Further details of each investment are provided below. As a result CIC now holds investments in 16 businesses and, in line with the Group’s business strategy, these are split evenly across healthcare and technology sectors and between those emanating from the University of Cambridge and those from elsewhere within the Cambridge Cluster.
Victor Christou, CEO of Cambridge Innovation Capital, commented, “CIC’s recent investments illustrate the strength and breadth of the exciting business opportunities that are being formed within the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Cluster. Adding to these investments, we continue to see a healthy stream of exciting new prospects with great commercial potential.”
CIC has provided follow-on funding to existing portfolio companies as part of its long term, patient capital strategic investment approach.
- CIC invested £2.5 million in Imagen to develop and expand Imagen’s customer base for its sector-leading media asset management system. Imagen was one of CIC’s earliest investments. Its sophisticated SaaS media archival and monetisation platform ImagenEVP is used by world-leading sports federations, including the Premier League, ATP World Tour, Ryder Cup and IMG Media, to handle and distribute valuable content and images to global broadcast partners such as NBC, ESPN and Sky.
- As announced on 13 October 2016, CIC provided follow-on funding to PragmatIC Printing, a world leader in flexible electronics, as part of its £18 million financing. Avery Dennison, which has leading global positions in labelling and packaging materials as well as radio frequency identification (RFID), and ARM also participated in the investment round. Funds will support PragmatIC’s development and commercialisation of its FlexLogIC “fab-in-a-box” system.
- Undo announced on 20 October 2016 that it had raised £2.6 million of funding from a syndicate of investors led by CIC. Undo’s unique record, rewind and replay technology enables Linux and Android developers to see exactly what their program did at every step in its execution, and its reversible debugging and recording technology allows problems to be fixed quickly and easily.
In addition to the follow-on funding for existing investments, CIC has invested in a range of companies new to the portfolio.
- CIC formed part of the syndicate that has provided $95 million (£78 million1) of funding to Carrick Therapeutics, launching and building a leading European oncology company. As CIC announced on 3 October 2016, some of Carrick Therapeutic’s founding intellectual property was licensed by Cambridge Enterprise from the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge.
- CIC has worked with Cambridge Enterprise and the University of Cambridge to make an initial investment in PervasID, a spin-out from the University’s Engineering Department focused on passive RFID reader systems.
- CIC has made an initial investment in Fluidic Analytics, which is developing exciting new technology for protein characterisation, with its first product being shipped before the end of 2016.
1 Translated at a rate of £1 = $1.22