British Business Bank puts £46m into Zinc's £70m science fund
The state-backed lender is committing up to £46m through its Enterprise Capital Funds programme to a pre-seed fund that intends to help start 80 deeptech companies. What it will not yet say is how founders get in.
The British Business Bank has agreed to commit up to £46m, or €53.6m, to Zinc Capital Management's second institutional fund.
The money comes through the Bank's Enterprise Capital Funds programme, which exists to push more equity into early-stage UK companies and to make first-time and smaller fund managers viable by improving the returns on offer to private investors.
Zinc's Science-for-Impact Fund is targeting £70m, or €81.5m. On Zinc's account, it aims to build a portfolio of 80 new deeptech companies.
That arithmetic matters more than the headline number. A £70m fund spread across 80 companies implies first cheques measured in hundreds of thousands, not millions.
Zinc was founded in 2017 and invests at pre-seed, in health and environment companies. It says it writes the first cheque and adds venture-building support alongside it, working with founders from the point before a company formally exists.
Its portfolio includes SignaCor, working on therapeutics for heart disease; Epiome, a biomarker platform for neurodegenerative disease; Speek, a clinical care platform for teenage self-harm; Spine, software for grid-scale battery assets; and CellMine, a lithium-ion battery recycling process.
The Bank previously committed to Zinc II in 2022. This is the second time it has backed the firm.
Zinc says the fund's strategy lines up with the government's industrial strategy priorities: advanced manufacturing, clean energy, life sciences, engineering biology and AI.
Mark Sims, head of development equity funds at the British Business Bank, said the commitment would strengthen the pipeline of businesses driving the UK's future economy.
For a scientist sitting on a result and no company, the practical questions are cheque size, equity taken, the programme a founder has to join and when applications open. None of that has been published.
What has been published is the shape of the opportunity: a pre-seed investor with fresh public money, an explicit remit to back people before incorporation, and a stated target of 80 companies to find.
Founders in health and environmental science who have been told they are too early for institutional money now have one more door that is, by design, meant to open at that stage. The terms behind it are still to come.