Public Funding for Dofygate Limited

The need for an automatic gate for use in agriculture has been identified. The need is specifically concerned with entering and leaving fields and yards containing livestock. The existing stock gate is time consuming and inefficient and while some attempts have been made to find an alternative none have made any impact on the market due to fundamental flaws of one sort or another. We have developed and tested an efficient, compact gate capable of spanning up to 5 meters. The gate requires no external power source and is opened remotely. The self-balancing folding design is unique. The use of simple and secure remote opening with automatic closing of the gate coupled with an ability to report back to the passing vehicle ’state of the system’ information will bring the farm gate into this century. Add in further features around security and this will expand the market beyond stock keepers in general into a variety of niche markets such as bio security, parks and temporary traffic control. The R&D program will develop a version aimed at agriculture to meet the needs originally identified and build on what has already been discovered. Once at the point of production we will move to Stage 2 and build prototypes to develop and test the markets outside agriculture that have been identified. This stage will expand the capability of the gate in terms of physical width, data capture and office based operation. TSB funding of the basic (Stage 1)and advanced prototype (Stage 2) will ensure a significantly higher level of design and testing than otherwise possible. The addition of the funding will allow us to accelerate R&D enabling our product to move into a wider nonagricultural market and consequently reach efficiency through scale earlier. This will be significant in our ability to maintain the position of market leader in a market created by us. IP protection will be sought and used but we feel it is R&D that will be the most important defense.