Founder-friendly spinout terms will boost the UK's AI economy
Software including AI is a UK success story and is currently the number one sector for UK university spinouts. It is also field where it only takes a few weeks or months of delay to lose a competitive advantage, making it vital that the process of forming a spinout goes quickly.
In the last year, we at Imperial and other innovative universities have worked with leading investors to jointly define a set of best practices that will help get our spinouts off to the strongest possible starts.
Following on from the University Spin-out Investment Terms (USIT) Guide, which we launched to bring life sciences innovations more quickly to the people who benefit from them, I am proud to have led work by a consortium of UK universities and investors to define best practice for software spinouts.
The USIT for Software Guide, which we launched this month, proposes standard terms in several areas of spinout formation. On equity and royalties, it reflects the combined needs of universities, investors and founders, with universities taking a small enough stake to avoid stifling growth but receiving the returns needed to keep investing in the support, incubators and training programmes that are needed to help researchers quickly develop into entrepreneurs.
Through this effort we hope to build on the sector’s success in creating software spinouts like Monolith and About:Energy, which are working to take years off the time it takes to develop electric vehicles, and advanced manufacturing spinout Polaron, which has just been shortlisted for the £1m Manchester Prize, among numerous other examples.
This will help boost the UK economy and maintain the country’s status as a leading place for innovation in of software and AI.
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