Meet the nominees for the Small Cap Award’s 2021 AQSE of the year

The Small Cap Awards 2021 will be held in-person event on 11 November at London’s Montcalm Hotel. Hosted by Perrier Award winning comedian Dominic Holland, the show will highlight the best in UK small cap business over the last year.

You can find out more about the event on the Small Cap Network website.

Here are some of the nominees for AQSE company of the year:

Chapel Down

Chapel Down is England’s leading winemaker with a mission to change the way the World thinks about English wine forever. Its talented winemakers produce world-class sparkling and still wines from grapes grown on the chalky terroir in the South East.

Chapel Down pushes the boundaries of wine production in England and continually strives to innovate in all areas of the business. Their portfolio includes the Kit’s Coty Collection a range of premium estate wines from one of the finest sites in England.

Regularly receiving international accolades, Chapel Down is also an official wine supplier to 10 Downing Street and is the first English winery to ever feature in the London Stock Exchange’s 1,000 Companies to Inspire Britain. Their multi award-winning wines are sold direct to consumers through a fast growing e-commerce business and to retail partners, including Waitrose, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Majestic, Selfridges and Harrods, as well as leading bars, restaurants and hotels in the UK and internationally.

The Chapel Down winery, based in the picturesque market town of Tenterden in Kent, boasts excellent visitor facilities and welcomes over 60,000 visitors each year.

2020/21 was clearly a strong year for the company, to what do you attribute your success?

English wine is on a high. Consumer interest and desire is growing and the English wine category is being increasingly well supported by trade customers. Building our wine business and brand has taken time and considerable investment over the years. Our wine quality has never been better and enjoys high critical acclaim both at home and abroad. After twenty years of building, we believe we are in a very good position to further accelerate growth.

Chapel Down is the best known and leading brand. With a strong brand, the results for Chapel Down wines in 2020 were outstanding in such a difficult year – a 38% increase in sales volumes for the wines was achieved.

We pivoted our business with explosive growth in e-commerce sales, delivered by new people, systems and processes. E-commerce was responsible for 18% of our sales in 2020, it made a significant contribution to revenue and helped to raise brand awareness to a new audience. We see huge further potential online.

A very good harvest in 2020, more awards for quality and further distribution success with major supermarket customers ensured that the brand was widely available and continued to gain awareness and popularity.

Our asset base is strong and supports the business – high quality vined land, stocks of valuable wines, buildings and equipment and a strong brand.

In 2021 we have also seen a strong start to the year as reflected in our half year results. The company also completed a highly successful fundraise via the Seedrs platform this summer securing £6.876m of investment in just 33 days and welcoming 4100 new investors to the business.

Chapel Down continues to attract exceptional talent and in September 2021 welcomed Andrew Carter (former Managing Director at Chase Distillery Ltd) as CEO, following the retirement of Frazer Thompson after 20 years at the helm. Andrew brings with him a wealth of experience in the drinks industry.

We are committed to continually invest in the business and consolidate our leadership in this exciting growth market.

DXS International

DXS International plc is an e-health business that develops and sells decision support solutions into the health and social care sector. Its main customer is currently the NHS where the DXS Point-of-Care software solution is deployed at 2,000 primary care practices.

The business operates in the dynamic and fast-emerging digital health space. The exponential increase in medical knowledge coupled with unprecedented Covid-19 induced pressure on health care delivery systems calls for urgent automation and use of artificial intelligence and other electronic tools designed to improve patient care.

DXS’s most widely used product, called Point-of-Care (PoC), is a multi-module computer-assisted primary care clinician documentation solution that utilises advanced technologies to help doctors and nurses ensure their documentation accurately and consistently reflects the care being provided and presents information to clinicians at the point of care. The solution is multi-faceted and includes digital tools designed to improve productivity and treatment accuracy that support cost-effective health care outcomes.

As an example, PoC’s Intelligence Referral Management module accurately processes more than one million referral documents a year. Latest PoC innovations include clinical treatment templates, protocols that help manage complex clinical decision-making and toolkits that support clinicians in navigating exacting treatment pathways for diseases like cancer.

DXS is an innovation-driven company that also recently launched a leading-edge artificial intelligence Medicines Optimisation solution called ExpertCare. The software provides evidence-based treatment guidance for long-term condition patients based on a wholistic real-time view of that patient’s demographics, prevailing health profile, clinical biomarkers, and medication history (past and present). These factors are assessed against treatment best practice pathways. The treating clinician is presented with compliance recommendations together with concise reasons.

Rising numbers of patients suffering for one or more long-term conditions’ together with complexities involved in treating them, means that doctors and nurses need intelligent computer-based assistance in determining the best treatments. It is well known that about twenty-five percent of the world population suffer from one or more chronic conditions and that these patients consume a staggering seventy percent of global health care spend.

As a first step in developing a comprehensive solution covering the most common long-term conditions, DXS chose to focus on the treatment of hypertension where the proper treatment of the condition could potentially save the NHS £273 million a year. In the coming months, the solution will be extended to include an addition three disease areas making it the most comprehensive digital medicines optimisation solution available in the world today.

Healthcare IT is moving at an unprecedented pace. The Covid-19 pandemic has added new impetus to the realization that health care delivery is urgently in need of a major overhaul and DXS, with deep knowledge and experience in the electronic health care space, is well-positioned to exploit this fast-emerging opportunity.

Incanthera

ncanthera plc is focused on innovative technologies for oncology and dermatology.

Incanthera’s model to acquire, prepare and commercialise technologies uniquely challenges the traditional model, de-risking time and investment to market, with a therapeutics portfolio containing technologies that address the sphere of oncology and dermatology indications.

Established in 2010, the company listed in 2020, gaining investment for its commercial focus asset, Sol, a unique formulation for the prevention and treatment of pre-cancerous and cancerous skin conditions.

In September 2020 studies revealed that the Sol’s formulation technology can do what no other product available has been able to address.  It can treat and prevent skin cancer in a formulation that is pleasant to use, has been classed as safe as presently marketed baby sun creams, and has the potential to add many other applications to its formulation. Incanthera envisages the formulation potentially being a global product with active prevention and treatment of conditions added to a sun care brand to include an SPF.

The support received from the investment community at the time of the successful Aquis flotation in 2020, has underpinned the ability of the company to provide the successful trial results for Sol announced in 2020, opening discussions with potential commercial partners and the subsequent filing of trademark names for the commercial roll-out of Sol.

 The strength of the team at Aquis has cast us forward on the public stage with proactive marketing and a relationship that has made our plc stage one of success and opportunity, providing a platform to reward the commitment of the institutional and private shareholders at flotation, and to welcome new shareholders to our Company.

Incanthera is honoured to be nominated Aquis Company of the Year. This is an acknowledgement of the support of the team behind the growth and success of the Aquis Exchange and the commitment and belief of the team at Incanthera plc.