Imperial Innovations announces further investments in three of its portfolio companies.

Imperial Innovations, the quoted technology transfer arm of Imperial College, has announced further investments in three of its spin out companies.

The first is a £500,000 investment in Novacem Ltd, which is developing a carbon-negative cement to help combat global warming. The cement produces less carbon dioxide in its creation and absorbs and locks away atmospheric CO2 on hardening. The production of conventional Portland cement is thought to be responsible for 5 per cent of global CO2 emissions, meaning this carbon negative cement could have significant benefits in the fight against global warming.

Imperial Innovations invested in a £1 million round of seed funding, with the Royal Society Enterprise Fund and the London Technology Fund providing the balance. Imperial Innovations owns 39.5 per cent of Novacem, which has appointed Jon Page, Imperial Innovations’ Director of New Ventures, to its board.

Novacem’s technology is based on the research and inventions of Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, Chief Scientist, and Chris Cheeseman, Senior Scientific Advisor, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London.

The second investment, of £333,000 was in Cortexica Vision Systems Ltd, which has developed technology that enables computers to see the way humans do. Its first product, BrandTrack for Video, monitors streams of video, online TV, or broadcast programmes on a continual frame basis so that multiple objects such as logos and brands can be found and tracked continuously in real time. The system is being deployed to analyse sporting events for sponsorship return on investment  as well as international advertisement monitoring, replacing the current labour-intensive and subjective processes.

Cortexica’s technology is based on the research of Anil Bharath and Jeffery Ng from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. They have studied the way the human brain analyses visual information and replicated this in the Cortexica technology.

Thirdly, Imperial Innovations announced a further investment in Acrobot, a company developing precision surgical systems, alongside the Pan London Technology Fund and PUK Investment.

Acrobot was formed as a result of collaboration between Justin Cobb, chair of orthopaedics, and Brian Davies, a medical robotics specialist.