Before the code, I was a drummer.
A drummer, a father of four daughters, a career that ends up in identity. It looks like a change of subject. It is closer to one habit applied to different material: learn the problem properly, refuse the conventional answer, then build something better. The dates and the sources are set out at the foot of this page, so none of it has to be taken on trust.
01 / Before the code
Before technology, I was a drummer, and not casually. I reached Grade 8, performed internationally and taught more than 300 drummers across Greater Manchester. Music was not a hobby running alongside something else. It was the first discipline I pursued seriously enough to master, perform professionally and then teach to hundreds of other people.
I expected it to remain my life. Illness brought that chapter to an abrupt end in 2009.
I have never had much interest in doing things at half measure. When a subject takes hold, the instinct is to understand it completely, push past competence, and eventually turn what I have learned into something other people can use. Drumming was the first visible example of a pattern that has run through everything since, in technology, in business and in public life.
02 / The first build
What came next did not begin with software. It began with a wristband. At KMS Solutions, which I co-founded in Manchester, we built a GPS telecare device for elderly people and for people living with dementia. The premise was deliberately simple: one button, pressed at the moment help is needed, connecting whoever is wearing it to somebody who can respond.
The device drew international attention, including coverage by CNBC, and we demonstrated it at CES in Las Vegas in January 2014.
We did not build it alone. The device was developed with Professor Patrick Gaydecki and his research group in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester. The two researchers who worked on it with us were Sheheera Ismail and Antony Barton. The hardest part was never the button. It was the antenna: a wristband small enough for a child has to carry both a GSM radio and a GPS receiver, worn tight against a body that detunes them. Getting a usable signal out of that is a research problem rather than an engineering one. Sheheera and Antony went on to publish the wearable GPS antenna work in its own right, at the European Microwave Conference in 2016 and then in the International Journal on Communications Antenna and Propagation in 2018.
In many ways everything I have built since has been a more sophisticated version of the same idea: how do you establish, at the moment it matters, that a person, an action or a transaction can be trusted?
03 / Image recognition, from 2012
I began working on image recognition in 2012. The idea was easy to state and hard to build: a code that does not carry a web address but proves something, readable by an ordinary phone camera in ordinary light, and difficult to copy usefully. That work became VCode, and it was applied across supply chain, ticketing and identity.
Five patent families came out of it, published between 2016 and 2022 and set out in full on the filing record with their numbers, so the work can be read rather than described.
In 2020 the same technology became the V-Health Passport, an application that recorded the result of a rapid COVID-19 test and was proposed as a way of getting spectators back into stadiums. It was reported in the national press, supported publicly by the former sports minister Richard Caborn, and discussed with government and the Premier League. I was interviewed about it live on Sky News.
04 / Beyond the companies
The work has increasingly taken me beyond the businesses I founded.
I have represented British technology internationally, including as Ambassador for Science and Technology to Zimbabwe, and I have been involved with the United Nations since 2018. Those engagements reflect a broader theme: using technology not simply to make commercial products, but to work on identity, inclusion, security, healthcare and access to essential services.
Philanthropy has developed alongside that.
In 2017 the children's cancer research charity Kidscan appointed me an ambassador and a member of its newly formed fundraising board. That involvement led to VDonate, an attempt to solve a problem becoming increasingly visible to charities: as society moved away from cash, collection tins and street fundraising were quietly becoming less effective. Technology offered another way to make the moment of giving immediate.
In 2019 I became an ambassador for Code Nation, supporting its work creating routes into software development for people who would never have entered the industry through a conventional university degree.
More recently that has developed through The Darwin, a charitable initiative using technology, creativity and access to opportunity to make a practical difference. It continues something that has run alongside the commercial work for years: innovation is worth considerably more when some of it is pointed at people who would otherwise be left behind.
I am also a father of four daughters, which has increasingly shaped both my priorities and the kind of legacy I want the work to leave.
I married Nicole Davis in 2018 and we separated in 2023. I filed for divorce that October and the final order came in August 2024.
I am a Master Mason of the Lodge of Friendship No. 44 in Manchester, the oldest lodge in the city.
In the room
Photographs from the work described above. Each caption says who is in the frame, where it was taken and when, and nothing beyond that.
05 / A different way of thinking
I was diagnosed with autism at 22 by the Sheffield Adult Autism and Neurodevelopmental Service, and I have been open about the way it shapes how I work.
I am able to concentrate on a problem intensely and for long periods. I am unwilling to accept an answer simply because it is the conventional one. I have a strong preference for systems that can be tested, evidenced and verified rather than taken on trust, which is not unrelated to what I have spent a decade building. That has been useful in invention and difficult in other parts of life. Both are true.
The same instinct runs through almost every chapter: learning an instrument well enough to perform and then to teach it, building technology around identity and authentication, founding companies, representing technology abroad, and the charitable work.
The subject changes. The intensity rarely does. Learn the problem deeply, challenge the accepted way of doing it, then try to build something better.
06 / Today
The current work is Confrmo, and the identity, verification and correspondence technology built around it. The filing record is published in full, application numbers included, so that any of it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The thinking behind it is written up in the essays.
