Funding opportunity
The UK’s Royal Society announced that its Enterprise Fund is open for business with an initial £5 million raised from philanthropic donations – the first time in its 350-year history that it has dipped into technology transfer.
The Fund is looking for scientific enterprises and innovators seeking early-stage investment of between £250,000 and £2 million, with an initial focus on backing opportunities in the physical sciences and engineering.
“Challenges such as climate change offer great opportunities for the UK to provide global economic leadership based on scientific endeavour,” said Peter Williams, Vice-President of the Royal Society.
The Royal Society wants the Fund to catalyse a fundamental culture change within the scientific community, by encouraging scientists and engineers to seek applications of their research.
Andrew Mackintosh, Chief Executive of the Royal Society Enterprise Fund said, “Our mission is to create a bridge between today’s early scientific ideas and tomorrow’s technological and commercial winners. Early stage ventures present the highest commercial and financial risk and are therefore starved of investment.”
The Society has identified three key gaps within the UK innovation environment, financing for early-stage seed investments under £2 million; a preparedness gap, with technology businesses going to the market for financing too early; and a research gap with comparatively poor funding of physical sciences and engineering ventures.
The Enterprise Fund hopes to address these gaps by raising £20 million from philanthropic donations. The philanthropic approach enables all financial gains to be returned to the Fund for reinvestment in future scientific innovations, making it a sustainable living endowment.
The Fund will be run on a commercial basis, leveraging the market and technical assessment capabilities of the Fellows of the Royal Society who represent all areas of science, engineering and medicine and include nearly 70 Nobel laureates.
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