A note from the founders
At the centre of the modern world lies a strange gap.
We are dependent on materials so rare that only a handful of facilities on the planet can make them. The supply is so thin that a single outage can cancel procedures, stall drug trials, and undermine the resilience of critical infrastructure. We have built industries on top of them, and the foundations are not secure.
These materials are isotopes: the substances behind the newest cancer treatments, the unseen layer beneath the critical infrastructure the modern world runs on, and ultimately the fuel the coming fusion era will depend on. Among the rarest substances on Earth, they are the hidden backbone of modern society. And almost no one makes them.
Why? Because unlike oil, lithium or other engines of industrialisation, they cannot be extracted from the ground. They have to be manufactured, atom by atom, inside machines that physically rearrange matter itself. The current infrastructure is ageing, fragile, and lacks the versatility and scalability to cope with today’s demand, let alone that of tomorrow. This fragmentation is slow and expensive to fix, and efforts thus far have fallen short.
As nuclear engineers, we saw this problem clearly. It was Ross who first identified that the fundamental issue was the same across medicine, industry and fusion: a lack of isotope supply, and that no one had cracked the right approach. His background in accelerator-driven isotope production, combined with years at the forefront of deeptech innovation, gave us a way through: a versatile, scalable machine that could be deployed. Richard brought years as a deeptech founder taking novel technology to market. Between us, we had the pieces.
Building upon proven physics, StandardX is developing a novel architecture for isotope production, which enables versatility, scalability and deployability. We have developed and deployed our proprietary digital twin, and drawn on advances in manufacturing, to design a machine that was not possible before. We are now building it.
A single platform to replace the fragmented, single-purpose infrastructure the world has relied on until now. It produces the full portfolio of isotopes upon which medicine, industrial infrastructure and the fusion industry depend, at the scale and reliability the world actually needs. Built for regional deployment, closer to where supply is needed, and purposely engineered to scale to meet the demands of the next century.
We start with medicine. The clinical pipeline for targeted radiotherapeutics is maturing fast, and the isotopes it depends on are not reliably available at scale. StandardX will supply first isotopes to a clinical partner in early 2027. The same platform, scaled further, reaches further medical and industrial isotopes, and ultimately will produce the tritium fuel that the coming commercial fusion industry will depend on.
What excites us most is not the science. It is the impact that we can drive, and what a world with isotope abundance makes possible. Doctors with the right treatment for the cancer in front of them. Countries that own the supply chains their industries depend on. A fusion industry with a fuel supply that can scale with it.
There is no better place to build this than Britain. World-class scientific expertise across accelerator physics, nuclear and medicine, deep industrial heritage, a fusion sector at the frontier, and an appetite for solving hard problems.
We are out of stealth . We are growing the team and looking for exceptional people who want to work on a problem that matters. If that is you, please get in touch.
The gap has always been there. We are closing it: building the infrastructure that turns chronic scarcity into reliable supply. Abundance, as standard.
Richard & Ross, co-founders, StandardX