Our Seed Fund
Accelerating high-potential, early-stage innovations into patient impact through seed funding, expert networks and business building support.
£7.8m
Seed Fund committed to date
£32.7m
co-investment secured to date
19
new investments to date
7
pending investments
About our Seed Fund
Our Seed Fund builds on 25 years of creating and building successful start-ups. It is a £15m investment commitment from Cancer Research UK, managed by our dedicated Ventures team, to help bridge one of the most challenging stages of start-up creation: attracting early-stage risk capital.
Far too many of the breakthroughs still stall in their early stages due to a funding gap between cutting-edge academic cancer research and a start-up becoming ready for scale-up investment. We invest in promising, early-stage opportunities, sourced from the 4,000 researchers we fund in the UK, and globally through our Cancer Grand Challenges programme, our global partnerships, and the wider research community.
Through this fund we can provide early-stage capital and venture creation support including entrepreneurial training, commercial advice, support with intellectual property, access to experts, mentors and management teams. We also catalyse co-investment to maximise the chances of start-ups becoming financially attractive to investors and benefiting cancer patients.
Our investment strategy
Our investment decisions are driven by the potential for patient impact – we take risks others can’t, adopting novel and challenging ideas that hold promise for real innovation, meet unmet need and have the potential to save and enhance lives. Having a sustainable fund that isn’t subject to market fluctuations or shareholder return allows us to take risks others can’t and to take a long-term view.
Our investment remit includes therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices and data-driven and AI solutions.
Any returns we generate are reinvested in the fund and cancer research. We’re also fundraising to boost the fund, to extend its scale and longevity.
Our difference
We have unparalleled access to 4,000 exceptional researchers and clinicians in the UK, and a wider network worldwide through our Cancer Grand Challenges programme and our global partnerships. This means we’re in a unique position to identify and support cutting-edge science and the people who have the entrepreneurial spirit to turn ideas into companies. The scale of our network also allows us to call on world-leading experts to validate translational potential and inform our investment decisions. This makes us a validating investor, helping our companies catalyse further investment.
We take promising discoveries further by deploying our exceptional drug discovery expertise in our Therapeutic Innovation labs to early breakthroughs. And for those further down the line, we offer clinical trial infrastructure through our nationwide Centres for Drug Development.
Everyone’s route to translation is different and we have expert teams to guide early-stage researchers through everything from entrepreneurial training, licencing and commercial collaborations to company formation, management team building and scaling up capabilities. All of this is underpinned by an unrivalled network of world-leading technical experts, commercial and specialist advisors and seasoned entrepreneurs who work with us on both an in-kind and consultancy basis.
Ventures team
Our Ventures team have a long-standing track record of sourcing, evaluating and creating start-ups. They manage the Seed Fund work alongside an independent investment committee to review applications.
Interested in investing in world-leading cancer research?
We're seeking investors and co-investors across our portfolio.