Business incubators provide start-ups and early-stage businesses with the support and resources those young companies find difficult to access. From 2024, a new 30,000 sq ft building will provide capacity to incubate 275 new companies from West of England universities and beyond.
Bristol’s growing status as a deep tech hub positions the city to rival well-established counterparts like the golden triangle, and actively contributes to the government’s ambitious vision of establishing the UK as a science and technology powerhouse.
The city’s deep tech incubators, which support scientists to take discoveries off the shelf and into the real world, are key to this status.
Science Creates, the University of Bristol and Research England (part of UKRI) are investing £8.5m to build a third state-of-the-art deep tech incubator in Bristol. The investment marks a significant stride in fostering innovation and supporting university spin-outs geared towards steering the fourth industrial revolution, in which technological advances are merging the physical, digital and biological worlds.
From 2024, the new 30,000 sq ft building will provide capacity to incubate approximately 275 new companies from West of England universities and beyond. Specifically, it will accommodate spin-outs which are making the next groundbreaking discoveries in quantum and engineering biology. Facilities include ducted fume cupboards, containment level two labs, a new dedicated AI server capability connectivity and high speed internet.
The third incubator will increase Science Creates’ state-of-the-art facilities by over 65 per cent to 75,000 sq ft.
In 2021 Science Creates opened its Bristol Old Market deep tech incubator with support from UKRI and the University of Bristol. A year after opening, Old Market was fully occupied. To date, Science Creates has supported over 100 deep tech startups and spin-outs. Their facilities provide essential R&D space and support to some of the UK’s most promising quantum and biotech companies including delta g, QLM, Scarlet Therapeutics and Imophoron.
Besides offering incubator space, Science Creates also provides investment support through SCVC –its award-winning VC firm– and training, resources and a community of partners and other Deep Tech startups to find and enable the brightest Deep Tech minds and best startups in the UK. They do this, for example, through their Government-backed and funded Engineering Biology Accelerator Programmes.
St Philips (previously Unit DX) was Science Creates first deep tech incubator, which nurtured Ziylo, one of the UK’s most successful spin outs. Dr Harry Destecroix, founder of Ziylo and the Science Creates ecosystem, said:
“We founded Science Creates in 2015, just one year after spinning out Ziylo, because the biggest barrier we faced was access to advanced research facilities. We also wanted to find people who understood the unique challenges that deep tech spin-outs face. Being part of only 0.3% of UK companies that are spinouts, we decided to do something about it.
“UK spin-outs are, and will be, driving the fourth industrial revolution. All we want to do is help world-class engineers and scientists who have discovered important technological breakthroughs, to build impactful deep tech companies. This will improve the health of the human race and the health of our planet. The additional physical infrastructure will allow deep tech companies to scale and emerge.”