Casting a light on the university venturing world

The evolution of university venture funds (UVFs) in recent years has been a rapid one. Until a few years ago, most UVFs existed purely as proof-of-concept (POC) grant providers, seeking to provide that much-needed early support for great ideas that would have otherwise simply sat on a shelf. But as the story of university innovation itself has grown, so has the financing there to support it.

Now, the landscape is much more varied. The number of small POC funds has grown, but along with them there are now small seed funds, angel groups, incubator investment funds, hybrid funds combining both POC funding and early stage venture capital, and more. Along with those, we have also seen the birth of several substantially-sized university venturing funds univsuch as the $250m UC Investments for University of California system and the £320m Oxford Sciences Innovation for Oxford University, as well as the continued success of tech transfer office and investor hybrid Imperial Innovations.

There are universities pooling resources for multi-campus venturing funds. Student-led university venturing funds. Corporates investing in university venturing funds. The type of investors with the long term outlook university innovation needs are increasingly making themselves available to university venturing. Private commercialisation firms are on the rise. The sort of understanding on campus to generate investible startups. Billion dollars deals being conducted by Tsinghua University. UVFs springing up all around the world.

Despite this, data on university venturing is slim. Outside of GUV, there is limited reporting on the actions of UVFs. The story they are telling goes unheard, even on their own campuses.

In order to address this, I am working in partnership with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology to benchmark UVFs for the first time. The report he is currently working on will be looking at the diverse range of models across the university venturing space, assessing their impact, and discussing the best practices in use around the world.

So far, we have a solid range of participants in the report, ranging from small POC to large scale UVFs such as Imperial Innovations providing data from around the globe. Yet, to get the clearest picture and to generate the impact the report needs, I need your fund’s data.

If you have not already provided data for the report, you can do so through the following link:

www.surveymonkey.com/s/uvfsurvey

The survey closes at the end of the week. Thanks in advance for your support.