CEO Interview with Brendan Emery of iQ Sense

Brendan Emery is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of iQ Sense Technology. He has more than 25 years of international experience in animal health, having held senior commercial leadership roles with organisations including Boehringer Ingelheim and Norbrook Laboratories.

Together with Co-Founder and CTO Madhu Jambunathan, Brendan is leading the development of a semiconductor-enabled biological sensing platform designed to provide Continuous Biological Visibility and establish a new category of continuous in vivo biochemical monitoring for animal health.

Tell us about iQ Sense. What problem are you solving?

Animal healthcare still runs on snapshots, periodic blood tests, and exams, with everything in between essentially unmeasured. We are closing that gap with silicon.

At iQ Sense, we are building what we believe is the first semiconductor-enabled platform for continuous, in vivo biochemical monitoring in animals. At its heart it is an integration problem: taking measurement capability that today lives in a benchtop analyser and collapsing it onto a millimetre-scale chip that can sit inside a living body for years.

The core is a photonic integrated circuit. Rather than electrochemical sensing, with its drift and consumable electrodes, we measure biochemistry optically and on-chip using integrated waveguide interferometry. It’s label-free, reagent-free, and stays stable over the timescales a chronic implant demands and for a device you can’t service after implantation, that stability is the whole game.

The interesting semiconductor work is in heterogeneous integration, co-packaging photonics, optoelectronics, low-power electronics and wireless power and telemetry into a volume on the scale of the RFID transponders pets already carry. It’s battery-less and read wirelessly, so it’s as much a low-power and packaging challenge as a device one.

The timing works because of convergence. Photonic integration, mature flip-chip packaging, efficient energy harvesting, sub-milliwatt mixed-signal design and on-device AI have all matured in parallel. None is individually novel, co-integrating them into an implantable sensing node is what’s newly feasible.
The architecture is also extensible: the platform stays fixed while the panel of markers it addresses grows. Build the platform once, amortise it across many products a familiar idea in semiconductors.

Our first applications are in companion animals, but the thesis is broader. We think continuous biological visibility becomes a foundational layer of animal healthcare, and the platform economics of silicon are what put it in reach.

You’ve said most animal health problems develop silently, and by the time clinical signs show up it’s already too late — how did you land on combining biochemical sensing, wearables, and AI as the way to catch that earlier?

The company was really born from combining two vastly different careers.
I’ve spent more than 25 years in global animal health, while my co-founder and CTO, Madhu Jambunathan, spent two decades developing advanced semiconductor and photonic technologies at organisations including ASML and imec.

As we compared our experiences, we realised veterinary medicine had a longstanding challenge. Most diseases develop continuously, but we’re trying to manage them using intermittent data.

At the same time, semiconductor technology had quietly reached an inflection point. Integrated photonics, ultra-low-power electronics, and advanced materials had matured enough to make continuous in vivo biochemical sensing technically achievable.

Rather than asking how we could build another wearable, we asked a different question: “What if we could continuously monitor the biology itself?”

That became the foundation of iQ Sense.

The implantable sensing platform continuously measures biochemical information from within the animal, while the external reader captures physiological data such as heart rate, respiratory rate, movement, and behaviour. AI then helps interpret those longitudinal datasets, identifying meaningful biological changes over time rather than relying on isolated measurements.

It’s not any single technology that creates the value. It’s the integration of semiconductor engineering, photonics, wireless communications, biology, and AI into one coherent platform.

You’re currently running in-vivo validation in pets and livestock — what has that real-world testing told you so far that lab data couldn’t?

Laboratory validation demonstrates that individual technologies work.
In vivo validation demonstrates that the complete system works.
Once you move into a living animal, the engineering challenge becomes significantly more complex. You’re no longer evaluating a sensor in isolation. You’re evaluating an integrated system operating within a dynamic biological environment.

Can the implant communicate reliably? Can optical performance remain stable over extended periods? Can wireless power transfer perform consistently? Can biochemical sensing, wearable electronics, cloud analytics, and AI function together as a single platform?

Those are fundamentally systems engineering questions that simply can’t be answered in the laboratory alone.

