Sana Biotechnology’s spectacular initial public offering has earned it the Global University Venturing Exit of the Year Award for 2021. The firm, a specialist in developing medicines based on stem cells, uses technology licensed from Harvard University and in its IPO on the Nasdaq Global Select Market in February raised almost $588m – nearly four […]

The $225m series D round for University of Dundee’s drug discovery spinout Exscientia is the Global University Venturing Deal of the Year Award winner for 2021. The round, which was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, an investment vehicle for telecoms conglomerate SoftBank, also featured pharmaceutical firms Novo and Bristol Myers Squibb as well as […]

More than a decade ago, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz looked at talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for inspiration in how to support entrepreneurs and run their then-new firm. Michael Ovitz, CAA’s co-founder, served on Andreessen and Horowitz’s prior startup, Opsware’s, board from 2000 until Hewlett-Packard’s $1.6bn acquisition in 2007 and shared […]

Recently Knowledge Commercialisation Australia (KCA) released its annual Survey of Commercial Outcomes from Public Research (SCOPR). With a reported doubling of commercialisation revenue in the two years from 2018 to 2020, it is the first time the report has delved into the commercialisation activities of the survey participants. And it has revealed some interesting and […]

The themes of this year’s GCV Symposium – sustainability and impact investing – capture the “let’s build back better” attitude that I have seen emerging across our ecosystem as we start to re-imagine what our future could and should be like. GCV Symposium’s choice of themes has an uncanny knack for setting the agenda for […]

Over the past 50 years, women have transformed their lives and goals through higher education and employment, in some cases accessing those sought-after seats in the board room. However, a large gender gap still exists which is particularly prevalent amongst entrepreneurs. For example, in the UK, for every three female entrepreneurs, there are five male […]

Verv, the smart energy company founded by Peter Davies at University of Bath six years ago, is on the verge of international success. The spinout has developed machine learning technology to produce devices that can monitor domestic energy consumption while also detecting and predicting faults on appliances such as air conditioning units. But its early […]

What sets Orca Computing apart from other quantum technology developers is its use of fibre optics and photonics to overcome one of the key challenges facing the sector – the disruption that can be caused by outside forces such as magnetic fields and thermal energy on qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing. “What you […]