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| 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | Events |
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U.K's $38-Million Nanotech Bet
Red Herring, 6th April 2005
Brits appropriate funds to help commercialize nanotech, boosting the U.K.'s competitive position in the emerging market.
The U.K. Department of Trade and Industry will make eight more grants totaling £20 million ($37 million) to help companies and university researchers commercialize nanotechnology research.
The funds are part of a £90 million ($170 million) nanotech initiative announced almost two years ago by the DTI, the British equivalent of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Combined with millions more in public grants and private capital, the money announced Wednesday by science and innovation minister Lord Sainsbury puts the United Kingdom in a solid competitive position in the nascent nanotech market, which cuts across dozens of sectors and could be worth trillions within a decade.
"In the U.S. and Asia there remains a huge amount of funding aimed at this area. It's good to see the U.K. government doing a bit to make sure our companies can compete," said Hazel Moore, chairman and founder of FirstCapital, a London venture capital firm and prominent U.K. nanotech investor.
No independent firm tracks U.K. nanotech investments, but VCs spend between £70 million and £100 million ($132 million to $185 million) per year in the area, according to Ms. Moore, whose firm has its own database of hundreds of venture-backed companies and early-stage projects. The U.K. government agency Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) spends £130 million ($245 million) every year on nano-scale scientific research.
These figures trail the U.S. expenditures of $1 billion from the government's National Nanotechnology Initiative and VC financings of $250 million, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Yet the U.K.'s public markets seem less spooked about nanotechnology than in the United States, with more than a dozen public offerings last year on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the London Stock Exchanges's little brother.
Because most mainstream VCs have shied away from nanotech, smaller firms like FirstCapital, MTI Partners in Hertfordshire, and Scottish Equity Partners in Glasgow, Scotland, have stepped in to invest.
Like the nanotech area as a whole, the most recently funded projects comprise a wide array of sectors, from precision laser printing to drug delivery systems, but the country has already carved out a few areas of nanotech expertise: fuel cells and displays. Fuel cell companies Ceres Power and ITM Power and microdisplay company MicroEmissive Displays offered up stock on AIM in 2004.
Nevertheless, as in the U.S. and Asia, most of these companies are in the process of commercializing their technology, and are years away from significant revenues.
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