Meet Imperial's most promising women-led student startups
In 2020, startups founded by women received a paltry 2.3% of global venture capital funding. Yet those that do get funded deliver more than twice the return on investment of those founded by men, reportsHarvard Business Review.
This striking statistic supports our view at Imperial that innovation is better, faster, and more exciting when it draws on the diversity of our community. One way we're working to improve the representation of women in our entrepreneurial ecosystem is through WE Innovate, our flagship pre-accelerator programme for women-led student startups, which is returning for its Grand Final next Thursday (22 June from 6pm in South Kensington).
The Final is your chance to discover the emerging talents and technologies of the final five teams, learn about their innovations in wearables, medtech, and cleantech, and be the first to hear which venture will take away the £30,000 prize.
The prize-giving will be followed by a networking event at which we’ll celebrate the achievements of the ecosystem that you, as a member of our extended community, are helping us to build.
I very much hope to see you there. If you can join, please let us know by registering at the link below.
Six leading universities and seven leading investors have joined forces to build on the UK’s already strong track record on launching spinouts through a ‘how-to’ guide that shares best practice on topics such as equity share and IP. Drawing on a wealth of experience, the USIT Guide will accelerate the formation of university spinouts by drawing on lessons from past successes.
Digital twinning startup Quaisr, which offers engineers an easy digital platform for monitoring the real-time behaviour of physical systems and predicting how they would perform under varied conditions, has raised $3.1 million pre-seed funding. The announcement follows news of the company’s partnership with QinetiQ, which will trial the platform for R&D of new materials.
Imperial is the academic lead on a programme that will explore a new technology for creating nuclear fusion with £12 million funding from EPSRC and First Light Fusion. Researchers will investigate the extremes of heat and pressure required for the technique, which they hope could eventually scale to provide abundant clean energy.
A wave energy startup, WaveX, has won Imperial’s competition for student entrepreneurs, the Venture Catalyst Challenge 2023. The venture will receive a £30,000 prize to progress its technology for harnessing energy from waves, a more consistent alternative to solar and wind power, using converters that are buried under the seabed.
Professional services firms EY and Slaughter and May, furniture manufacturer DFS, and investment firm Talis Capital have become the latest corporate members of Undaunted, a climate innovation centre from Imperial and the Royal Institution. The organisations in its corporate membership programme will have access to insights into new technologies and advice from academic experts.
Fifteen new startups on a mission to use their skills to resourcefully tackle climate change have begun the twelve-month Greenhouse accelerator programme at Undaunted. Their innovations include carbon-negative polystyrene, textiles made from banana fibre and potato harvest waste, and devices for roadside drains that capture particulate pollution.
Flagship analytical facility the Agilent Measurement Suite will continue to provide researchers from Imperial, the White City startup community, and other organisations and universities with access to advanced tools for analysing molecules and cells, after Imperial and the US equipment manufacturer extended their partnership.
Imperial and BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, are leading a consortium of organisations from across the chemical sector that will develop modern continuous production methods to improve its sustainability, resilience and economic success. The partners and EPSRC are investing £17.8 million in the programme.
An at-home swab test for human papilloma virus (HPV) under development by bioengineering PhD students could provide a more comfortable alternative to testing in healthcare settings, reducing barriers to uptake. The students, who won £2,000 in prototyping community the Advanced Hackspace’s Hackstarter competition, have made use of community’s new Biolab.
OSSTEC, a startup developing smart bone implants specially 3D printed in titanium and designed to last longer and better mimic the properties of real bone than existing products, has received £1.2 million from investors including the Imperial College Enterprise Fund. The implants are designed to serve the needs of younger recipients, for whom 35% of knee implants fail in their lifetimes.
Polymateria, a scale-up based at Imperial’s White City Campus, has received £20 million Series B funding to scale its tech for making conventional plastics biodegradable. The company aims to address the problem of plastic products such as carrier bags that find their way into the natural environment through a technology that attracts microbes to biotransform them without sacrificing recyclability.
Startup FreshCheck has launched its latest product, a swab for hygiene testing surfaces in the food industry, and received £400,000 investment following an earlier seed round backed by the Imperial College Enterprise Fund. The team has also moved from a shared lab into its own lab at Imperial’s White City Incubator, where they hope to act as a mentor to younger neighbours.
