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Seed Fund & Venture Fund

Northern Accelerator’s Seed Investment Fund helps spinouts validate business models and demonstrate value to investors. The region also benefits from the recently launched North East Spinout Inspire Fund. This £22.5m venture fund is dedicated to helping spinout businesses in the region.

Seed Investment Fund

With a strong pipeline of investment opportunities and a vibrant community of Northern Accelerator businesses, we’re determined to make a long lasting impact on the North East’s innovation ecosystem.

Alongside the creation of the Inspire Fund, our Seed Fund allows spinouts to demonstrate their value, supporting a pipeline of ambitious, globally scalable businesses.

We’ve invested £1.8m in 9 businesses, as part of funding rounds that raised an overall £6.2m – therefore helping to leverage significant funding from other investors.

The fund, managed by Northstar Ventures, has made significant investments in businesses with the best commercial ideas and high growth potential in a targeted group of sectors including healthcare, clean technology and data.

I very much welcome Northern Accelerator’s launch of a Seed Investment Fund. This is an important step along the way for a vital development in the North East that can increase commercialisation of university research and address the Government’s levelling up agenda.
Alice Frost | Director of Knowledge Exchange at Research England

Inspire Fund

The North East Spinout Inspire Fund invests in companies set up to commercialise the research and innovation emerging from the Northern Accelerator universities.

We are delighted that three Northern Accelerator university spinouts have already received funding from the recent Inspire Fund.

These include Newcastle University spinouts Gnosis Health and Nunabio, along with Durham University spinout H2CHP.

See the images below for more information about each of the companies and their investment rounds.