Miss out opportunities because of internal culture

Sometimes companies form an internal bound to their own ideas, that prevent them from seeing the bigger picture and identify opportunities.

Refeyn has a long history. They develop a device based on iSCAT, which is purely a scattering method. The company was founded in 2018 and has received 30M€ in investment in these years. However, they struggle to identify any applications besides "mass photometry" (albeit, they are working with AAV now).

On the other hand, NanoView Biosciences created the Exoid, which is fundamentally an iSCAT with fluorescence. Built a solution targeting the characterization of larger objects (like extracellular vesicles) and their phenotype, and was acquired by Unchained Labs after around ~25M€ investment.

I can't really tell how the culture of both companies is. I can just tell how it looks from the outside, and it's something that has happened at Dispertech as well.

We started as a purely scattering company with the NanoCET. We built a case around the "label-free". But after a couple of years it was clear that we were missing the point, and that's why I decided to develop the NanoQNT, a purely fluorescent method.

Listening to your customers is much more important than pushing a technology down someone's throat.