The Herald newspaper interviewed our CEO, Amanda Pickford, as part of their Entrepreneur campaign. Amanda discussed the swift growth of her tech firm, ThermaFY, and its solutions aiming to tackle some of society’s biggest environmental and social challenges, including Covid-19.
“I have a passion for solving problems. We haven’t just come up with an idea and tried to take it to market, we’ve looked at people’s problems and tried to create a solution.”
Amanda Pickford, ThermaFY founder and CEO.
ThermaFY Protect recently piloted a new solution which has been installed in two hospitals with Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust, scanning over 6,000 people every day for high temperatures. The company was able to build this new solution after successfully securing support via the Pivotal Enterprise Resilience Fund.
“We had no intention to build that [scanning software] until Covid-19 came along. We’ve always had a plan to move into the health sector but digital health is still a growing industry and we didn’t feel the timing was right for our new solution, so we were focusing on our other core products first. The change that Covid has brought about has just accelerated our growth pattern immensely.”
Amanda Pickford.
The ThermaFY Group specialises in solving problems using thermal image analysis. It incorporates three divisions to tackle different solutions throughout key sectors.
ThermaFY Eco Solutions analyses heating efficiency in homes including fault prediction and life span. ThermaFY Protect offers an automated thermal scanner for entrance foyers (the first of which was installed in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital). Finally, ThermaFY AgriTec is an automated remote sensor used to improve cattle health with image and temperature analysis for early detection of disease.
Amanda has been appointed as an ambassador for Women’s Enterprise Scotland (WES) and won Innovator of the Year at the 2019 (WES) Awards.
“I love the fact that I’m a female founder of a tech company. It’s really important that we are given a platform because there are so few women in tech and there needs to be far more. We look at things differently and understand things differently and it’s a really hard road to be on when it’s such a male-dominated environment.”
Amanda Pickford.
ThermaFY is a Microsoft partner and a member of the Royal Bank of Scotland Climate and Entrepreneur Accelerator programme – a partnership that Amanda admits has been “great for our network” and helped the company connect with the right people.
“With more people now working from home, we’re looking to work with companies such as the Royal Bank, helping them to continue to meet their environmental targets by addressing how people are working from home with inefficient heating systems, identifying ways to reduce their employees heating bills while also reducing their carbon footprint.”
Amanda Pickford.
Amanda, who has four full-time employees, believes ThermaFY Protect will be the immediate focus for the firm although the entrepreneur points out that there are products to sell in all three divisions of the business.
“I believe they [ThermaFY products] are all relevant to the time and will naturally grow as they are solving real problems, addressing some of society’s greatest challenges.”
Amanda Pickford.
Click here to read the full article on The Herald website.