Ultimately, commercial success depends on every part of the platform working together reliably. In vivo validation is where semiconductor engineering, materials science, wireless communications, and biology all have to perform as one integrated system.

Pets, equine, livestock, and vets are quite different customers — how are you sequencing which one you serve first?

Every platform technology needs an initial application where it can demonstrate value quickly.

For us, companion animals provide the ideal starting point. Chronic diseases already require ongoing management, creating a clear need for continuous biological monitoring. Once validated commercially, the same semiconductor-enabled sensing architecture can expand into equine medicine, livestock production, biosecurity, and broader One Health applications.

Our roadmap isn’t organised around species. It’s organised around demonstrating the platform where it creates value fastest, then applying the same underlying technology to increasingly larger opportunities.

You’ve drawn a link between animal biomarkers and zoonotic and antimicrobial-resistant disease in humans — how far do you want to take that One Health angle?

One Health recognises that animal, human, and environmental health are deeply interconnected.

Our immediate focus is improving veterinary medicine through continuous in vivo biochemical monitoring, but the underlying platform has applications that extend much further.

In livestock, continuous biological monitoring could support earlier detection of infectious diseases, improve biosecurity, strengthen antimicrobial stewardship, and provide new tools for population-level health surveillance.

Longer term, we see One Health as another application of the same sensing platform and believe Continuous Biological Visibility will become an important source of real-world biological data.

How can vets, breeders, or research partners get involved with your pilot programs today?

Collaboration has been fundamental to iQ SENSE from the very beginning.
Developing a semiconductor-enabled biological sensing platform that brings together integrated photonics, biotechnology, wireless electronics, and AI isn’t something any one organisation can do alone. From the outset, we’ve worked closely with universities, government programmes, veterinarians, and global animal health companies because each brings different expertise and helps ensure we’re building a platform that addresses real-world needs.

As we progress through commercial MVP completion and in vivo validation, we’re looking to expand those collaborations. We’re particularly interested in working with veterinary practices, specialist clinicians, breeders, researchers, and animal health pharmaceutical companies that share our vision for continuous biological monitoring and want to help shape the future of animal healthcare.

There are a number of ways organisations can become involved, whether that’s participating in validation studies, exploring research collaborations, evaluating future pilot programmes, or discussing commercial partnerships that leverage continuous biological data to improve animal health outcomes. We see our partners as collaborators, not just customers, and we’re always keen to speak with organisations that believe Continuous Biological Visibility can transform animal healthcare.

Ultimately, our goal isn’t simply to develop a new product. It’s to build a platform and an ecosystem that creates an entirely new category of biological data for animal health. We believe the best innovations happen when industry, academia and clinicians work together to solve real-world problems, and we’re excited to collaborate with partners who share that vision.

Why did you join Silicon Catalyst ChipStart AU, and what do you expect to gain from their 12-month program?

As a deep technology company, we have always recognised that developing the technology is only half the challenge. Successfully commercialising it is equally important.

As iQ SENSE has evolved, we have deliberately engaged with a number of innovation programmes, each offering something different depending on the stage of the business. What attracted us to Silicon Catalyst ChipStart AU was its unique focus on semiconductor companies and the ecosystem needed to take advanced technologies from development through to commercial deployment.

Developing a semiconductor-enabled biological sensing platform requires expertise across multiple disciplines, from semiconductor engineering and integrated photonics through to manufacturing, packaging, commercialisation, and market adoption. Silicon Catalyst brings together mentors and industry experts who have first-hand experience of those challenges and understand what it takes to successfully scale deep technology businesses.

One aspect we’ve particularly valued is the balance between technical and commercial mentoring. Building a great technology is essential, but it is equally important to understand how to position it in the market, build strategic partnerships and create a sustainable commercial business. Having access to mentors with experience across both areas has been invaluable as we prepare for commercial pilots and the next stage of growth.

For any early-stage semiconductor company considering the programme, I’d say the real value lies in the combination of deep technical expertise, commercial experience, and access to a highly connected industry network. Building breakthrough technology is never a solo effort. One of the biggest lessons we have learned is the value of surrounding yourself with people who have already navigated the challenges you are about to face, and that’s exactly what ChipStart has provided for us.

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