Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) has today launched a new £100 million Opportunity Fund to invest in growth stage deep tech and life sciences companies.
With up to £20 million per investment into later-stage rounds of deep tech and life sciences companies, the Opportunity Fund aims to address the UK’s scale-up financing gap, which forces many of Britain’s most promising companies to seek overseas funding to support their growth. Developing home-grown global technology businesses is a central theme of the Government’s plans to create Europe’s Silicon Valley, with Cambridge at the heart of the transformation.
The fund has already made its first two investments – into chip designers and manufacturer Pragmatic Semiconductor and quantum error correction company Riverlane.
The fund has received significant backing from Aviva Investors and British Patient Capital and the potential returns available from the UK’s maturing scale-up ecosystem.
Since its inception in 2013, exits from CIC’s portfolio include the sale of gene therapy company Gyroscope Therapeutics to Novartis for $1.5 billion, the $285 million acquisition of pet treatment 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. CIC’s portfolio company Bicycle Therapeutics listed on NASDAQ in 2019.
According to Andrew Williamson, Managing Partner at CIC:
"With this new fund we will support our portfolio companies, and scaleups from the UK ecosystem, as they reach a defining moment in their growth – and at exactly the point where the UK often loses its most exciting businesses.
We want to be a part of that change, and we’re delighted to be working with Aviva Investors and British Patient Capital to achieve this ambition.”
According to Ben Luckett, Managing Director, Venture and Strategic Capital, at Aviva Investors, Cambridge has a reputation as a world-leading technology cluster, with the huge value of the unique ideas being created here, and their potential to create growth, success and impact.
“We believe CIC’s new Fund and its unrivalled access to these early-stage companies, will enable us to support their growth whilst aiming to deliver long-term investment outcomes.”
Cambridge was ranked as the world’s leading science and technological cluster by intensity by the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2024.
University of Cambridge affiliates have won 125 Nobel Prizes and founded many of the UK’s most successful science and technology companies, including ARM Holdings, Abcam, Darktrace, and Bicycle Therapeutics. Venture capital investment in Cambridge has surged, hitting almost £1 billion in 2024.
Lead image: Cambridge Innovation Capital. Photo: uncredited.
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