UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund

Profile

The UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund is backed by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Fund’s partners are 9 publicly funded research bodies, including STFC, BBSRC, NERC and Dstl. The Fund is independently managed by venture capital specialist Midven.

We help build companies from great science developed in laboratories, science and technology campuses and synthetic biology.

We hold investments in some of the UK’s most innovative companies, in areas as diverse as novel antibiotics, research into Alzheimer’s disease, “green” chemicals and airport security.

Investment Focus


Investing In Great Science To Answer Unmet Commercial Needs
We get excited about great science, especially if you can articulate how it might solve unmet needs. If the technology will solve real world problems, we are prepared to invest early and bring a research based idea into commercial fruition.



Building & Growing Sustainable Businesses
We don’t require revenues or a team which have run and exited businesses before we invest. We’re prepared to get involved early, building an experienced team, developing market focus and figuring out a business model. We want to identify the best and most talented founders from diverse backgrounds and support them to succeed.

We like to be actively involved on the board of our companies. We can help define the right strategic approach for growth, facilitate the introduction of high calibre resources to make the business go faster and raise the additional finance needed to get to market and grow.

Our investment managers and members of our high powered Spectrum Advisory Board assist in fine-tuning business and investment plans and in establishing appropriate milestones for businesses as part of investment rounds.





Further Information
We do have a set of criteria that must be met in order to receive investment. Please see our FAQ section to assist with any queries.

If you think you could meet the criteria, we would be happy to have a discussion with you. Please contact us.

You can read more about our partners, the campuses we associate with and our role in supporting the development of synthetic biology technologies.

Impact
UKI2S (previously called the Rainbow Seed Fund) is a seed fund investing in the earliest, and highest risk, stages of technology companies emerging from the publicly funded science base. Created in 2002/03 with Government funding, the purpose of the Fund is to:

Make early-stage ‘patient’ capital investments in commercial companies (developing products based on publicly funded research)
Earn a financial return on investments, to be retained and re-invested (to keep the fund active)
Leverage private capital into ventures backed by UKI2S
The Fund’s core focus on the earliest and riskiest stages of “deep technology” companies means it takes risks private sector investors are rarely willing to tolerate. It has played a critical role in enabling the spin out of over 50 companies from laboratories such as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, John Innes Centre and the Babraham Institute.

The Fund provides considerable support over and above its own investment, helping to shape the commercial proposition, find high-quality management and introduce later stage investors as the company grows.

UKI2S has invested at a steady rate and has now invested approximately £12.5M in 50 start-up companies and a further 39 early stage pump-priming investments of up to £50,000, in projects and companies from across a range of public sector sources.

UKI2S companies have built strong commercial relationships with over 150 companies ranging from consumer goods (Huawei, Google, Unilever, P&G) through to industrial (GE, Rolls Royce, WS Atkins), pharmaceutical (GSK, Eli Lilly, Takeda, Astellas) and other high value fields such as space and defence (ESA, Thales etc), with many of these relationships also involving the parent research organisation. The sale of Cobalt Light Systems to Agilent in 2017, which resulted in Agilent locating their global technology centre for Raman Spectroscopy at Harwell.

The Fund’s reach extends across the UK; the core partners are STFC, BBSRC, NERC and Dstl but relationships extend from Aberdeen (James Hutton Institute), through Norwich Research Park and Cambridge, to Southampton (National Oceanography Centre) and Plymouth (Plymouth Marine Laboratories) and extend more widely than UKRI alone (Dstl, National Nuclear Laboratory, Animal and Plant Health Laboratory, Public Health England).

Our investments have resulted in a continuing economic impact along with wider benefits which can also be seen in some case studies.