OVERVIEW
STRATEGIC REPORT
GOVERNANCE
FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
OPERATIONAL REPORT We are delighted to report that the last year has been transformational for our business, despite the challenges posed by the global coronavirus pandemic. We have completed the first close of our new fund (Fund II) that we will manage alongside our balance sheet investments, and we have already added three companies to Fund II’s portfolio including Seldon Technologies, an Open Source DevOps company, further details of which are provided on pages 38 and 39. Our balance sheet portfolio goes from strength to strength and now includes one company valued significantly in excess of £1 billion and two more, Bicycle Therapeutics and Centessa Pharmaceuticals, that are publicly traded on Nasdaq. In addition, since the year end we have announced that NeoGenomics, a leading provider of cancer-focused genetic testing services and global oncology contract research services, has acquired Inivata, our liquid biopsy company. The acquisition follows a $25 million investment by NeoGenomics in Inivata that completed in May 2020, at which time NeoGenomics also secured a fixed price option to purchase the shares it did not own for $390 million.
PUTTING CAPITAL TO WORK
We first invested in Inivata at the seed round and have participated in every round since, validating our differentiated strategy of gaining early access to the most innovative life sciences and technology companies in the Cambridge ecosystem and supporting them through their lifecycles. Inivata’s InVision® platform unlocks essential genomic information from a simple blood draw to guide and personalise cancer treatment, monitor response and detect relapse. We are thrilled that this acquisition will accelerate patients’ access to Inivata’s groundbreaking technology that is based on the pioneering work of Dr Nitzan Rosenfeld from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.
In May 2020 we invested in PetMedix, a biopharmaceutical company developing antibody-based therapeutics for companion animals, as a direct investment from the Group’s balance sheet. PetMedix has developed an innovative platform for the creation of naturally generated, fully species-specific therapeutic antibodies, enabling the discovery of its own veterinary medicines to target some of the most important clinical areas in animal health. Our funding will be used to further the development of PetMedix’s unique platform and pipeline, and we are delighted to support the company’s exciting growth transition from biotechnology start-up to clinical-stage animal health company.
IMPACT OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC We are pleased to report that the deep technology and life sciences sectors in which we invest have weathered the coronavirus storm well and our portfolio has continued to grow healthily. We have implemented various measures to ensure that our office is COVID-secure but in accordance with government guidance we are working from home when possible. As a result we are conducting a significant proportion of our investment and portfolio support activities remotely. We have continued to work with our portfolio companies to mitigate the impact of business interruption and other challenges posed by the world’s response to the pandemic. This has included successfully applying for the government schemes that have been introduced during the current climate, specifically the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and the Future Fund for innovative businesses. Having initially experienced a significant slowdown in venture capital activity as other investors, like us, focused on supporting their existing portfolios, we are pleased to report that several of our portfolio companies are making significant commercial progress and our pipeline for Fund II contains several particularly exciting opportunities.
During the year ended 31 March 2021, the Group has completed 21 transactions (2020: 22) and deployed a total of £25.9 million (2020: £35.7 million) in two new and 13 existing portfolio companies, such that cumulatively £192.5 million (2020: £163.0 million) has been invested by the Group, or funds managed by the Group, since CIC’s incorporation.
EXPANDING THE PORTFOLIO
More recently we co-led a £7.1 million Series A investment in Seldon, an Open Source DevOps company providing enterprises with the tools to manage, serve and optimise their machine learning models at scale, as the first investment by Fund II. Seldon is a cloud agnostic machine learning deployment specialist which works in partnership with industry leaders such as Google, Red Hat, IBM and Amazon Web Services. Seldon’s suite of products enhances machine learning deployment pipelines with best-in-class explainability, governance and monitoring functions. The company’s flagship open-source project, Seldon Core, has over 700,000 models deployed to date, drastically reducing friction for users deploying machine learning models. Seldon’s technology can help to ensure decisions made by machine learning algorithms are transparent and ethical, enabling customers to regulate the deployment of their models with significant oversight.
We have significant cash resources and are, therefore, in a strong position to maintain our support for portfolio companies under management and enhance their aggregate value.
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