News

Cancer Research Horizons Seed Fund

Published on: 14/01/2025

Cancer Research Horizons Seed Fund

Accelerating high-potential, early-stage innovations into patient impact through seed funding, expert networks and business building support.

Funding news

About our Seed Fund

Our Seed Fund builds on 25 years of creating and building successful start-ups. It is a £15m investment commitment from Cancer Research UK, managed by our dedicated Ventures team, to help bridge one of the most challenging stages of start-up creation: attracting early-stage risk capital.

Far too many of the breakthroughs still stall in their early stages due to a funding gap between cutting-edge academic cancer research and a start-up becoming ready for scale-up investment. We invest in promising, early-stage opportunities, sourced from the 4,000 researchers we fund in the UK, and globally through our Cancer Grand Challenges programme, our global partnerships, and the wider research community.

Through this fund we can provide early-stage capital and venture creation support including entrepreneurial training, commercial advice, support with intellectual property, access to experts, mentors and management teams. We also catalyse co-investment to maximise the chances of start-ups becoming financially attractive to investors and benefiting cancer patients.

Our investment strategy

Our investment decisions are driven by the potential for patient impact – we take risks others can’t, adopting novel and challenging ideas that hold promise for real innovation, meet unmet needs and have the potential to save and enhance lives. Having a sustainable fund that isn’t subject to market fluctuations or shareholder return allows us to take risks others can’t and to take a long-term view.

Our investment remit includes therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices and data-driven and AI solutions.

Any returns we generate are reinvested in the fund and cancer research. We’re also fundraising to boost the fund, to extend its scale and longevity.

Funding available

Early-stage validation capital

  • Rapid-access funding to help bridge the gap between a new idea and some validating data, obtain expert regulatory advice, entrepreneurial training and/or support market research
  • Up to £50k

Pre-seed capital

  • Investment capital to evaluate and support the technical feasibility and commercial potential of early-stage technologies
  • Typically £50-150k
  • This applies to pre-company formation or early-stage company validation

Seed capital

  • To assist new company creation and early growth, or further develop a start-up proposition before forming a new company
  • Typically £100-500k, with the ability to invest up to £1m on occasion

Follow-on capital

  • For our seed invested portfolio companies, we have the ability to provide follow-on capital to help drive maturation where additional capital may incentivise external investment
  • Typically £100-500k, with the ability to invest up to £1m on occasion

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