About Fetu

Yorkshire-based FeTu has developed a revolutionary ‘green’ energy device, a hybrid of piston engine, turbine, and heat exchanger, which it calls the ‘roticulating system’ – because it rotates and it articulates. This invention has a wide range of applications including engines, pumps, and generators.

Founder and managing director Jonathan Fenton is a design and engineering manager who first came up with the idea more than 30 years ago as a teenager, before creating a fully functional version in 2015.

The challenge

Jonathan Fenton initially raised money from family and friends, before getting help and advice from the University of Sheffield, the Knowledge Transfer Network, Leeds City’s Digital Enterprise initiative and the Advanced Propulsion Centre, which enabled him to raise funds to set up the company. Since then, it has conducted three investment rounds.

The solution

FeTu was invited onto the accelerator program run by the University of Sheffield and the UK’s flagship water research project, TWENTY65, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The program introduced FeTu to Inngot, and paid for the company to get a valuation using Inngot’s online toolkit.

Kirsty Hinchliffe, FeTu’s Projects and Grants Manager, explains that the company first identified its intellectual property rights and other intangible assets using Inngot’s Goldseam, then used the Sollomon tool to get an indicative value for what the company’s IP and intangibles might be worth. She says: “Sollomon was very easy to use, it was self-explanatory. And the fact that you have three opportunities to revalue, based on feedback from Inngot, is very good – you can really get the most value out of it.”

The result

That first Sollomon valuation from the start of 2018 was shared with the company’s existing investors “to show them where we were and what the valuation came back as.”

Kirsty then conducted another Sollomon valuation at the end of 2018, to coincide with FeTu’s third investor round. The company has since carried out another valuation covering some new patents and target markets.

It’s a really good document and I’m sending it to interested investors. It puts everything down – all your patents, your markets, where you think you’re going to be in five to 10 years, and it’s just a really useful document for people who are thinking of investing. It just went as it comes out of the Sollomon valuation – we sent the pdf copy of it with some words to any people who are interested

Kirsty Hinchliffe - Projects & Grant Manager