EDINBURGH university’s renowned Roslin Institute has teamed up with a private equity firm with the aim of creating potential $1 billion (£0.8bn) companies in sectors such as animal health and agricultural technology.
The partners have launched the Food & Agriculture Science Transformer to use the financial firepower that Deep Science Ventures can provide to maximise the commercial potential of the expertise offered by academics working at Roslin institute.
£750m expansion plan to put Edinburgh Bioquarter on global stage
Famed as the birthplace of Dolly the cloned sheep, Roslin has specialists working in a range of fields, including genomics, veterinary biosciences and agriculture.
The FAST partnership will provide up to £500,000 funding to support the development of new businesses that are seen as having the potential to help tackle key challenges faced by farmers, the public and the planet’s ecosystems.
Commercialisation specialist John Mackenzie at the innovation centre linked to Roslin said the programme had the potential to create the first ‘unicorn’ in the Animal Health, Agri-tech and Aquaculture (AAA) sector. Unicorns are young firms that have reached a valuation of $1bn.
Financial research specialist to create jobs in Edinburgh after winning private equity backing
Edward Perello of London-based Deep Science ventures said: “ Over the coming years, our ambition is to work with the right founders and partners, and create hundreds of high value jobs at the intersection of technology and agriculture.”
Deep Science Ventures’ portfolio includes a stake in Roslin-based Beta Bugs, which develops insect breeds.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here