The Venture Catalyst Challenge in 5 graphs

The Venture Catalyst Challenge is the UK’s only deep science pre-accelerator programme. It takes Imperial College students, staff and alumni and puts them through an intensive programme to prove their ideas have commercial viability.

Since 2013 teams who have gone through the programme have raise almost £14 million in funding and been acquired by the likes of Elsevier and Facebook. The winners of the 2016 Venture Catalyst Challenge were BioNet.Agriculture who have developed an edible biopolymer to wrap straw, hay and silage.

This year we received more entries than ever before and the quality of applicants was incredibly high. We focused down repeatedly throughout the programme, with 7 teams finally pitching for £10000.

The cohort this year had a strong representation from a range of academic backgrounds. Teams with a mix of specialisms performed particularly well:

Similarly, the VCC attracted a mix of applicants from a range of academic stages:

When the VCC first came into existence, it lacked the deep science focus it has today. We chose to specialise in this area for two main reasons. Firstly, Imperial has a world leading scientific community with an incredible pool of talent. Imperial students have the capability and competitive advantage to build paradigm-changing deep technologies, in place of the norm of creating apps and software platforms. Secondly we think this area is particularly under-served in London and the UK in general. In addition to the hundreds of options digital startups can turn to for support, we offer an opportunity for scientific ventures to get the help they need too.

Overall these graphs paint a picture of a programme that has grown over time and that increasingly benefits from the healthy and unique ecosystem that exists at Imperial today. You can find out more about the startups that went through the programme this year and in the past here.