Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), a leading venture capital firm embedded in the Cambridge ecosystem, announced it has launched a new £100 million Opportunity Fund – which is anchored by Aviva Investors and British Patient Capital – to invest in growth-stage deep tech and life sciences companies.
This fund already made its first two investments into Pragmatic Semiconductor (one of the UK’s largest and most innovative chip designers and manufacturers) and Riverlane (a leading quantum error correction company).
With up to £20 million per investment into later-stage rounds of tech and life sciences companies, the Opportunity Fund aims to address the UK’s scale-up financing gap, which forces many of Britain’s most promising companies to seek overseas funding to support their growth. Developing home-grown global technology businesses is central to the government’s plans to create Europe’s Silicon Valley, with Cambridge at the heart of the transformation.
This fund has received significant backing from Aviva Investors and British Patient Capital, demonstrating the appetite of prominent institutional investors to invest in growth-stage tech and life sciences companies and the potential returns available from the UK’s maturing scale-up ecosystem. Since its founding in 2013, exits from CIC’s portfolio include the sale of gene therapy company Gyroscope Therapeutics to Novartis for $1.5 billion, the $285 million acquisition of pet treatment developer PetMedix by Zoetis, the sale of liquid biopsy platform Inivata to NeoGenomics for $390 million, and the sale of sound recognition developer Audio Analytic. CIC’s portfolio company, Bicycle Therapeutics, was listed on the NASDAQ in 2019.
Cambridge has been ranked as the world’s leading science and technological cluster by intensity by the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2024. And University of Cambridge affiliates have won 125 Nobel Prizes and founded many of the UK’s most successful science and technology companies, including ARM Holdings, Abcam, Darktrace, and Bicycle Therapeutics. VC investment in Cambridge has surged, hitting almost £1 billion in 2024, and solidifying the region’s reputation as a breeding ground for the next generation of global technology leaders.
KEY QUOTES:
“CIC has traditionally invested in early-stage opportunities around Cambridge and has seen many of these companies mature into highly commercial businesses developing proven technologies. With this new fund we will support our portfolio companies, and scaleups from the UK ecosystem, as they reach a defining moment in their growth – and at exactly the point where the UK often loses its most exciting businesses. We want to be a part of that change, and we’re delighted to be working with Aviva Investors and British Patient Capital to achieve this ambition.”
– Andrew Williamson, Managing Partner at CIC
“We are very pleased to complete our latest investment in the Cambridge innovation cluster. CIC has a wealth of expertise in life sciences and deep tech, discovering and supporting pioneering companies like Pragmatic and Riverlane which are putting the UK at the forefront of global innovation. As an investor with a long-standing presence in Cambridge, we understand its reputation as a world-leading technology cluster, the huge value of the unique ideas being created here, and their potential to create growth, success and impact. We believe CIC’s new Fund and its unrivalled access to these early-stage companies, will enable us to support their growth whilst aiming to deliver long-term investment outcomes.”
– Ben Luckett, Managing Director, Venture and Strategic Capital, at Aviva Investors
“We’re pleased to be expanding our relationship with CIC. Cambridge has long been a global research centre, but it is now a growing hub for breakthrough technology as its spin-out ecosystem matures. CIC has unparalleled access to the opportunities emerging from that ecosystem and is providing critical growth funding that can help these businesses to reach their commercial potential, ultimately allowing British entrepreneurs to build successful, globally competitive companies.”
– Christine Hockley, Managing Director, Funds, British Patient Capital
