Winners

Headquartered just south of Cambridge, Ziath Ltd was founded in 2005 by two young scientists from GSK and Cambridge Antibody Technology, and has now grown to 25 staff worldwide. Its aim is to help scientists remove some of the bottlenecks from their automation workflow, making their research more productive and helping them develop new drugs and therapies more efficiently and bring new treatments to the clinic much faster.

Ziath Ltd specialises in instrumentation control and sample management in both the academic and the pharmaceutical/biotech industry sectors, with a specialisation in the application of laboratory automation. It focuses on managing large sample libraries in biobanking, biotech, public health and compound management using 2D data matrix barcoded tubes.

Ziath Ltd is world leader in 2D-barcoded tube and rack readers, and exports 85% of its production to the major life science markets globally – Western Europe, USA, Japan and China. It designs, builds and maintains all its own tube readers and picking devices in its Cambridge facility.

The company ethos is to actively help both its staff and its customers to be more productive and to enrich their working and personal lives. Its commitment to training and staff development sees it promote and recruit internally for many roles. The company has strong links to its local community and sponsors food banks, children’s cancer charities and campaigns to increase mental health awareness in the Cambridge area. Its products and software can improve the working lives of customers by allowing them to work more efficiently and keep better control over their stored sample locations – that is important when some of them have hundreds of thousands of stored samples to manage.

Ziath is a very diverse company with staff members from Germany, India, Spain, Iran, Libya, Lithuania and Poland as well as the UK, all collaborating on projects in the UK factory. In addition, offices in Japan, Netherlands and the USA have opened in recent years. Its commitment to R&D sees it partner with key British universities, including Hertfordshire and Aston, to develop new products and further expand into new international markets.