Ed Nutting

My journey began at age 8 with a simple fascination: how do computers actually work? While other kids were playing games, I was building them — diving deep into C# to create Windows Forms applications and web apps. This wasn't just hobby programming; it was the beginning of a relentless quest to understand computation from the ground up.

The real breakthrough came during work experience at Imagination Technologies after my GCSEs. Suddenly, I wasn't just writing applications — I was exposed to the fundamental layers that make everything possible: operating systems, drivers, and hardware interfaces. This experience revealed a whole universe beneath the surface of programming.

But perhaps the most telling moment of my teenage years was when I designed and built an 8-bit processor entirely in Minecraft. This wasn't just an impressive technical feat; it demonstrated an intuitive understanding that computation isn't magic — it's layers of abstraction built on logical foundations.

During my A-levels, while continuing internships with Imagination Tech's Windows Graphics Drivers team, I embarked on what would become the foundation of my life's work: developing an operating system in C#. This project required me to write a custom compiler from MSIL to assembly code — a journey that led to a profound realization.

I discovered the abstraction gap between C#'s Object Memory Model and hardware's Linear (Paged) Memory Model. This wasn't just an academic observation — it was the identification of a fundamental inefficiency that every computing system accepts as inevitable.

At the University of Bristol, I couldn't let this go. I asked around the department until I found someone who understood: Professor David May, the legendary designer of the Inmos and XMOS processor architectures. Together, we didn't just identify the problem — we solved it, designing a Hardware Garbage Collector that would eliminate this abstraction gap entirely.

What started as curiosity about inefficiency evolved into the Object Memory Architecture — an innovative approach that we initially didn't fully appreciate. My bachelor's thesis on the Integrated Hardware Garbage Collector (IHGC) not only received the highest mark in my graduating cohort but proved the commercial viability of our breakthrough.

Recognizing the transformative potential of our work, I proposed my own PhD topic: Formal Proof of the IHGC. This wasn't just academic pursuit — it was the essential engineering work to prove our garbage collector would work perfectly, every time, making it viable for commercial hardware implementation.

Through the QTEC Incubator at Bristol, we attempted our first spin-out: BeyondRISC. While the timing and business model weren't right, this experience taught me that innovative technology alone isn't enough — you need market timing, the right team, and a viable path to customers.

When the pandemic hit and my supervisor retired, I could have simply continued my PhD. Instead, I saw an opportunity to build something the world urgently needed. Co-founding Midspace (Clowdr CIC) with three US academics and my closest university friend, we created virtual conferencing solutions for academia.

What started as a mission to reduce carbon emissions became a critical pandemic-era service. We bootstrapped from contract to contract, turning over nearly $500,000 in two years while building a fully remote team across the US, UK, and Netherlands. This experience taught me how to scale teams, deliver under pressure, and navigate complex client relationships across the globe.

The eventual failure of Midspace — due to a collapsed business deal and my own burnout from 110-hour weeks — was devastating but educational. I learned that sustainable growth requires more than just determination; it requires strategic thinking about partnerships and personal limits.

After recovering from burnout, I joined Emizio as Lead Engineer, but destiny had other plans. A contact reached out with news that UK semiconductor investment was surging — was I ready to resurrect BeyondRISC?

The timing felt right, but more importantly, I had found a co-founder with VC experience (through the most unexpected connection — a paragraph about my teenage FlingOS project in our old school magazine). Together, we founded VyperCore, raising £4 million in March 2023. Over two years, we grew to 17 people (14 engineers), filed four patents, and demonstrated that our IHGC technology could deliver 2-5x performance improvements while completely eliminating memory safety problems.

VyperCore's eventual failure taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my career: innovative technology must be paired with the right leadership and clear market validation. Despite our technical breakthroughs, we couldn't demonstrate sufficient customer demand to secure our next funding round.

But this wasn't the end — it was evolution. Along with two former colleagues, I've acquired all of VyperCore's assets. We're not just trying again; we're applying everything we've learned about the critical importance of market traction and customer validation.

Today, I'm not just a technologist who stumbled into entrepreneurship. I'm a founder who understands that innovative technology must solve real problems for real customers. Our Object Memory Architecture doesn't just offer theoretical improvements — it provides measurable performance gains and eliminates entire categories of security vulnerabilities that cost the industry billions annually.

From that curious 8-year-old building processors in Minecraft to a founder with proven technology, world-class team, and hard-won market wisdom, I'm uniquely positioned to bring this innovation to the computing industry. The abstraction gap I identified as a teenager isn't just solvable — it's the key to the next generation of computing performance and security.