From hypothesis to headway

Ahead of introducing our new Activation Partners next week, we’re looking at what our founding cohort has made possible – from new companies and research organisations to bespoke tools, talent pathways and communities helping ambitious R&D move faster and further.

Breakthroughs do not make the journey from lab to world on their own. A team may need a piece of equipment that has never been built, a route for a researcher to become a founder, a new kind of organisation, or simply the right people in the same room.

Since launching the call for our founding cohort of Activation Partners in May 2024, we have worked with nine partners to build bespoke translational infrastructure and activate talent in the UK. Our aim wasn’t to replicate one model, but to bring together distinct capabilities that could help our Creators and Programme Directors overcome different bottlenecks, while connecting more of the people, tools and organisations around frontier R&D in parallel.

Here’s a snippet of what they’ve achieved so far:

• Making experiments possible: Amodo Design is providing specialist engineering support to 38 projects, with 27 Creator teams across all of our programmes.

• Opening new talent pathways: Nucleate UK has engaged more than 3000 researchers through its growing biotech community. Pillar VC’s Encode: AI for Science Fellowship attracted more than 1,400 applicants from 116 countries for its second cohort, bringing exceptional AI researchers into UK labs and alongside our Creators.

• Giving ambitious ideas room to develop: Cambridge NeuroWorks now has 17 fellows, 12 of them from outside Cambridge, and its first six fellows have raised more than £2.4m in follow-on funding to take their ideas forward.

• Building ventures and institutions: Fifty Years has brought its 5050 company-building programme to the UK, with £7.5m raised in pre-seed funding raised. Convergent Research has launched two new UK Focused Research Organisations, while Renaissance Philanthropy has connected more than 1,000 scientists through UK Horizons.

• Connecting the ecosystem: Venture Café has gathered more than 10,000 people together across 64 curated events in London, Manchester and Edinburgh. Through its Science 2030 initiative, Google DeepMind has connected more than 160 Creators with frontier AI tools and questions.

Working in parallel, our Activation Partners are building the connective tissue around the UK’s breakthrough R&D: specialist engineering expertise, talent pathways, founder support, new institutions and communities. This makes it more likely that a high-risk idea can become an experiment, a capability, a company, an organisation or a tangible breakthrough.

The founding cohort has also sharpened our thinking. Strong partners need room to pursue their own distinctive methods, rather than fit a standard service model. Where the ecosystem already serves a need, our job is to connect rather than duplicate. And because talented people move between opportunities, the strongest pathways often reach beyond any one partner’s network.

That is the foundation for our new cohort. We are doubling down on the translation of frontier R&D across our opportunity spaces, through talent pipelines, engineering support and organisation building, while expanding the model to include advanced AI capabilities applied to R&D.

The film above captures some of the people and work already putting this into motion.

Stay tuned for more on our new partners.

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