Founded in Canberra, loved by NASA, Google and Intel

For Liquid Instruments co-founder and CEO Daniel Shaddock, there’s something a little bit Silicon Valley about Canberra.

“Canberra is a very multicultural city to live in, and that’s a big advantage for us,

“Attracting people here from overseas is very easy. I think we’re in that nice intersection point of a high-tech company based in Canberra – a place where people would like to move to bring their families – but we don’t require any special clearances because we’re not a defence company.”

Part of the attraction is Canberra’s size, but it’s also very highly educated and tolerant.

“It reminds me a little of the Silicon Valley bubble,” Daniel says. “There’s lots of like-minded people who you know who have similar beliefs.

Tackling the big issues

Daniel knows technology has the potential to solve some of the world’s greatest problems; from understanding climate change to transitioning to renewable energies and developing new medical solutions.

The company gives scientists and engineers within behemoths like NASA, Google and Intel a reconfigurable test solution that accelerates the process of developing a product from idea to implementation. And they do it all from Canberra.

Daniel, who is also a Professor of Physics at the Australian National University and worked for nearly a decade in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, says

“Canberra punches above its weight in terms of the quality of universities, the concentration of universities, and the calibre of its people”.

Canberra’s graduates go toe-to-toe with global experts

Working at NASA, Daniel realised the graduates of Australia’s top universities could go toe-to-toe with anyone in the world.

“It gave me renewed confidence that made me think we can be internationally competitive,” he says.

Liquid Instruments was established, in part, to take advantage of Canberra’s stream of top-notch STEM graduates and offer them a local career path.

“People would leave the field they loved and worked hard to become a world expert in, or they’d go to live overseas to pursue their careers,” Daniel explains.

“Liquid Instruments offers a career path to stay in the technical field and make a go of that in Canberra.

“We have one of the world’s top universities here. We have a very high calibre of people in academia. There are now a lot more companies in Canberra, like Seeing Machines and Aspen Medical, that show you can build a large and successful business in the ACT.”

A local business attracting the biggest companies in the world, with diverse applications

Most of Liquid Instruments’ large customers are in the industrial space, in company sectors that range from telecommunications to semiconductor to aerospace and defence, Daniel explains. 

“Companies like Intel and Apple now buy a lot of our equipment.”

There’s a wide diversity of applications for Liquid Instruments’ product. 

“We’re working with a researcher from Duke University who was using our products while developing a new type of ultrasound that would measure the effectiveness of breast cancer drug delivery,” Daniel says. 

“Another example was somebody who would go out to places like the Sistine Chapel, and they would have a non-destructive way of assessing how the paint was aged on the walls by scanning it with a laser spectrometer.

“We’re now in about 300 universities around the world teaching the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The Dean of the US Air Force Academy got rid of all of their other equipment and outfitted the entire undergraduate teaching of electrical engineering with our stuff.

Government support provides the competitive edge

Daniel says the ACT Government wants the company, and others like them, to do well. “We wouldn’t have been able to start without investment in venture capital and seed funding from the ACT Government,” he explains. “As we develop, having schemes like the Priority Investment Program have been very, very useful and just really allowed us to get that extra competitive edge.

“I think there’s that level of trust. There are people with connections to the top universities here who have gone on to do amazing things in related fields. That’s a very helpful and happy coincidence when you bump into one of those people. They always try to give you a helping hand.”