The Ceres Agritech Knowledge Exchange has secured $28m and will exploit research from the universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Hertfordshire, Lincoln and Reading.

Ceres Agritech Knowledge Exchange Partnership, a research-focused fund targeting institutions including five universities, secured £19.8m ($28m) on Tuesday from the UK government and unnamed investors.

The partnership will commercialise agritech projects from the universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Hertfordshire, Lincoln and Reading, as well from independent research organisations NIAB, John Innes Centre and Rothamsted Research.

Undisclosed corporate and VC investors provided $21.3m of the capital, with the remaining $6.8m awarded by the $125.5m Connecting Capability Fund (CCF), a UK government-backed initiative aimed at building a regionalised commercialisation ecosystem.

Ceres and its business partners will seek to identify, build, invest in and run commercially viable projects, with the resulting technologies to be exploited through licences, startups and partnerships with SMEs and larger corporations.

The CCF funds were awarded as part of a $95m nationwide tranche after CCF spent $18.8m from its budget during the 2016-2017 fiscal year, Ceres said. CCF is now managed by state-owned agency Research England after taking over from Higher Education Funding Council for England on April 1.

Ian Thomas, head of life sciences at Cambridge Enterprise, the tech transfer office of University of Cambridge, said: “The time is ripe for catalysing early-stage technology transfer in the globally critical agritech sector. 

“Advances in nutrition, genomics, informatics, artificial intelligence, remote sensing, automation and plant sciences have huge potential in precision agriculture and food production.”