Medtech firm Bond Digital Health has doubled its team in lockdown by recruiting half a dozen new members of staff remotely.
The Cardiff-based company hired six new employees in the space of three months to bolster its development team and help it complete and deliver a major client project on time.
The entire recruitment and onboarding process was done remotely and the new employees have not yet met each other in person – or the rest of the Bond team.
Phil Groom, Bond’s commercial director, said: “We’ve built a new development team from the ground up in the space of three months, who have then gone on to help deliver a major client project on deadline, and it’s all been done remotely. It really is a remarkable achievement.
“We are a people-driven organisation and our company culture is very important to us. It took some getting used to meeting new people over a video link and trying to assess whether their mix of skills and personalities would be a good fit. There’s no substitute for face to face but we adapted.”
The new development team members are:
- Tiago Ferreira – Product Owner
- Rachel Sloan – Senior Full Stack Developer
- Rory Power – Front End Developer
- Vaseeharan Srikandan – Android Developer
- Scott Middleton – Android Developer
- Anil Wickramsinghe – Lead Test Analyst
The team has also been joined by Luke Morris, a Cardiff University MSc Computing student, who is on a one-year internship as a trainee Android developer.
Russell Hicks, Bond’s Head of Technology who leads the development team, said: “With this solid foundation in place we can continue to develop our core product to meet the demands of our clients and partners and ultimately deliver our ambition of digitising lateral flow diagnostics and making the industry better with data.”
In September, Bond fast-tracked development of Transform® connectivity and data platform to underpin and digitise a rapid diagnostic test being developed for Covid-19 by its Canadian partner Sona Nanotech.
The client-branded platform, called Sona Connect, includes a mobile app for test users and a web dashboard providing geo-mapped data for health agencies.
Sona’s test can be used as a screening tool to identify and triage patients infected with the virus and is being assessed for approval in the US and Canada for emergency use authorisation.
Bond Digital Health is currently preparing for another major funding round and is also gearing up to recruit up to five new developers in the coming months, with other key roles to follow.