The record
Claim, date and source. Every entry below was published by somebody other than this website, and every link goes to the source rather than to a summary of it. Where something is reported rather than confirmed by the organisation concerned, the entry says so.
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2013 University publication
The KMS Wristband was built with a research team at the University of Manchester
It was developed with Professor Patrick Gaydecki and his research group in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, who record the collaboration on their own site as a 59 gram GSM and GPS wristband for vulnerable adults and children. The two researchers who worked on it with us were Sheheera Ismail and Antony Barton. Their wearable GPS antenna work was published in its own right afterwards, at the European Microwave Conference in 2016 and then in the International Journal on Communications Antenna and Propagation in 2018.
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Jan 2014 Broadcast and press
The KMS Wristband shown at CES in Las Vegas
A GPS telecare device with a single call button, for elderly people and people living with dementia. Covered by CBS News and NBC News in their CES round-ups, and by CNBC that March, which quoted me on what it was for.
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Aug 2016 Companies register
Timothy W. Wright III joined the board of VST Enterprises alongside me
He was a director from 9 August 2016 to 1 August 2018. Claremont McKenna College, his own university, records that he served in the administrations of Presidents Clinton, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush and was special counsel and director of intergovernmental affairs to Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago. His own biography goes further and calls him President Clinton's first Director of Domestic Policy; the college write-up does not carry that, so it stands here as his account rather than as mine.
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Nov 2017 Trade press
Appointed an ambassador of the children's cancer charity Kidscan
Joined the charity's newly formed fundraising board.
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Feb 2018 Zimbabwean press
Appointed Science and Technology Ambassador to the government of Zimbabwe
Following an agreement announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos to apply VCode to counterfeiting, border security and traceability. Bulawayo24 quoted the then information minister, Christopher Mutsvangwa, endorsing the partnership, and the appointment was reported by The Fintech Times and Zimbabwe Situation in March 2018.
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Jun 2022 UN Global Compact
VCode joined the United Nations Global Compact
A participant from 6 June 2022, listed as a UK small or medium enterprise in software and computer services. Nova Wallet was registered the same day and has its own row below. The Compact still publishes the profile, so the date and the commitment can be read from them rather than from me.
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Jun 2022 UN Global Compact
Nova Wallet joined the United Nations Global Compact the same day
Participant 152033, registered alongside VCode on the same day in June 2022. Two companies of mine committing to the Ten Principles at once is the substance of it, and the Compact still publishes both profiles.
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Nov 2018 Awards
Tech Entrepreneur of the Year, UK Business Tech Awards
At the inaugural awards. In the same year he was a regional winner, for the North, of Innovation Entrepreneur of the Year at the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards. That was a regional heat and is not described here as the national award.
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Sep 2019 Regional press
Named an ambassador for Code Nation
A Manchester coding and cyber security training provider, fronting a campaign to bring people into programming from outside the university route.
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Oct 2019 Regional press
Secured the right to buy the house where Charles Darwin was born
Mount House on The Mount in Shrewsbury, Grade II listed and derelict, which I secured the right to buy and intended to restore as a centre for research and teaching in the natural sciences. The charity did not raise the funding, so the purchase was never completed. Mike Marchant coordinated the project. My father, Den Davis, is chairman of The Darwin now. I am one of its trustees. The name came from this.
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Jun 2020 National press
The V-Health Passport proposed for the return of spectators to sport
An application recording the result of a rapid COVID-19 test. The Telegraph reported that the former sports minister Richard Caborn was supporting the scheme, then under discussion with government and the Premier League. I was interviewed live on Sky News that September and the system was reported on Channel 4 News in 2021.
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Oct 2025 UN Global Compact
LunaNet AI joined the United Nations Global Compact
A participant from 20 October 2025, the most recent of the three. The Compact publishes the profile, which is what makes the date checkable rather than asserted.
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Feb 2026 Companies register
Hire One Vet founded with Robert Beringer
The company has two directors and no others: me from 25 February 2026 and Robert James Beringer, an American resident in the United States, from 31 March 2026. CIOReview in 2019 and Industry Era in 2021 both name him as founder and chief executive of The Electronic On-Ramp, a cyber security firm in Rockville, Maryland. He is third from the left in the Times Square photograph above.
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2016 to 2022 Patent registers
Five published patent families naming me as an inventor
Filed through the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the UK Intellectual Property Office. All are ceased or withdrawn. Applications from the portfolio were later cited as prior art by examiners against filings by other companies, including Alipay and Robert Bosch. A citation means an examiner found the earlier disclosure relevant to novelty. It is not use, licensing or endorsement.
Two things this page deliberately does not do. It does not describe a patent application as a patent, and the filing record sets out exactly what each one is, with a link to the register entry for every number. It does not present a patent examiner citing earlier work as use, licensing or endorsement by the company that cited it. Where something here rests on my own account rather than on a document, it is written as my account.
Institutional, investment and partnership enquiries.
Four kinds of enquiry reach Louis-James Davis at the same address. Say which one you are in the first line and it is answered faster.
- Investors What you invest in and the stage you come in at.
- Partners What you would want to build or integrate.
- Press Your outlet and your deadline in the first line.
- Working together What you have built. Working code beats a CV.