Dr Karl Heeks

Co-founder, Board Advisor

Karl has over 25 years of senior technical and commercial experience in high technology in both blue chip and SMEs with the last 10 years in CEO and executive board positions in high profile start-ups. He has broad commercial experience backed by outstanding technical understanding. He is experienced in fund raising from VCs, angels and private equity as well as non-equity investments from government organizations in the UK, Europe and the US and has successfully closed $multi-million rounds. He is skilled in marketing and sales, business development, global licensing and IP portfolio management and complex commercial and technical due diligence. He is a recipient of the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for ‘outstanding innovation in engineering’ and was also part of a small commercial team that won 1st place in the UK and 4th in Europe in the Deloitte and Touche European FAST 500 in 2002.

Professor Klaus McDonald-Maier

Co-founder, CEO

Klaus is the founding CEO of Metrarc and responsible for all aspects of the company including strategy and growth. He is an internationally recognized expert in embedded system, system-on-chip technologies and encryption and security technology. He is Professor in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex and holds visiting positions at the University of Kent and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs. He has received significant funding for his research work from EU, EPSRC and industrial sources as well as several proof-of-concept awards. Klaus is founding Chief Scientist of UltraSoC Technologies (which he founded with Karl) a developer of silicon IP for the semiconductor industry where he shaped early technology development and commercialization and helped raise over $15 million in VC funding. He has authored over 180 papers and holds 12 granted patents.

Professor Gareth Howells

Co-founder, CTO

Gareth is the founding CTO of Metrarc and leads the technical program. Gareth is a Professor of Secure Electronic Systems at the University of Kent where his research interests focus on security and pattern recognition fields. He has lead several large and complex international research and development programs. He has developed a generalized document security system and has done substantial work on the initial investigation and development of techniques for the direct generation of encryption keys from ICMetric samples. Gareth is an internationally recognized expert in security for electronic systems and has received substantial funding from the EU, EPSRC and industrial sources as well as software related proof-of-concept funding from finance South East. He has authored numerous publications and several patents.

Dr Andrew Hopkins

Advisor

Andrew is an experienced technologist with expertise in system-on-chip architecture, embedded and automotive systems as well as the incubation and commercialisation of advanced technologies.

Currently, his main role is Director of System Technology within Arm’s Embedded and Automotive line of business where he delivers strategy for functional safety systems, machine learning and strategic partnerships with the system IP ecosystem.

Prior to Arm Andrew was CTO, co-founder and board director of UltraSoC Technologies Ltd, a VC funded Cambridge start-up that developed and licensed a next generation IP platform for system-centric on-chip debug, upon which Andrew and his team pioneered the emerging concept of on-chip analytics.

Andrew has 17 patented inventions, has published numerous papers with bodies such as IEEE and is an active contributor to industry conferences. He is a member of the IEEE and IET.