Success Stories | Marine Power Systems

Marine Power Systems have raised nearly ￡7m from 3,956 investors on Crowdcube.

This innovative cleantech was founded by Dr. Gareth Stockman (CEO) and Dr. Graham Foster (CTO). In our next round of Success Stories, we were lucky enough to speak with Gareth to find out more about how MPS has developed as a business, gone from strength to strength, and their experience of raising with Crowdcube. Read on to find out more!

What inspired you to start your business?

I met Graham way back in 2008 whilst both doing independent industrial research to support our PhD studies at Swansea University, and realised we shared a passion for renewable energy, and specifically ocean energy. This represents a huge and certainly at the time, a largely untapped resource, and it was abundantly clear that current technologies failed to address all the challenges that energy developers in this sector were facing. We worked on some technology concepts and once we were confident they had potential we started Marine Power Systems.

What significant challenge did you face when launching the business? How did you overcome it?

Neither of us had any capital of our own and we were still quite young, so in some respects, starting your own business when you haven’t developed a solid financial base from which to do that feels like quite a bold move! That was over 15 years ago, and we have come a very long way in that time, through continually developing the technology, securing grant funding, and raising investment off the back of the progress we have made. Now we have a world class team, and we are working with some of the biggest energy developers globally and we are seeing significant commercial traction for our floating offshore wind platform, PelaFlex. That is very satisfying and hugely rewarding.

How has community played a part in your business's growth?

We are firmly in the B2B space, and both our professional network and investor community are very important to us. Large ocean energy projects take time to come to fruition and there are a lot of different parties involved in the process, from Government and many other stakeholders, through supply chain to the project and energy developers themselves. So, the strength of your network and the perception of your business across that network is crucially important. We play a very active role in business and industry associations and real-world events but at the same time driving reach and engagement across channels such as LinkedIn has played an important role too.

Our retail investors help drive broader interest in the businesses and working with Crowdcube has supported some of our PR activity by making the business and our story more visible across multiple channels.

What advice would you give to others looking to build a community around their product or service?

Understand what is important and what resonates with them. That might vary across different parts of your community, but it is something you can test and develop through listening to them and understanding what drives better engagement.

We are a technology developer and whilst the performance of our technology is important to all our community there is much more to it. For our retail investors the way we conduct our business and the contribution we are making towards energy transition and net zero is clearly very important to them. For our energy developer customers, how they can deploy our technology at industrial scale and do that quickly is just as important as its operational performance. That is why we focus so much on things like ‘manufacturability’ and deliverability.

Looking back on your crowdfunding experience, what advice would you offer to other founders who are considering this funding approach?

Three things.

First of all, consider it! Whilst there is significant work entailed in any crowdfunding campaign, the same goes for any fundraising activity, and crowdfunding has proven to be a very valuable platform to support our overall investment strategy.

Plan meticulously and prepare your campaign well in advance. You will need to put time aside to respond to feedback and questions from potential investors as well as follow up personally with specific investors. But getting to know some of your most enthusiastic shareholders is one of the most fulfilling parts.

Develop a close working relationship with your Crowdcube campaign manager and anyone else working on your campaign. It is very much a team effort!