Episode overview

Steve Grace had visited Scimita’s warehouse years before this episode and describes it as one of the most unusual and impressive things he had seen in the startup ecosystem. This conversation catches up on what Scimita has built, what they are working on now, and why the path from a PhD in drug modification to COO of a deep tech product studio makes more sense than it sounds. Thomas Telfer covers the non-invasive blood glucose monitor project that ran through COVID, the circular economy work that has become the company’s primary focus, and what is coming next with a new facility in Western Sydney.

What Scimita Ventures actually does

Scimita describes itself as a small business that helps others take very early-stage ideas or technologies through to physical products. The word Thomas uses is “deep tech”: physical science and engineering-based products rather than software. They are not an accelerator or incubator. They are scientists and engineers who work directly alongside their clients on the development. Their client base includes SMEs, entrepreneurs, and universities, covering people who have the idea but not the team to bring it to reality. The company has a facility in Western Sydney and is expanding.

Non-invasive blood glucose monitoring through COVID

The first major project Thomas describes was an in-house venture: developing a non-invasive blood glucose monitor. Current solutions require either a finger prick or a continuous monitor with a needle under the skin. Scimita started with a large proof-of-concept machine demonstrating a correlation between blood glucose levels and non-invasive measurements, then built a smaller clinical device and ran it through a year-long clinical trial with diabetes patients. The trial was conducted entirely during COVID, with Thomas lying on his lounge at home with a device attached to him while a colleague in another suburb controlled the machine remotely via camera.

Battery recycling and the circular economy

As Scimita matured, it narrowed its focus toward materials, energy, and circular economy projects. Battery recycling is one of the active areas, addressing the growing challenge of managing end-of-life batteries as EV and energy storage adoption accelerates globally. Thomas describes this focus shift as a natural progression: the problems are large, the commercial opportunity is real, and Scimita’s generalist science and engineering capability is particularly well-suited to materials challenges that do not fit a single existing discipline.

From pharmacology PhD to startup COO

Thomas’s path from drug modification research to running operations at a deep tech product studio is a story about wanting immediate impact. Academic research felt too far removed from real outcomes: even a successful drug discovery could be 20 years from market. The PhD was broader than most, requiring expertise across multiple disciplines to modify a drug’s chemical structure by feeding bacteria slightly different building blocks. That generalist scientific thinking translated naturally to the kind of multi-domain problem-solving Scimita does every day.