Northern Gritstone

Celebrating #WorldEntrepreneursDay. Thank you University of Manchester Innovation Factory for creating this short film with Northern Gritstone CIO Marion Bernard on what she looks for when assessing an investment opportunity in an academic spinout. To those budding academic entrepreneurs out there, we hope you feel encouraged. #profitwithpurpose

Working with younger generations is an honour. Whatever the pathway (apprenticeship, A-level, regional Bacc), feeling motivated and believing there are career opportunities in your local region, shouldn’t be impossible. So thank you to Longley Park Sixth Form and Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College for welcoming the Northern Gritstone team. The topic was early-stage investing in the North of England. Students dived into the essential ingredients for a successful start-up, conducted a SWOT on a new business, and explored pathways to becoming an Investment Manager.   The Northern Gritstone team looks forward to working with more schools after the summer holidays. But for now, school's out for summer. We hope you get good weather ! 😎   #profitwithpurpose

Congratulations Bionow on your inaugural Neuroscience conference yesterday in Sheffield, and thank you for inviting Northern Gritstone's Marion Bernard to moderate a panel session. Marion's highlights from the day : 👉 Inspiring keynote from Professor Dame Pamela Shaw, Co-Founder of Crucible Therapeutics and Director of the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience, highlighting some of the amazing research from SiTRAN. 👉 A powerful call to arms by Elizabeth Ineson in the patient presentations, for “more speed please” from everyone involved in the discovery, development and commercialisation of neuroscience treatments and technologies. 👉 A candid discussion of the challenges facing neuroscience, and the benefits of greater collaboration between academia and industry. #profitwithpurpose The University of Sheffield

Researchers at the University of Leeds The University of Manchester and The University of Sheffield - are you looking to take therapeutic discoveries from the lab to the market? Northern Gritstone is supporting a new accelerator program run by the Northern Triangle universities. See below 👇🏼 #profitwithpurpose

📢 Northern Gritstone's 2024 annual report is now available. Follow the link below to find out more about: 🌟 the amazing teams in the North of England that we're supporting 👟 our purpose & impact ➡ our company structure & governance https://bit.ly/4cGYPyA #profitwithpurpose

It was a game of two halves, before the actual game of two halves ⚽   Yesterday Northern Gritstone held its third annual AGM & Investor Day at The University of Sheffield.   Our keynote speakers focused on growth, capital to support growth, and the importance of research and innovation from our universities   “Private capital is an engine for growth and a force for good across all parts of the country. Getting the capital matters” Thank you Michael Moore, Chief Executive of the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (BVCA) for highlighting the importance of growth for all regions in the UK and that we have the ingredients to galvanise growth -  the universities, the entrepreneurial mindset and the pension fund capital.   Louis Taylor, CEO of the British Business Bank, highlighted the Bank’s values and strategy, including growth for smaller businesses in deprived areas of the UK.    The second half saw the CEOs of six early-stage science and technology companies highlight how their companies can improve our lives – whether our health outcomes or the security of our data. Thank you to:     Amanda Smith from Pencil Biosciences Limited a biotech company developing an innovative non-CRISPR gene modulation platform technology that can edit the DNA in any cell   Sheena Macpherson from adsilico Limited a computational medicine company aiming to define, disrupt and dominate the in-silico trials industry through its end-to-end platform  David Rajan from Opteran, which has developed natural intelligence software to enable robots and autonomous vehicles to move around like nature (insects for example)   Nick New from Optalysys which is creating a unique technology that can process data whilst still encrypted James Trenholme from Cavero Quantum which has developed secure quantum-safe software-based cryptographic keys Andrew Almond from Imperagen which is reimagining every step of the enzyme engineering process to develop the world’s fastest and most scalable enzyme-engineering platform   Thank you Sheffield 💛 Our venue for 2025 is Manchester 💜 See you then.  Photography by Laure Divisia-Astill

"Keir Starmer's in-tray: what UK businesses need now". Thank you Richard Parris at startups.co.uk for including Northern Gritstone's Duncan Johnson among the voices of academic and business leaders in his latest piece. The North needs well-paid high-skilled jobs. We have world-class universities and their spinouts are attracting more investing. That's the right direction. So what else does the North need for its science and tech communities to thrive? Better rail services to connect the innovators, entrepreneurs and investors of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. Right direction, but quicker. Read the full article https://bit.ly/4bzhXxg #profitwithpurpose

📢 Portfolio news. Northern Gritstone has invested in Cavero Quantum, a spin-out from the University of Leeds.   Imagine a world in which all of our data (internet communications, web browsing, medical data…) are visible to anyone because of quantum computing. The world needs a scalable, universal and unbeatably secure system !   Cavero Quantum has developed a new passwordless encryption technology for secure key generation and authentication. It is compatible with legacy hardware, requires little bandwidth and has the potential to be secure against cyber attacks by quantum computers.   Founded by Professor Ben Varcoe and Dr Frey Wilson, Cavero now begins commercialising its technology with James Trenholme as CEO and Andrew Wallace as Chair. Northern Gritstone is investing alongside Foresight Group. Frey and James were also part of the inaugural cohort of the NG Studios Deeptech Labs accelerator program. To see their pitch to investors and entrepreneurs, follow this 🔗 https://bit.ly/3RKLixC   To read more about the investment deal, go to our website News https://bit.ly/3VZyTrY #profitwithpurpose #deeptech

Creating a new UK investment narrative. Thank you to Cyrus Kapadia, Chief Executive of Lazard UK, for referencing Northern Gritstone is his recent opinion piece in The Telegraph. Cyrus believes that the narrative on private capital investing into the UK needs to become far more positive for good reason - the UK has many strengths and its economy is sorely in need of investment for growth. He highlights the opportunity stemming from the UK's entrepreneurial combination of innovation and research underpinned by its world-class universities. We couldn't agree more. World-class universities are part of the backbone of UK innovation. We invest in and support spinouts from three of these (the Northern Triangle of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield) precisely because they represent an untapped innovation seam. Since Northern Gritstone's inception, investment into early-stage science and technology-enabled businesses in the North of England has increased tenfold to £300 million (sources: Beauhurst and Northern Gritstone) And that's the narrative for investing into the UK that we believe in. Ambitious founders creating the world-class companies of tomorrow stemming from the world-class science and technology in the North's universities today, for the benefit of UK plc. To read Cyrus' article, go to [paywall] https://lnkd.in/ej_-2-GN #profitwithpurpose

Wonderful news that Professor Shearer West has been appointed as Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Leeds, one of Northern Gritstone's three founding universities and an important strategic partner. We look forward to working with Professor Shearer when she takes up her post.