Birmingham technology firm secures grant support for new project

A BIRMINGHAM technology firm has been awarded a grant to help it develop its latest innovation.

Synapse Information, based at Innovation Birmingham Campus, has been awarded €50,000 for developing an innovative semantic web technology, SEQUOIA (Semantic Query of Information Assets), which allows users to rapidly question multiple data types and sources across the web using a spreadsheet interface.

The grant is a potential stepping stone to Horizon 2020’s €2.5m grant, which will be awarded in 2017.

Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80bn of funding available over seven years (2014 to 2020).

The €50,000 grant has enabled Synapse to employ new engineer, whose role will be to assist in realigning the SEQUOIA technology developed at Synapse to address the big data challenge in drug discovery research and development.

Synapse founder and CEO Brian Donnelly said the arrival of the new engineer would be massively useful in developing upcoming projects.

With a background in drug discovery at GSK, Mr Donnelly has been a leader in the field of semantics for 15 years. He has developed the framework for a suite of SEQUOIA-enabled products, and current evolution to a drug discovery analysis platform.

In the last 12 months, Synapse, which was founded in 2012, has doubled its team, accelerated research and development activities across the region and put plans in place to expand abroad after securing a £500,000 funding package from HSBC. Over the next three years, the business is on track to achieve annual turnover of between £7m and £10m, with plans to further expand its team to up to 100 staff.