BritChips Podcast: Spin-out Funding - A Walk in the Park?

Maybe you can just give us a little bit of background about who Parkwalk Was Is would be probably helpful for our audience.

Yeah, so Parkwalk started in 2009 when a group of colleagues who had previously worked together in various banks set up a fund looking at university intellectual property and companies focused around that.

They had the thesis that that technology would be better than your bog standard technology and more validated and more peer reviewed.

And all those things, of course, are true.

So since 2009, they've been investing from an enterprise investment scheme fund into university technology spin-outs and startups.

Okay, it might

just be worth, sorry to interrupt you, it might just be worth explaining about enterprise investment scheme because it is a very important part, isn't it, for attracting investors into emerging and young tech companies.

In a nutshell, what does EIA scheme, of the investor?

Yes, the enterprise investment scheme is a UK scheme that is great for early stage companies because it offsets some of the risk that the investor has through various tax breaks.

So if you are investing into an EIS relevant company, you can get back 30% of your investment as a tax off your tax bill.

Then when you realize your investment, it's capital gains free.

And also if it fails, you can get back 65% of your loss off your tax bill as well.

So all of this was set up to encourage individual investors into early stage companies.

Well, into any companies, really, but it specialized over the years into having a very hard focus on knowledge intensive companies and university spin outs get a lot of financing through this because at that early stage, you need people who are willing to take that extra risk and the tax breaks can help encourage that.

But for most EIS investors, though, they don't have direct access to university spin-outs.

So investing through a fund like Parkwalk gives them that access.

Now, Parkwalk is only UK universities and only through EIS funds? Yes.

Yes.

But we're part of this broader, larger company, IP Group.

So we are wholly owned by IP Group and have been for about 10 years.

That was obviously before I joined full-time.

And so Parkwalk tends to concentrate on the first part of this continuum of funding.

So Parkwalk comes in typically at seed round, but we also have some pre-seed pots with specific universities.

So we come in at that sort of stage.

Follow the company along.