Dr. Kärt Tomberg - Making Better Protein Drugs Artwork

The Big Experiment

Ever wondered how technology start-ups, well, start-up? For most founder entrepreneurs, it is the biggest experiment they'll ever run. Like most experiments, the result isn't known beforehand and it often doesn't work first time. On a bigger scale, how do big tech companies turn innovative science into profit?

Mark Davison interviews founder scientists, executives, investors, communicators, and others in the technology start-up and corporate science ecosystems.

Learn how great ideas turned into thriving businesses (or not) from those who made it happen (or didn't). Get business tips, lessons learned, and life lessons straight from the people who know.

Inspiring, disastrous, funny: hear what life in a science-driven company is really like.

Straight-talking, no nonsense, but conversational style. All technical content is explained for the non-specialist - you don't need a PhD or fluency in jargon and technobabble.

All Episodes

The Big Experiment

Dr. Kärt Tomberg - Making Better Protein Drugs

June 10, 2024 • Mark Davison • Episode 8

The challenges of scientific entrepreneurship don’t end when you get funding.

In fact, a whole new set of challenges arise, from finding labs, to building your team and more.

In this episode I talk to Dr. Kärt Tomberg, CEO and co-founder of ExpressionEdits. She is now at that exact moment, where she has just secured £10 million of funding. So, who better to talk us through the pitching process and how to be successful at it.

Kärt discusses her journey into science from Estonia to Cambridge as well as her current work, where she is focusing on the importance of introns in gene expression to optimize protein production. She shares her experiences pitching to investors and why she actually enjoyed the process.

She also talks about how ExpressionEdits are leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize the placement of introns in artificial genes. As well as the next steps for the company now funding has been secured.

“The vast majority of investors are not there to tell you how you should make your company” – Kärt Tomberg

You’ll hear about:

01:18 - Where does Kärt's love of science come from?

02:11- Growing up in Estonia

06:31 - What led Kärt to Cambridge?

09:51- Kärt on co-founding expression edits

17:45 - The mechanics behind Kärt's work

20:36 - How is AI used within Kärt's work?

25:16 - Therapeutics or tools

27:36 - Kärt's recent fundraising success

33:36 - How many pitches did Kärt have to make?

37:14 - Problems you face after investment