“Much of our success is due to the work of many remarkable people.”
Anne Dobrée, Cambridge Enterprise
Cambridge Enterprise, the tech transfer office of Cambridge University, has taken the top international spot in a ranking for return on investments by leading firms, Business Weekly has reported. The ranking has been produced by private equity and venture capital database PitchBook. According to the list, Cambridge Enterprise has a distributed-to-paid of 2.86 times.
Meanwhile the total value-to-paid-in – the returns added to unrealised investments divided by the cash paid into the fund – reaches 3.55 times, putting the TTO in 10th place.
Although the numbers have not yet been officially audited, Anne Dobrée, head of seed funds at Cambridge Enterprise, revealed that gross proceeds reached nearly £23.5m ($33.5m) by the end of July last year.
Cambridge Enterprise has celebrated a number of significant successes over the years, including the acquisition of medtech BlueGnome by biotech company Illumina in 2013. The deal provided Cambridge with an immediate return of £7.7m though the transaction included an additional £3m dependent on milestones.
Another exit for Cambridge Enterprise came in March 2015, when pharmaceutical company Janssen Pharmaceuticals bought spinout XO1, which had been commercialising an anticoagulant that could avert strokes and heart attacks.
In 2014, the commercialisation unit launched Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), a £50m evergreen fund that invests not only in the university’s spinouts but also in startups and companies in the Cambridge cluster. The fund was the result of 18 months of work initiated by Tony Raven, chief executive of Cambridge Enterprise, and Edward Benthall, then chairman of Cambridge Enterprise and now non-executive chairman of CIC. Sister publication Global University Venturing gave CIC an award for fundraising of the year in 2014.
Dobrée said: “We do not do a lot of bragging at Cambridge Enterprise. While we keep up the good news flow, we are pretty modest about our achievements.
“This is partly because our roots are firmly planted in customer service, and mostly because we recognise that much of our success is due to the work of many remarkable people, not least of which the members of the university who come to us for help commercialising their brilliant ideas.”