28 November 2025
Seeding new AgTech ventures with Nucleate UK
A deep dive into how Nucleate UK and ARIA are working together to create the conditions for bold ideas to thrive, building and connecting communities and empowering those driving impact beyond the lab.
The Nucleate Forum – a fireside chat with Ilan Gur and Maja Wojtynska
Nucleate UK are a student-led, non-profit organisation empowering a global community of bio-innovators. They promote science commercialisation to researchers by building more consistent and smoother spin-out pathways, early entrepreneurship education, and increased financial and operational connectivity across the ecosystem.
A core aim of ARIA and Nucleate’s partnership is supporting our Programmable Plants opportunity space through Nucleate’s Eco track. The track fosters biotech entrepreneurship aimed at tackling sustainability and climate challenges, offering masterclasses, workshops, and its flagship Activator programme to help early-stage science transition into commercial ventures.
The first ARIA-powered UK Eco cohort ran from October 2024 until March 2025 – ARIA’s support empowered Nucleate UK to have the biggest cohort amongst the 22 chapters running an Activator programme. Kicking off with a series of events across the entire country to build a community from scratch, our partnership is already catalysing scientific and economic impact in the UK. Success stories from the first cohort include Bindbridge, whose founders joined with a concept of computationally accelerating molecular discovery for agriculture. Over the course of the programme they went from idea to incorporated company which has now raised a multimillion pre-seed round in investment from investors including Nucleus Capital and Speedinvest.
Another is 2Blades, an AgTech organisation from The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich focused on delivering durable disease resistance in crops. 2Blades joined Eco to explore the best strategic path for translating their fundamental R&D into real-world applications. They ultimately concluded that remaining a non-profit was the best way to preserve their mission and impact. ARIA and Nucleate see this as a success: “A core purpose of the Activator is to give teams a structured, time-bound way to pressure-test startup ideas and company models as quickly and honestly as possible,” says Federico Caso, who directs the partnership on behalf of Nucleate UK. “Sometimes that results in a new, venture-backed company like Bindbridge; sometimes it results in a well-informed decision to continue in other directions.”
Launching Nucleate UK's first ARIA-powered cohort.
Building on the success of the first Activator, the partnership is growing the Eco track community through technical hackathons, UK-wide roadshows and foundational education workshops in order to catalyse new ideas, talent and capital into the Programmable Plants opportunity space. “By supporting Nucleate UK’s Eco track, we’re not just helping to build our own Programmable Plants space, but we’re actively catalysing a new, dedicated pillar of entrepreneurial activity in the ecosystem,” says Pranay Shah, Product Manager at ARIA and lead for our Activation Partners initiative. “Biotech translation for climate impact currently lacks the robust entrepreneurial pathway seen in human health areas such as drug discovery – our vision is to rapidly expand this through our partnership with Nucleate, ensuring a sustained flow of exceptional founders, breakthroughs, and investment that will endure long after ARIA’s initial work in the space.”
Looking forward, Nucleate is gearing up to further increase access to biotech entrepreneurship around ARIA’s opportunity spaces. In 2026, our partnership will launch Catalyse, a fully online ‘Biotech 101’ programme designed to help researchers take their first steps toward company creation. Nucleate will also run dedicated Investor Roadshows, providing sustainability and climate focused biotech investors the chance to meet and interact with early stage Eco ventures across the UK.
When it comes to the goals of the partnership, “the clearest measure of success will be the impact we have on seeding a more ambitious, risk-tolerant entrepreneurial culture in the UK AgTech ecosystem,” says Fiachra Sweeney, Director of Eco at Nucleate UK. “One where researchers feel supported to pursue bold, unconventional ideas.”