It was a gruelling three-hour commute between his home on the edge of the New Forest, Tring in Hertfordshire and Cheltenham that was the spur for Heddwyn Davies to seek a new career. After eight years at a venture capital- backed start-up, the former GEC executive decided it was time to take on something closer to home.

Mr Davies signed up as a mentor at the University of Southampton where he discovered a group of physicists working on cutting-edge technology that increases the sensitivity of sensors such as gamma-ray detectors. The company, Symetrica, had been set up two years before, in 2002, by David Ramsden, formerly head of physics and astronomy at the university. At that point, Symetrica was targeting the medical equipment market but Mr Davies had other ideas.