When Matt Bates describes how he entered the fire industry, he doesn’t talk about a grand plan or a lifelong ambition.
“I really fell into the fire industry by accident,” he says, but it’s clear, looking at the arc of Matt’s career, that accident became expertise, and expertise became leadership.
Matt began as a technical apprentice at British Aerospace, working on defence radar systems before studying electrical engineering, a change of tack: long nights on the road as a sound technician for concerts and live events. Eventually, he wanted something more stable (“a proper job,” as Matt puts it) and a small local newspaper advert for a junior role at a fire alarm company changed everything.
“That first fire alarm company gave me an incredible amount of training of the kind you just don’t see these days,” he said. This training consisted of six months shadowing engineers across servicing, commissioning and design, laying the foundation for a career that would eventually lead him to become one of the first people in the UK to install a system from Spotfire, the company now known as Ciqurix.
“That moment,” he says, “is really how it all began.”
Solving Problems, Not Just Systems
For Matt, the fire industry has always been about one thing: solving real problems.
He talks about the satisfaction of arriving on site to a system full of faults and leaving with everything working perfectly. “Every box ticked, the whole job wrapped up with a neat bow.” In Matt’s opinion, it’s that sense of completion that drives many engineers.
His path diverged from the purely technical when he started his own fire business, giving him a commercial awareness that many engineers never develop, a blend of technical depth and business understanding that would later shape his role at Ciqurix.
“I find unresolved projects far more stressful than difficult technical work,” he says. “What I enjoy most is taking a problem, investigating it properly, delivering the result, and being able to draw a line under it.”
A Changing Industry and a Growing Demand for Better Solutions
Matt draws a clear line between traditional fire detection and what Ciqurix does.
Most fire detection technologies work by sensing the byproducts of fire: smoke particles, heat or gas. They rely on those byproducts reaching the detector, which means the system is always reacting to fire indirectly and often with delay.
Video Flame Detection takes a fundamentally different approach.
Instead of waiting for smoke or heat to accumulate, it identifies the fire itself – instantly and visually. Multi‑spectral imaging adds further layers of analysis, improving accuracy, reducing false alarms and increasing confidence in complex environments.
As Matt simply puts it: “It’s a completely different way of approaching fire detection.”
By detecting flame behaviour directly, multi‑spectral VFD changes what’s possible in environments where existing technologies struggle, offering a more immediate, more resilient and more intelligent form of fire detection.
The Decade‑Long Journey to LPS 1976
Achieving LPS 1976 certification wasn’t just an engineering challenge, it was a structural one. Matt recalls attending an initial meeting a decade before certification was finally awarded.
“When we were finally awarded certification in November 2025, I looked back at my Google timeline history and realised it had been exactly ten years and one week since I first attended a meeting at BRE in Watford to discuss possible test methods for video fire detection,” he says. “The overall journey took a full decade – writing the standard, refining it, and finally meeting it.”
Two challenges stand out:
Creating the standard itself – because no framework existed for video flame detection.
Funding the accreditation – a long, expensive process with slow return on investment.
Ciqurix’s FC-XFP detector was subjected to a gruelling series of tests – long range fire detection, environmental performance, repeatability – most of which it passed with comparative ease. The hardest part on a technical level, however, was EMC compliance.
“The EMC resilience requirements for life safety products are extremely stringent… achieving those standards with video imaging sensors required a considerable amount of development work.”
Why the CORE System Performs Where Others Fail
In harsh environments full of dust, steam, heat sources and airborne contamination, traditional detectors struggle. Matt explains why CORE doesn’t:
“Our system can effectively ignore all of that because it is specifically looking for the flame itself.”
Two things make this possible:
Multi‑spectral sensing
On‑device analytics – no cloud dependency, no external processing, fully compliant with life‑safety requirements.
“As long as the fire can be seen,” he says, “the detector can identify it very quickly and very reliably.”
Transforming a Camera Into a Certified Fire Detector
One of Matt’s proudest achievements is leading the shift from “a camera that could see fire” to a fully accredited fire detection product.
“The real transformation came when we stopped thinking of it as a camera that could see fire and started developing it as a fire detector that happened to use camera technology.”
This meant:
- designing around BS 5839
- adding battery backup and fire‑rated cabling
- integrating into compliant fire systems
- pursuing formal accreditation
Coordinating the Disciplines Behind Certified VFD
Throughout the journey there have been countless technical breakthroughs, but Matt is clear about his role in that process. He doesn’t claim to be the most specialised engineer in any single discipline; not the strongest hardware designer, and certainly not a software engineer. His contribution has always been about setting the direction, holding the vision, and bringing together the specialists who make the technology possible.
He often describes it as trying to drive a bus while it’s still being built, with different experts constructing different parts at the same time. At moments it can feel like herding cats, aligning multiple technical disciplines, each with their own priorities, and getting them to move in the same direction.
For Matt, that coordination has been central to Ciqurix’s evolution. His biggest contribution has been guiding the transition from CCTV into fire: taking an innovative imaging technology and shaping it into a certified, standards‑compliant fire detection product the industry could adopt with confidence and trust.
What’s Next for Ciqurix
Matt hints at several developments currently underway: continued refinement of multi‑spectral imaging; improvements in manufacturability and scalability; further expansion of the Zero detector for cold‑chain environments; the evolution of next‑generation test tools for video flame detection; and a number of advanced R&D projects not yet public.
All of it reinforces Ciqurix’s focus on maturing video flame detection as a mainstream life‑safety technology, while pushing its capabilities even further.
Clearing Up the Biggest Misconception
The most common misunderstanding?
“People assume we are making thermal cameras.”
Ciqurix detectors are not thermal imaging systems. They detect flame, not heat. That distinction is crucial for accuracy and false‑alarm resilience.
Why False Alarm Resilience Matters
Matt puts it simply:
“You can’t trust a fire alarm system if it keeps false alarming.”
False alarms lead to systems being ignored or disabled – a life‑safety risk in itself. That’s why LPS 1976 includes rigorous false‑alarm rejection testing, and why Ciqurix has always prioritised reliability.
What Specifiers Should Look For
Matt’s advice is clear:
- Accreditation. Always choose accredited products
- Compliance with BS 5839‑1
- Manufacturer and installer expertise
- Suitability for the environment, because every site behaves differently
Fire detection, he says, is not just about clever hardware – it’s about understanding real‑world conditions.
A Technologist Who Never Stops Finding Solutions
Matt’s story is one of curiosity, persistence and a deep commitment to doing things properly. From his early days fixing faulty systems to leading the development of the world’s first LPS 1976 certified video flame detector, his career reflects a simple philosophy:
Move the industry forward.
And in many ways, that’s exactly what Ciqurix, and Matt, continue to do.
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