Look close enough and you’ll find that some of the startups that have raised big, big money in Europe have their roots in academia.
Isar Aerospace, a spacetech spinout from the Technical University of Munich, raised an additional €65m last week, bringing its total funding to $434m to date according to Dealroom. Climeworks — one of the world’s best-funded carbon removal startups — spun out of ETH Zurich, a European spinout powerhouse. PolyAI, a spinout from the University of Cambridge developing a machine learning platform for conversational AI, raised $50m in May this year, after a $40m Series B in 2022.
There’s been a lot of debate over how to get even more of those successes — whether through encouraging universities to reduce the amount of equity they take or figuring out how to encourage more academic founders.
Governments have also been getting involved in the conversation. A long-awaited review into the UK's university spinout ecosystem published last year was met with a good response from tech folk. The UK’s Labour Party has said in its manifesto ahead of the country’s upcoming election that it wants to “work with universities to support spinouts”; a February report from the party also said it wants to help increase the number of spinouts coming out of UK universities and get them better access to funding to scale. And the Czech government has plans to invest €15m into a fund exclusively focused on AI spinouts.
The spotlight tends to fall on more established hubs like London and Cambridge in the UK, ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany. But there are smaller universities and research centres in Europe also working to improve their spinout pipeline; it only takes one big exit to put an institution on the map.
So, which spinouts could be set to give the universities they came from a boost in the next few years? Sifted turned to investors from Earlybird, Octopus Ventures and Voima Ventures for spinouts they have on their radars (and haven’t already invested in).
Natalia Ahmadian — investment team at Earlybird-X
Earlybird-X is a fund from VC Earlybird, focused on pre-seed and seed-stage startups in western Europe. It collaborates with several universities to get proprietary deal flow as early as possible.
OSPHIM — RWTH Aachen University, Germany
OSPHIM is a spinout from the Institute for Plastics Processing (IKV) at RWTH Aachen University that is using AI to optimise the setup of injection moulding machines in the plastics industry, which make everything from bottle caps to dowels. OSPHIM first focuses on the automatic selection of the best settings for injection moulding processes. The data used by its system come from the machines, but also from peripheral devices such as temperature control units, dryers and cameras. The technology was able to demonstrate more than 70% time savings in the initial setup of the machines.
PhotonIP — Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
PhotonIP is a deeptech company based in Eindhoven which aims to reduce fabrication complexity by using geometry to better connect different layers of semiconductor materials (e.g. indium phosphide and silicon). It’s first targeting the datacom/telecom market by optimising existing transceiver technology and therefore reducing assembly costs and complexity.
DuckDuckGoose AI — TU Delft, the Netherlands
DuckDuckGoose has developed AI detection software to spot deepfake threats quickly and accurately, and to safeguard organisations from them. It also provides explanations of how it detects digital manipulations. By flagging deepfake images, DuckDuckGoose can prevent threats like social scams and the spreading of fake news and misinformation.
Amy Nommeots-Nomm — investor at Octopus Ventures focused on deeptech and climate tech
Octopus Ventures is a London-based multi-stage VC.
Cambridge GaN Devices — University of Cambridge, UK
A spinout from Cambridge University, Cambridge GaN Devices (CGD) is a fabless semiconductor company that develops a range of energy-efficient Gallium Nitride (GaN)-based power devices, which switch faster and consume less energy than silicon-based devices. The CGD team are leading the way in GaN innovation and are creating a path to greener power electronics. Its CEO, Dr. Giorgia Longobardi, is a phenomenal example of an academic turned CEO, proving that highly technical academics can become commercial leaders.
Materials Nexus — University of Cambridge, UK
Materials discovery is a hot topic in the investor community right now, and as a huge materials fan, Materials Nexus is one I’ve been tracking closely. The company is another spinout of the University of Cambridge. They have built a platform that can discover and predict the properties of materials, for climate applications, short cutting the iterative R&D loop usually used for materials advancement. Materials Nexus has an incredible team led by CEO Johnathan Bean, with PhD talent covering every aspect of the material modelling pathway.
Glaia — University of Bristol, UK
Glaia is a spinout from the University of Bristol that is improving the efficiency of food production by using its nanodot technology to enable plants to turn sunlight into biomass more efficiently, enhancing their fundamental photosynthetic process. To date, it has proven its technology in strawberries, lettuces and tomatoes — and hit up to a 25% increase in yield.
Salience Labs — University of Oxford, UK
Compute as we currently know it is inefficient. As society adopts more AI, we need smarter solutions to tackle data from every angle — how data is moved, how quickly and how efficiently. Salience labs, a spinout of the University of Oxford, is building silicon based optical switches to enable fast and efficient data transfer. Switches form part of the fundamental backbone of compute, and Salience’s solution will create a step change in available technologies, while saving a huge amount of energy.
Inka Mero — founder and managing partner at Voima Ventures
Voima Ventures is an early-stage deeptech VC with offices in Finland and Sweden
Onego Bio — VTT, Finland
Onego Bio uses precision fermentation to make an animal-free egg white called bioalbumen. At the end of the full process, which starts with the genetic code of actual egg white, you have a tank filled with the biomass and the protein, which you filter out. The protein is then made into bioalbumen powder, which turns into egg white when mixed with water.
Asgard Therapeutics — Lund University, Sweden
Asgard Therapeutics is a biotech startup working on gene therapies that reprogramme cancer cells to spark anti-cancer immune responses in patients. The company came out of Lund University’s Cell Reprogramming and Immunity Lab.
