Uniseed receives further $16m from founding investors

The Universities of Queensland and Melbourne, the founding investors in university based pre-seed venture fund Uniseed, have extended their commitments to the fund by a further $8 million each.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) has also indicated that it is to become a partner in Uniseed through its newly badged commercialisation and technology transfer arm, NewSouth Innovations (formerly part of Unisearch).

"We're interchanging contracts at the moment," said NewSouth Innovations chairman and UNSW deputy vice-chancellor (research) Prof. Les Field. "We'll be putting in of the order of $10 million."

The commitment by the Universities of Queensland and Melbourne follows a $15 million partnership with Westscheme, Western Australia's largest private sector superannuation fund, signed earlier this year.

"As part of that deal the universities got the option to subscribe further to the fund," said CEO Gareth Dando.

Uniseed was established in 2000 as a $20 million joint venture between the commercial arms of the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne.

"It's proved to be a very reliable structure for getting technology out of the universities," said Dando.

However, Uniseed will be restructured to accommodate the entry of UNSW as a partner, said Field.

"UNSW is looking for a mechanism to fund the early stage technology development that comes out of the university," he said.

Field sees entry into Uniseed as a way of UNSW spreading risk. "Uniseed draws on the technology from three institutions, rather than any individual institution relying on its own technology. So in effect we can draw on the best technology out of the three institutions," he said.

The first specialist pre-seed commercialisation fund for university technology in Australia, Uniseed now has total funds of over $50 million under management.

"We now have capital available for five or six years," said Dando. Uniseed also now has funds comparable to any venture capital fund in the country, he said.

While Uniseed is a general purpose fund, about two thirds of its investment is focused on biotechnology because of the expertise in that area of the Universities of Queensland and Melbourne, said Dando.

So far, Uniseed's biotechnology investments have been in the anti-inflammatory drug discovery efforts of Cryptopharma, the head lice cure Hatchtech and chiral chemical compound developer Chirogen.