- Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) recently announced it raised £225 million for Fund II. These are the details.
Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), a venture capital investor focused on building world-leading deep-tech and life sciences businesses connected with the Cambridge ecosystem – recently announced it has raised £225 million for its oversubscribed second fund (Fund II).
With Fund II, CIC now manages in excess of £500 million, giving it the scale to support its portfolio companies throughout their life cycle and providing investment capital as well as strategic and operational support.
Investors in Fund II include a geographically diverse group of around 50 institutional and strategic investors with nearly half of the capital raised has come from UK-based investors.
CIC has invested in 40 deeptech and life sciences companies to date with Fund II already having made 6 investments. And these include Riverlane, a quantum computing software provider; Pretzel Therapeutics, a leading developer of mitochondrial therapeutics; Salience Labs, the photonic compute company; and Epitopea, a cancer immunotherapeutics company.
CIC’s first fund portfolio companies include CMR Surgical – which closed the largest medtech private financing round in the world in 2021 (£425 million), valuing the company at more than £2 billion; and Pragmatic Semiconductor, which recently raised $80 million to build its second manufacturing facility in the North of England.
CMR’s next-generation Versius robotic system is bringing the benefits of keyhole surgery to patients around the world while Pragmatic has launched a low-cost flexible electronics manufacturing process, which is disrupting the existing silicon chip manufacturing market and enabling a whole new class of innovative electronics.
CIC was founded to improve the success rate of businesses originating from the University of Cambridge and the broader Cambridge ecosystem, to encourage more academics and entrepreneurs from the area to build businesses. In addition to its portfolio companies, CIC has co-founded two Cambridge-based business accelerators, DeepTech Labs and Start Codon. And the goal is to support deep-tech and life science entrepreneurs develop their commercialization and technology strategy, bridging the gap between translational research and Series A-ready businesses.
KEY QUOTE:
“Cambridge, UK is one of the fastest-growing science and technology innovation ecosystems in the world. Since our inception, CIC and our co-investors have invested more than £2 billion in sectors as diverse as robotics, semiconductors, genomics, gene therapy, therapeutics, liquid biopsy, artificial intelligence, and edge computing. We are delighted to launch our new fund and to work with a dynamic group of entrepreneurs and investors to capture the full potential within the thriving Cambridge ecosystem.”
— Andrew Williamson, Managing Partner of CIC
