Ben Varcoe, The Leeds Physicist and Entrepreneur Behind Creavo and Cavero

Ben Varcoe is Professor of Quantum Information Science at the University of Leeds, and a physicist who builds companies as well as experiments. He first made his name in 2000 with a paper in Nature that showed how to make light containing an exact number of photons, something physicists had found very hard to do. Since then he has turned his physics into a heart scanner and a new kind of encryption. His first company, Creavo Medical Technologies, took a portable heart scanner from a Leeds lab bench to hospitals in Britain and the United States, raising more than £20 million along the way. His second, Cavero Secure, makes encryption keys small enough to fit on a SIM card. Both grew out of his Leeds lab. One simple idea ties it all together. As he explains on Ben Varcoe’s Leeds staff page, information is always stored and moved by something physical, so it has to follow the laws of physics like everything else. Understand those laws well and you find new ways to handle information. That thought has taken him a long way. Ben Varcoe trained as a physicist in Australia. His ORCID record lists an honours degree from Flinders…