One of the UK’s most innovative venture capital funds is to partner with two leading organisations to help finance and support high growth companies.
The UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (RSF) – managed by long-established venture capital specialist Midven – will work with the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Enterprise Hub and the ERA Foundation.
The chairman of the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund’s advisory board, Ian Taylor, said the partnerships reflected the fund’s increasing reach and influence in investing capital into early stage ventures emerging from the UK’s high quality science research.
RSF is a £24million early stage venture capital fund dedicated to kick-starting promising UK tech companies. The fund is independently managed by Midven and focuses on promising technologies developed at some of the UK’s largest publicly-funded research facilities and at the campuses they support.
The fund will work with the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Enterprise Hub and the ERA Foundation to provide support and investment capital for some of the UK’s most ground-breaking and innovative concerns.
Ian Taylor added that the fund’s “unique and adaptable structure” played a key role in ensuring the new partnerships went ahead.
The Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub has been created to bring about a step change in the success of UK-based entrepreneurial technology businesses, harnessing the expertise and insight of Academy Fellows. The ERA Foundation supports activities that help bridge the gap between research and commercialisation in engineering.
Ian Taylor said: “Investors play a key role in the success of new engineering and technology companies, and these partnerships will provide a collaboration that brings not just capital, but the real world business experience that early stage companies so often need.
“That is particularly helpful in areas such as commercialisation – bringing those ideas to market – meaning we are suitable partners for institutions wanting to stimulate the application of research. The fund has a proven track record and has stimulated a multiple of follow-on private investment into it portfolio companies”.