Key Cambridge, UK VC launches $126M fund to stem later stage flight

It’s often said that the UK and Europe lack the huge level of growth funding for later-stage startups that the US has for its own, and this is correct. According to the European Investment Fund, there are at least seven times more large-size VC funds in the US than in Europe. So the appearance of a new growth fund in the UK is significant.

Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), which invests exclusively in the Cambridge ecosystem in and around the famous university, has launched a new £100 million ($126 million) ‘Opportunity Fund’, essentially a growth fund. CIC has $757 million invested in over 40 companies and has a privileged relationship with the University of Cambridge.

The fund is being anchored by Aviva Investors and British Patient Capital and will invest in growth-stage deep tech and life sciences companies.

Two investments have already been made. Pragmatic Semiconductor is a large chip designer and manufacturer which has raised $389.3 million to date, while Riverlane, is a quantum computing error correction company that has raised $120.7 million. 

The new CIC fund will invest up to £20 million ($25.2 million) per investment into the later-stage funding rounds of deep tech and life sciences companies. The hope, of course, is to address the UK’s long-standing funding gap issue for later-stage startups, which tends to lead to a drain of those companies towards other countries, usually the US. 

In part, it’s this issue that led the UK government to announce last month, its “AI Action Plan” — a string of measures designed to grow the economy using AI, and included a pledge to build Europe’s “Silicon Valley” by super-charging the existing tech ecosystems around the famous Oxford and Cambridge universities. Plus, the “Golden Triangle” of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, comprising five leading UK universities, will also be given greater links, including transportation, alongside a package of  £14 billion in funding.

Andrew Williamson, Managing Partner at CIC, told TechCrunch over a call that CIC had traditionally invested in early-stage companies around Cambridge, but there were many that were maturing into proven technologies.

“Historically, what we’ve done is when our companies get to Series C stage…. we didn’t have the capital in our core funds to make those [later stage] investments,” he said. 

“So we used to offer them as co-investment to some of our LPs. But not many institutions, particularly financial institutions, are really set up to make direct investments into companies. So the genesis of this fund was one they could participate in.”

He added that one of the key directives from the UK government to the British Business Bank is to address the later-stage gap in scale-up capital: “So this is a perfect mission for what they’re looking to do, to anchor new growth funds like this. In the case of Aviva, they’re one of the signatories of the Mansion House Compact. So this is around allocating some of their pension fund capital into productive growth assets.”

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. 

Cambridge is best known for producing several significant companies including ARM Holdings, Abcam, Darktrace, and Bicycle Therapeutics.