Icona geared for growth

London, 13/2/2003, (venturedome.com)

Icona Solutions, a provider of visualisation software for the automotive industry, has received a £300,000 investment from the White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund.

Icona was developed within the Informatics Institute at the University of Leeds. Its software allows engineers to review the effects of manufacturing variation on the appearance of vehicles and products. Through the use of computer-based virtual prototypes rather than life-sized real models, the quality of new vehicles can be improved and time-to-market reduced.

The products are targeted at end-users in the automotive industry and major software vendors and will be marketed in conjunction with industry standard computer-aided design (CAD) systems. By collaborating with major solutions providers such as IBM and SGI, Icona hopes to quickly penetrate large manufacturing accounts.

"Visualising the effects of manufacturing variation early in the design process will significantly reduce the number of quality problems encountered during the production of new models, leading to enormous savings in both time and money for manufacturers," says Dr John Maxfield, technical director at Icona.

Icona is headed by executive chairman Dr David Belford, who led the secondary management buy-in at Charles Walker, a manufacturer of conveyor belts, in 1999. He oversaw a trade sale of the business to Switzerland's Habasit in 2001 and remains as non-executive chairman.

The £9m White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund invests in commercial opportunities arising from research at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. It is managed by Aberdeen Murray Johnstone Private, and has made a total of 16 investments since it was launched in 1999.