Universities are under increasing pressure to commercialise their research and create spinout companies. Many of them are creating their own investment funds to accelerate this process. There are now more than 200 venture funds attached to an academic institution around the world, according to Global University Venturing research.

Global University Venturing conducted a survey of university venture funds to understand how the market for spinout investing is changing. The results show that momentum is growing for universities to set up their own funds or use third-party venture capital firms to finance spinouts emerging from the world’s top research institutions.

Some universities have had associated investment funds for a long time. The University of Cambridge Venture Fund and the University of Cambridge Discovery Fund, which both run out of Cambridge University’s technology tech transfer office Cambridge Enterprise, started in 1995. Uniseed, the Australian multi-university investment firm has been running since 2000. But the past few years have seen a rapid acceleration of this trend.

Half of respondents to the inaugural Global University Venturing survey were funds launched in the past five years. The relatively young age of a lot of university venture funds means that portfolio sizes can be small — more than a third of respondents indicated that they have only made 10 investments to date.

Some are so new that they are yet to make any investments. Four respondents to the survey launched their funds in 2024: University of Sydney Launch Fund, Michigan University Innovation Capital Fund, Monash PreSeed Fund and UTSA Ventures in the US.

Some funds began with a focus on a single institution but have expanded to cover multiple universities. An example of this is IP Group, whose portfolio has grown to more than 500 companies in the UK, Australasia and the US, having invested more than $2.3bn. IP Group’s journey began in 2001 with a commercialisation deal with the University of Oxford’s chemistry department.

Global University Venturing is tracking university funds globally in a regularly updated list. Check out our roster of 200 venture funds that back university spinouts.

Many university venture funds are small vehicles — just over half of the respondents to the survey declared that they have up to $20m under management. Among these funds are the University of Alberta Innovation Fund in Canada, which was established in 2023 and has $4.7m at its disposal, and the US’s University of Notre Dame’s 1842 Fund, which has $18.35m in assets under management.

Australia’s Monash University launched the Monash PreSeed Fund with $12m in 2024. The university also has the $50m Monash Investment Holdings fund, which was created in 2012.

Funds with larger assets under management are generally more mature funds such as Uniseed, which has $76.6m under management and the University of Cambridge Venture Fund and Discovery Funds, which collectively have $78.3m.

Not all funds that have been around for a long time have big coffers: Libertatis Ergo Holdings, the investment arm of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, was established in 1996 and has $35m under management.

Bigger funds include Generation Food Rural Partners, managed by Big Idea Ventures, which collaborates with universities in the US to commercialise intellectual property related to food, protein and agriculture. The fund has $53m under management and was established in 2023. TAU Ventures, linked to Tel Aviv University in Israel, was launched in 2018 and has $70m at its disposal.

Atlantic Bridge’s University Bridge Fund, which invests in Irish institutions and is backed by a range of local universities such as Trinity College Dublin and the University of Galway, has $135m under management.

Some of the largest funds are found in the UK: Parkwalk Advisors, which manages investment vehicles on behalf of a wide range of institutions such as the University of Bristol and Imperial College London, has $600m under management. It has made more than 180 investments to date. Oxford Science Enterprises, set up by the University of Oxford in 2015, has $1.1bn under management – making it the world’s biggest university-affiliated fund.

Japan, meanwhile, has one of the most advanced university venture fund ecosystems in Asia, with 85% of its top academic institutions having an investment vehicle to support its spinouts and other startups. Japan is an outlier in Asia, however. Only around 25% of universities across the rest of Asia have an associated investment fund.

Surprisingly, the US, a powerhouse in startup in startups and investment in many other ways, lags behind Europe and Japan when it comes to university research funds. Most research-intensive universities in the US — including globally renowned institutions such as Stanford, Cornell and Yale — do not have their own venture fund to back spinouts. Just 50 out of the 146 universities  that are at the top rank of the Carnegie classification — a scale that measures the amount of doctoral research they produce — have an investment vehicle.

University funds can have a sizeable impact on the rate at which universities can create new spinout companies. Before Oxford Science Enterprises was set up, the University of Oxford created around four spinout companies a year, which increased to around 20 a year following the setting up of the fund in 2015. OSE has invested in more than 80 spinouts to date, of which seven have gone on to exit and two have achieved stock market listings. DNA sequencing company Oxford Nanopore had one of the UK’s most IPOs of recent times when it went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 for £3.4bn.

University funds can also have an outsized impact on the broader national ecosystem. Parkwalk estimates that the spinouts it has backed have created upwards of 10,000 new jobs.  In South Africa, Stellenbosch University raised just $12.6m but has created 32 active spinouts and is one of the main patent filers in the country. Stellenbosch’s  University Technology Fund (UTF) also invests in spinouts from other universities, such as the University of the Western Cape.

Global University Venturing will continue to track university venture funds and their performance. If you would like to add your university venture fund to our annual survey, please contact Global University Venturing editor Kim Moore.