Northern Gritstone, the investment vehicle which backs spinouts from universities in the north of England, has announced a partnership with the University of Liverpool.
Launched in 2021, Gritstone invests in companies created from research at the universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. Since then it’s raised £312m and has 31 companies in its portfolio.
The partnership will give Northern Gritstone preferred investor status in spinouts coming out of the University of Liverpool. It will also give companies access to NG Studios, a 10-week accelerator programme Gritstone set up in 2024 with Cambridge deeptech VC Deeptech Labs, which runs the programme.
Lord Jim O’Neill, chair of Northern Gritstone, said: “We now have all four of the universities from the major metro areas that make up a key corridor of the North. This is central to developing a growth hub of 8-9m people in this area, boosting growth not just here, but for the country.”
In the last six years, Liverpool’s commercialisation team has supported the formation of 24 spinouts, including PhenUtest, which works on microbial resistance, and Renewvax, which is developing next-generation vaccines.
“Liverpool is home to some of the most incredible advances in medtech, biosciences and advanced materials,” said Northern Gritstone CEO Duncan Johnson.
The partnership comes at a time when university spinouts are gaining traction among investors. Last year £2.6bn was invested in UK spinouts, the highest that figure has been since 2021, according to a recent report by the Royal Academy of Engineering and data platform Beauhurst.
The same report also found that UK universities took the lowest stake in their spinouts to date in 2024, after a number of institutions adopted government-backed guidelines designed to reduce their share in affiliated spinouts, giving founders bigger stakes in their companies and in turn encouraging more researchers to turn their academic work into commercial ventures.
