A report published in February by Tony Hickson, whose career spanned university technology transfer, investment and startups, found that almost half of UK university spinouts founded between 2013 and 2024 came out of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Those three cities attracted two-thirds of the venture capital that went into the sector.
Data compiled by Indeed for Bloomberg also showed the so-called Golden Triangle accounted for more than half of the sector's hiring.
More than 2,000 university spinouts have formed in the UK since 2010, with a combined value of about £49bn, most of them in deep tech, according to the Royal Academy of Engineering. Oxford Nanopore went public at a £3.4bn valuation, and Oxford Ionics and OrganOx were each acquired for more than $1bn last year.
One company formed outside them is METzero, which spun out of Newcastle University in 2024 and has raised about £750,000 in grants. Its technology uses microbes and electrodes to break down sewage, using less energy than the century-old method of pumping oxygen through tanks and giving off ammonia that can be recovered and sold as fertiliser. Thames Water, the UK's largest water company, is trialling it.
Pavlina Theodosiou, METzero's chief executive, said support from Northern Accelerator, a government-funded programme founded in 2016 to help researchers commercialise their work, was vital. It paid for someone to develop the business plan, and a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship bought her out of her university contract for a year.
Across the universities in Northern Accelerator's umbrella, the number of spinouts rose from two in 2018 to 10 in 2025, against the
