The bottleneck is not funding

The bottleneck in university commercialisation is not funding. It never was.

A recent UKRI-commissioned review of university spin-outs is well researched and worth reading. But its most important finding is buried in plain sight: after years of building more sophisticated funding infrastructure, the pipeline is still leaking, and more capital has not fixed it.

The same is true in Australia. We have the NHMRC, the MRFF and Breakthrough Victoria. The architecture is genuinely stronger than it was a decade ago. And yet the bottleneck has not moved. Assets still reach investors underprepared. Proof-of-concept funding still gets deployed without adequate commercial input. The gap between a promising discovery and an investable proposition remains stubbornly wide.

The report identifies pre-incorporation support as the most under-resourced part of the system: the technical de-risking, commercial pathway design and investor-readiness work that happens before a company even exists. I would go further. It is structurally undervalued.

We celebrate the funding announcement and the spin-out incorporation. We do not celebrate the unglamorous upstream work that determines whether either of those things leads anywhere.

Until that changes, in the UK and here, the pipeline will keep leaking regardless of how much capital sits at the other end.

Where Apex Science helps

This upstream work is what a Funding Readiness Review or an Expert Scientific and Translational Assessment is built for: an independent read on whether a program is ready for investors, and what needs to happen before it is. See services and pricing, or book a 30-minute call.

First published on LinkedIn as part of the #TheCompleteTranslationPipeline series.