Spinout News / UCLB News

PoC Funding: the spinouts benefitting from UCLB’s early assistance

20 May 2025

Proof-of-Concept (PoC) funding is a hot topic in the Technology Transfer sector right now. A leading group of tech transfer universities – called TenU – is calling on government, universities and the investment community to work closely together to grow this vital early funding route which can be critical in helping academics to make their inventions, research outputs and ideas ‘investment-ready’.  

PoC bridges the gap between the end of research funding and the start of venture capital investment in their spinout business. It has helped many UCL technologies make it through that tricky early phase over the last ten years, with over £6.6m PoC funding coming from a range of sources including the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), and UCLB’s own PoC investment fund.

Today’s most successful UCL spinouts – and their positive impacts ranging from leukaemia therapies to wireless railway infrastructure monitoring systems – might not have reached market.  

There are many more in the pipeline too – over £1.1m was awarded by UCLB alone last year.  

To find out more about UCLB’s wide-ranging impact, check out our Impact Report discover more about the TenU PoC campaign, see here. 

Meanwhile, here are some of examples of the transformative technologies now on the market thanks to PoC, entrepreneurial academics and the successful spinouts they have grown… 

 

Autolus Therapeutics  

Breakthrough immunotherapy cancer treatments from Autolus Therapeutics offer hope to cancer patients who previously had few or no treatment options. Spun out from University College London in 2014, the business develops re-programmed T-cell immunotherapies (known as CAR-T), also called ‘living medicines’; they rearm a patient’s T cells to recognise and kill their cancer cells, particularly leukaemia’s and lymphomas.  

Dr Martin Pule, one of the leaders of the ‘CAR-T’ programmes at UCL’s Cancer Institute, established Autolus following several rounds of proof-of-concept funding totalling £183,000 from UCLB between 2010 and 2014, which successfully demonstrated the therapeutic applications and commercial potential of this nascent technology.  

Since its inception in 2014, the company has undergone rapid growth. The company has raised $921.6m, including $150m (£125m) from investors such as UK life science investment firm Syncona and up to $250m from Blackstone Life Sciences in one of the largest ever private financings of a UK biotech company. 

 

Satalia 

Satalia is a global leader in enterprise AI and one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies, whose clients have included Tesco, DFS, DS Smith, BT, PwC, Gigaclear and Unilever.  

Combining machine learning and optimisation, it builds technologies that helps clients transform their business strategies and radically improve operational efficiency – for example by instantly identifying optimal delivery routes from trillions of possibilities. Saving time, money and resources, improving customer service and reducing energy.  

Satalia developed from research by founder Daniel Hulme at UCL’s Department of Computer Science, along with co-founders Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein and Dr Alastair Moore. UCLB awarded £32,000 in PoC funding in 2008 to allow Daniel to build a prototype and in parallel conduct market research with companies that could benefit from the proposed optimisation technology.  

 

Senceive  

Senceive Ltd has become the international leader of wireless enabled remote condition monitoring solutions for use in rail and construction applications. 

Researchers within the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering had developed an innovative wireless mesh-enabled sensor network technology which had the potential to enable highly efficient monitoring of the state of infrastructure assets (e.g. whether a railway embankment was at risk of slippage).  

POC funding of £37,500 from one of the UK’s first PoC programmes, a consortia comprising UCL, Imperial, Cambridge and Oxford and funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund, supported prototype development and market scoping work which sought to quantify the unmet need that the UCL technology had the potential to address.  

Over a 15+ year commercialisation journey, the company translated the early prototypes into a robust monitoring solution that met the demanding needs of rail and construction clients in over 40 countries, generating strong revenues (£15m+) and employed a team of 60+ staff from offices in the UK, Australia and the USA.  

In 2021, Senceive was acquired by Previan, a Canadian industrial technology group generating strong returns for the company’s management team, UCLB and academic founders.  

 

Aspire 

Cassava is a staple crop in Nigeria, crucial for food security and income due to its versatility in producing food and industrial products like starch and ethanol. However, smallholder farmers struggle with market access due to quality evaluation issues.  

Dr. Temitope Odedeyi and Professor Izzat Darwazeh from UCL developed a low-cost, handheld device to measure cassava starch content, aiming to help these farmers meet high-value market standards.  

This tool, paired with Rinicom’s AI platform, will provide a comprehensive solution for productivity enhancement and market integration in Nigeria’s cassava industry.