After completing our PhDs in organic chemistry and physics respectively, my co-founder Ben Miles and I were both early hires at Ziylo, a Bristol-based university spinout which developed new technology for treating diabetes. Ziylo was bought by Novo Nordisk back in 2018. Our paths diverged after this exit with Ben founding Spin Up Science, to train the next generation of entrepreneurial UK-based scientists (over 5,000 trained since 2018) and myself becoming a full-time angel investor in DeepTech. 

However, after a chance conversation in 2021 where we both identified a lack of domain specialist investors for our portfolios, we came back together to establish an angel syndicate. This focused on providing specialist due diligence to angel investors and the founders to help support their latest fundraising efforts from more generalist funds. 

After securing a £5M co-investment fund from British Business Investments Regional Angel Programme in October 2023 and analysing our latest syndicate member survey, we identified that there was appetite for a domain specialist SEIS & EIS fund. We rebranded to Empirical Ventures, launched our first SEIS & EIS fund in 2024 and set about building the specialist VC fund for early-stage deep tech startups and university spin-outs that the UK needs. Our mission is to empower scientists to take their ventures forward and make entrepreneurship a natural progression from science. To date, we have invested in 21 startups across fields like life sciences, advanced materials and robotics, deploying £8.9M to date. 

Which industries are you working in?

Our planet faces urgent challenges—from climate change and resource scarcity to the need for accessible healthcare. We are looking for entirely new technologies developed from fundamental research in Life Sciences, Advanced Materials, TechBio, Photonics and Quantum Hardware, Robotics and Automation, AgChem/Tech and DeepTech. The nature of developing deep technologies requires patient capital. We are investing in these high risk, high reward areas of science that have the potential to solve the world’s most pressing issues. 

What do you look for in a founder? 

Empirical Ventures is looking to back multidisciplinary teams of scientists who combine exceptional scientific talent with innate entrepreneurial drive. We particularly think that people who've been through a PhD process have been trained in the personal skill sets required to turn scientific research into a commercial reality.

In a PhD, it's a self-driven activity where it's on you to drive yourself forward, it's on you to make decisions in the face of uncertain outcomes. There's no right answer, there's no right path to follow. It requires a huge amount of persistence. Often things don't necessarily work the first time, you have to keep showing up every day. These skill sets are invaluable in the zero-to-one phase of building a Deep Tech business.

Having co-founders in a business is important for sharing the emotional burden and journey of what it takes to make these companies successful. We look for multi-disciplinary teams because we believe that it creates a talent moat for DeepTech businesses from day 1 and represents a key advantage that a startup has over any incumbent business looking to tackle the same problem space, e.g. finding the right talent to solve the identified problem.

Can you talk about your current portfolio?

Since we launched the SEIS & EIS Fund in March 2024, we've been actively deploying the capital raised into some really exciting businesses in the UK. As a DeepTech investor across a broad range of different scientific disciplines, we look at a huge variety of different opportunities. Some of the highlights from the current portfolio of the SEIS & EIS Fund include:

  • Argonaute RNA, are developing bispecific siRNA therapies for tackling residual cardiovascular disease. There is a growing interest in multi-polygenic drivers of disease, especially related to cardiovascular risk. Most of the currently approved gene silencing therapies only knock down or silence one gene target of interest and are therefore somewhat limited to single gene disease drivers. Argonaute has a capability of knocking down two genes simultaneously, generating some very exciting preclinical data for their bispecific drugs.
  • Signapse, are enabling real-time unconstrained translation of English into British Sign Language in video translation. We got excited about this company because, as of today, the entire translation industry for sign language is a manual consultancy-based market. Signapse's world-leading technology will be the first automated approach to the translation of English into British Sign Language and soon American Sign Language. We think that this will open up an entirely new market opportunity for large organizations interested in ensuring that they have full accessibility of their content for the deaf community.
  • Trans-dermal Diagnostics, who are developing a non-invasive continuous glucose monitoring device. The reason we invested in this company is because Professor Richard Guy at the University of Bath is a world leader on the technique of reverse iontophoresis, the primary technology used in minimally invasive continuous glucose monitors. These minimally invasive CGM devices have a small needle that sits in the upper layers of the skin which increases the cost of the manufacturing and supplying these sensors at scale. Transdermal have worked out a way of obtaining the same measurement via a different set up that doesn't require any skin penetration. This could fundamentally alter the cost to produce each sensor. And if you can massively reduce the cost of goods of each sensor, all of a sudden you might open up the adoption of continuous CGM devices to both the type two diabetic market and the pre-diabetic market which could be an enormous opportunity.

What does the future look like? New trends/technologies, changes in the global/local economic landscape?

We think 2025 is going to be a really exciting year for a whole host of different industries. The UK's recent announcements to accelerate the establishment of small modular nuclear reactors is going to be a particularly compelling area to look at from an early stage investor perspective. In addition, any technologies that look to improve the operational running costs of AI infrastructure will become particularly compelling and also space tech is going to continue seeing a surge in activity, especially as more and more early-stage companies get to in-space demonstration of a particular capability/service.

What makes Empirical Ventures different?

Deeptech funding cycles require patient capital to support R&D-intensive endeavours. Empirical Ventures serves as a bridge between scientific ideas leaving the lab and becoming commercially viable businesses. We combine extensive due diligence with the unique perspective of a PhD-trained deal team to be first-mover investors. Our approach means Empirical Ventures recognises opportunities before others do.

We are also able to operate with deep founder alignment. My co-founder and I have our own academic backgrounds in science and have lived experience of running businesses, which means we are able to add real world value to our portfolio and guide the UK’s most promising science entrepreneurs.

What one piece of advice would you give founders?

Venture is a two-sided game of stakeholder management. Make sure you understand what success looks like for a VC Fund Manager, this will completely reframe what you need to tell a fund to get them excited to invest in your business

Investors > VC Fund Manager < Founders.

By and large, >95% of all decision making by investors is driven by the desire to obtain a financial return. For VC Fund Managers, timelines to judgement of your performance are long, for example most funds don’t settle into their performance quartile until year 7 of a fund life cycle. Investors are therefore looking for positive signals from their portfolio that show to their underlying investors “look we are good at this job of making you money”. This is because VC funds are often out fundraising again for new fund vehicles well before that 7 year point. With this in mind, founders should focus on telling investors stories that communicate; my company alone can return your entire fund 1x, referred to as a Dragon outcome (as opposed to Unicorn’s and £1B valuations). Also, that you are making exceptional progress relative to your peers - think growth rates, quantitative numbers that demonstrate speed of execution, significant commercial interest in your next inflection point (e.g. PoC data, pilot projects, FOAK arrangements). Anything that can form part of the story telling that VC funds have to do in order to be successful themselves.

Johnathan Matlock is the cofounder of Empirical Ventures.