September 2020 marked 20 years since the formation of multi-university venture fund Uniseed. To still be operating after 20 years is quite an achievement, given the difficulty of commercialising early-stage research.

Over that time, we have experienced first-hand the ebbs and flows of Australian innovation, including the dot.com crash, the global financial crisis, the covid crisis, the changes in governments and associated innovation policy changes, the reinvention of technology transfer office business models and the rise and decline of a numerous venture funds, with most venture fund managers in operation at the time Uniseed was formed no longer active. The 20th anniversary is a good opportunity to reflect on Uniseed’s journey, not only considering how long the fund has been operating, but also factoring in the significant success Uniseed has had, and the ultimate impact of the fund on the Australian research and innovation ecosystem. 57 startups                   630+ people employed           A$760m raised            12 exits Part 1 – Forming (2000-2005) The environment leading up to the formation of Uniseed in late 2000 At the time the concept of a Uniseed fund was starting to be discussed, the Australian venture capital industry was very immature compared to that of the US. Despite early-stage investment in Australia totalling A$230m in 1999-2000, spread across 83 investments, very little capital (if any) was targeted at seed-stage technologies arising from Australia’s public sector research organisations. The Australian government had policies to support venture capital, but there was a low pool of venture funds – particularly for early stage investment. Early stage VC represented only 1% of Australian GDP compared with 4% of GDP in the US. As a consequence, technology developed in Australian research institutes was not being funded to a significant extent – a problem that colloquially became known as “the valley of death”. Put simply, Australian VCs were not interested in university technology or seed-stage investment because it was too early and too risky, and publicly funded research inventions were not going anywhere. A good idea was not enough. Research-based ventures had historically been poorly organised, had intellectual property that was poorly defined and managed, had a high science and people risk, and needed intensive hands-on assistance. On top of these issues, at that time many considered the effort of negotiating a licence agreement with a university tech transfer office too difficult to be worth it. To be fair, there had been some high-profile commercialisation stories, such as University of Queensland TTO UniQuest’s magnetic resonance imaging scanning technology (Magnetica) and its licence of a cervical cancer vaccine technology to CSL, though neither had provided a significant commercial return at that time. There was a need…

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