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Latest - Organisation: Alacrity Foundation

Ellie Coyte

Ellie Coyte is Founder and Head of Marketing at Haelu, a start-up which builds software to support health and social care.  She  joined the Alacrity Foundation after graduating in 2020 and that provided her with mentors and enabled her to develop the concept behind Haelu’s product. It also introduced her to the fellow students with whom she set up the business.

Haelu’s tool empowers social care workers without clinical training to record signs and symptoms, and alerts them when a health professional is needed. “The aim is to help meet people’s needs earlier so that they can live happier and healthier lives,” she says. ”Because while people are tending to live longer they are not necessarily healthier.”  She also hopes it will help social care workers be more valued by giving them a means of sharing much of the knowledge they already have about people they work with.

It is early days and the tool is still under development. However, Ellie believes it has the potential to be adopted in health authorities across Wales and the rest of the UK and Haelu is going through an intensive growth period which she finds stimulating and rewarding. “The best thing about this situation is having room to grow,” she says. “It’s so exciting to be always learning something new that you didn’t know yesterday.

Sean Coutts

As a boy, Sean Coutts enjoyed designing and building things, and dreamed of becoming an architect. Instead, as co-founder and director of technology at Graphium technologies, he is creating a company which transforms unstructured research data into visual insight.

After studying materials science at university, and a few years working in accounting and project management, Sean went back to university to do an MSc in computer science. Then, keen to found his own business, he signed up for Entrepreneur course at the Alacrity Foundation — an organisation set up to support talented young graduates turn their ideas into commercial reality.

Since completing the course, Graphium has raised £250,000 seed funding — enough to last 18 months to two years without making any sales, “but we hope to start selling by mid-2022.” Alacrity has a stake along with the founders, who have 13 per cent each.  Sean hopes Graphium will eventually be acquired. “That would be our preferred route,” he says. “It fits with our values as a company — we are more interested in the process than creating a Microsoft or a Google.”

He sees himself as serial entrepreneur. “This is the first time, but none of us wants it to be the last.”

Simon Gibson CBE & Mike Doyle

Professor Simon Gibson CBE co-founded the Alacrity Foundation with Owen Matthews in 2009. Mike Doyle was appointed CEO when the Foundation opened its doors in South Wales in 2011.  With the backing of Sir Terry Matthews, OBE and the UK and Welsh Government, Alacrity aims to educate graduates to become a new generation of IT entrepreneurs.

Simon joined the GPO as a telephone technician. He worked with telecommunications companies during the period of deregulation and joined Newbridge Network Corporation at its start-up in 1987. He was VP of marketing and helped build it into a $7.1 billion company. Simon and Michael Doyle founded Ubiquity Software in 1993, which was a leader in the development of the (ubiquitous) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and achieved one of the biggest VC funding rounds in the history of the software industry in the UK.

 

Michael Doyle was sponsored through university by GEC Telecommunications, where he wrote software for the Systems X exchange. He worked as a contractor for five years and then co-founded Ubiquity with Gibson. 

 

The Alacrity Foundation is operating in 8 locations around the world. It has been responsible for helping young entrepreneurs launch new ventures based on a demand-driven model. Many graduated companies from Alacrity have successfully scaled up and raised further funding rounds.