Remembering Dr Paul Atherton
Technology entrepreneur Dr Paul Atherton, a distinguished alumnus of London Business School and former member of the School’s Governing Body, has died after a short illness. He was 69.
An LBS MBA alumnus, class of 1989, Dr Atherton was a vigorous and passionate member of the School’s community, serving on the Governing Body, the E100 Club and the UK Regional Advisory Board. He was also engaged with the Foundation for Entrepreneurial Management and invested in Sussex Place Investment Management Ltd. He won the Alumni Achievement award in 1995.
Dr Atherton spoke regularly to LBS MBA and Masters in Management students and was strongly involved in the engagement of the School’s Strategy and Entrepreneurship faculty, working with the entrepreneurial and investment community in London.
Atherton’s entrepreneurial career began “by accident” when he was studying for a Ph.D. in Astrophysics at Imperial College London. He founded a company, Queensgate Instruments, in 1978. Designed to exploit his research, Queensgate Instruments also sold equipment to academics.
“The business really took off in 1985 when NASA offered us a contract to build a system to go on a space shuttle, at which point I took a sabbatical from my academic career,” said Dr Atherton in an interview given to Think magazine in 2020.
Queensgate Instruments was sold in March 2000 for more than $200m.
“Serial entrepreneur” perhaps fails to do justice to the phenomenal body of work that Dr Atherton undertook throughout his life. He was Chairman of C2V, a Micro Gas Chromatographs company, until November 2009 when it was acquired by Thermo-Fisher. He was founder and Chairman of Midaz Lasers until July 2012 when it was sold to Coherent Ltd. He was an Angel Investor in Natural Motion and supported it through five investment rounds until its sale to Zynga for $527m in February 2014. He was founder and Executive Chairman of Nexeon Limited, a Li-ion battery materials company, which raised more than £85m of venture capital investment. He was Chairman of Phase Focus Ltd Ltd., which produces lensless live cell imaging, and was a Director of Infinitesima Ltd, a high-speed Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) for wafer inspection.
Paul’s most recent investment was in the start-up FungiAlert, an Imperial College spin out focusing on fungus detection in crops.
Paul was Chairman of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Ultra Precision Engineering at Cambridge and Cranfield Universities.
A Non-Executive Director of Imperial Innovations from 2004 until 2014, Dr Atherton helped raise several hundred million pounds for investment in UK technology start-ups.
He was a Chairman of Sussex Place Ventures – the London Business School Venture Fund, and he was a notable and generous donor to the School.
He gained a Ph.D. in Physics from Imperial College and an MBA from the London Business School in 1989. He was made a Fellow of London Business School at the annual graduation ceremony in July 2013, and became a Fellow of The Institute of Physics in April 2016.
Dean of London Business School François Ortalo-Magné said that Dr Atherton had been an enormously generous donor and committed member of the LBS School community. “We would like to pass on our deepest condolences to his family and friends. He was a close friend and supporter of many of us and he will be greatly missed.”
