It’s typically mentioned that the UK and Europe lack the large degree of progress funding for later-stage startups that the US has for its personal, and that is right. In keeping with the European Funding Fund, there are a minimum of seven times more large-size VC funds within the US than in Europe. So the looks of a brand new progress fund within the UK is critical.
Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), which invests completely within the Cambridge ecosystem in and across the well-known college, has launched a brand new £100 million ($126 million) ‘Alternative Fund’, basically a progress fund. CIC has $757 million invested in over 40 firms and has a privileged relationship with the College of Cambridge.
The fund is being anchored by Aviva Traders and British Affected person Capital and can put money into growth-stage deep tech and life sciences firms.
Two investments have already been made. Pragmatic Semiconductor is a big chip designer and producer which has raised $389.3 million so far, whereas Riverlane, is a quantum computing error correction firm that has raised $120.7 million.
The brand new CIC fund will make investments as much as £20 million ($25.2 million) per funding into the later-stage funding rounds of deep tech and life sciences firms. The hope, after all, is to handle the UK’s long-standing funding hole subject for later-stage startups, which tends to result in a drain of these firms in the direction of different international locations, often the US.
Partly, it’s this subject that led the UK authorities to announce final month, its “AI Motion Plan” — a string of measures designed to develop the economic system utilizing AI, and included a pledge to construct Europe’s “Silicon Valley” by super-charging the prevailing tech ecosystems across the well-known Oxford and Cambridge universities. Plus, the “Golden Triangle” of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, comprising 5 main UK universities, will even be given higher hyperlinks, together with transportation, alongside a package deal of £14 billion in funding.
Andrew Williamson, Managing Companion at CIC, advised TechCrunch over a name that CIC had historically invested in early-stage firms round Cambridge, however there have been many who have been maturing into confirmed applied sciences.
“Traditionally, what we’ve performed is when our firms get to Sequence C stage…. we didn’t have the capital in our core funds to make these [later stage] investments,” he mentioned.
“So we used to supply them as co-investment to a few of our LPs. However not many establishments, significantly monetary establishments, are actually set as much as make direct investments into firms. So the genesis of this fund was one they might take part in.”
He added that one of many key directives from the UK authorities to the British Enterprise Financial institution is to handle the later-stage hole in scale-up capital: “So it is a good mission for what they’re trying to do, to anchor new progress funds like this. Within the case of Aviva, they’re one of many signatories of the Mansion House Compact. So that is round allocating a few of their pension fund capital into productive progress belongings.”
Exits from CIC’s portfolio embody the sale of gene remedy firm Gyroscope Therapeutics to Novartis for $1.5 billion, the $285 million acquisition of pet therapy developer PetMedix by Zoetis, the sale of liquid biopsy platform Inivata to NeoGenomics for $390 million, and the sale of sound recognition developer Audio Analytic.
Cambridge is finest recognized for producing a number of important firms together with ARM Holdings, Abcam, Darktrace, and Bicycle Therapeutics.
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