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On knowledge-intensive businesses continued
Expanding and supporting our existing portfolio
In August 2022, we invested in Cambridge GaN Devices (CGD), a fabless semiconductor company that develops a range of energy-efficient gallium nitride-based (GaN) power devices to make greener electronics possible. CGD was spun-out of the University of Cambridge to push the limits of semiconductor properties based on decades of research to develop green solutions for everyday electronics, respecting our planet’s natural resources, and creating a more sustainable future for the generations to come. This transaction has not been announced yet.
target broad cancer patient populations in both solid and haematological cancers. The seed funding will be used to build the company’s executive team, advance further research on this new class of antigens, and catalyse their translation into novel cancer immunotherapeutics, including therapeutic vaccines, cell therapies, and TCR-based biologics.
In December 2022, we participated in Carrick’s $25 million Series C round to accelerate the development of its CDK7 and CDK12/13 inhibitors to potentially bring new treatment approaches to patients battling cancer. At the same time, Carrick announced a collaboration with, and $35 million investment from, Pfizer to support its rapid development of samuraciclib in HR+, HER2- breast cancer, which represents more than two-thirds of all new female breast cancer cases. Carrick secured the aggregate funds, whilst maintaining full economic ownership and control of samuraciclib and the rest of its pipeline.
During the year, we invested in the $28 million Series A round of Mosaic Therapeutics, an oncology therapeutics company dedicated to resolving cancer’s complexity to power new treatments for patients. Mosaic’s use of advanced computational methods, while combining mining of large datasets with experimental approaches to identify and develop novel targeted therapies, completely reinvents the traditional approach to target and drug discovery. The company’s bespoke relationship with the Wellcome Sanger Institute provides it with unique access to deep scientific expertise, infrastructure, and biological assets.
During the year, we invested funds that we had previously committed to Epitopea’s £10.3 million seed financing. Epitopea aims to bring transformative benefits to cancer patients by uncovering a new class of untapped tumour-specific antigens (TSAs), to create immunotherapies that
In March 2023, we participated in Seldon’s $20 million Series B round alongside new and existing investors. Seldon is a data-centric machine learning operations (MLOps) platform for the deployment, management, monitoring and explainability of machine learning models. Organisations are investing heavily in AI but many are struggling to scale out their models in production due to bottlenecks in team workflows, increased regulation and compliance restraints, a lack of trust in model outputs, and ensuring peak model performance are all top of mind for AI-powered enterprises. Seldon empowers Data Scientists, ML Engineers and other business stakeholders to accelerate the adoption of machine learning to help solve these challenges with unprecedented efficiency.
In November 2022, we participated in the Series A round of T-Therapeutics, a venture-backed company on a mission to unlock the power of T cells to treat chronic and infectious diseases. Based on technology from Professor Allan Bradley’s laboratory in Cambridge University’s Department of Medicine, T-Therapeutics secured the funds to support its drug discovery efforts and prepare candidates for development.
During the year, we participated in Unlikely AI’s $20 million seed round. The funds raised will boost the development of Unlikely AI’s ambitious, fresh approach to artificial intelligence and expand its team. Unlikely AI was founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, best known for his role in the development of Amazon Alexa and a member of our Advisory Panel. His first start-up, Evi Technologies (formerly True Knowledge), developed technology for natural language understanding and question answering. Evi launched a voice assistant with the same name in 2012 that saw millions of downloads in the first few months. The company was then acquired by Amazon, where the technology, team and know-how were used to create, launch and further develop Alexa.