiologist and Visiting King’s Research Associate in the Department of Psychological Medicine.

Gemma is an active member of the Entrepreneurship Institute’s Women Entrepreneurs Network, is a former Idea Factory competition winner and also scaled her idea through King’s Accelerator offer.

 

We are thrilled and grateful to have won an Innovate UK Award. This funding marks a significant milestone in our journey and will help us transform Researcher Searcher into a market-ready product. We are excited to take a step closer to our vision to ensure that the right researchers can converge effortlessly to help accelerate innovation.

Gemma Archer, Visiting King’s Research Associate and co-founder of Researcher Searcher.

STEMatHome

STEM@HOME provides curated boxes of science equipment for secondary school students to access their science practicals outside the classroom. It aims to save the education system time, money and resources and improve accessibility to high-quality education, by empowering students in their own environments.

It was founded by Francis Jones, a King’s Alumnus in MA STEM Education and an experienced science teacher, who is currently doing a PhD in education research.

Francis Jones was a finalist in the SantanderX and Mayor of London’s Entrepreneur competitions. He was also a finalist in the Foundervine Gamechanger Awards 2023 (Social Enterprise Category) and a finalist in UCL's GlobalEdTech Labs competition. 

It means a lot that Innovate UK, a government organisation, understands the importance of developing science skills amongst the UK’s students, to improve innovation in our country. The funding will help us to expand our team, scale our product offerings, improve the value of our products and most importantly, start shipping internationally. We have had lots of interest from international and private schools abroad and we want to be able to start accepting these orders.

Francis Jones, King's Alumnus and founder of STEMatHome

In this story

Francis Jones

Alumnus of the STEM Education MA