British Business Bank commits up to £46m to a pre-seed deep tech fund aiming to create 80 companies

The British Business Bank has agreed to commit up to £46 million to Zinc Capital Management’s second institutional fund, the Science-for-Impact Fund, in a cornerstone commitment announced on 2 September aimed at UK deep tech companies at the point of company creation.

The fund is targeting a total size of £70 million and a portfolio of 80 new deep tech companies, according to the Bank. Its strategy, the Bank states, “aligns closely with the government’s Industrial Strategy priorities across Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy, Life Sciences, as well as engineering, biology and AI”.

The commitment is made through the Enterprise Capital Funds programme and follows the Bank’s previous commitment to Zinc II in 2022. The Zinc Science-for-Impact Fund is the 55th fund backed under the ECF programme.

Zinc is described by the Bank as a specialist early-stage investor and venture builder that “works with founders at the point where access to finance is often most limited”. Its existing portfolio includes SignaCor, working on first-in-class therapeutics for heart disease, Epiome, an AI-powered biomarker platform for neurodegenerative diseases, Speek, a digital clinical care platform for teenage self-harm, Spine, an AI operating system for grid-scale battery asset management, and CellMine, a waste-free process for recycling lithium-ion batteries.

Mark Sims, managing director and head of development equity funds at the British Business Bank, said: “Breakthrough businesses need support from the very earliest stages if they’re to realise their potential. Zinc has a strong track record of backing founders tackling significant health and environmental challenges, and we’re pleased to support the next phase of its growth.”

Ella Goldner, co-founder and managing partner at Zinc, said: “The UK is home to some of the world’s most extraordinary scientific talent, yet too many breakthrough discoveries never become the companies that improve lives, protect our planet and create long-term economic value.”

How the ECF programme works

Founders cannot apply to the Enterprise Capital Funds programme. It is a fund-of-funds scheme: the Bank commits public money to venture capital managers, who then invest in companies. Applications come from managers looking to raise a fund, not from the businesses that eventually receive the cheques.

The Bank describes the programme’s primary objective as addressing the “equity gap” by increasing the availability of early-stage equity finance to high potential UK companies, and as lowering the barriers to entry for fund managers seeking to operate in the venture capital market. A budget of £1 billion was provided to the programme in 2017, and the Bank states that on average investment is made into three to four funds a year, with total deployment of between £100 million and £150 million. Following the UK’s exit from the EU, the programme now runs under the UK Subsidy Control Act rather than European Commission approval.

For a founder, the practical route is therefore to the funds themselves. Applying to a first cheque investor is a different exercise to applying for a grant, and the terms are equity rather than public money: an ECF-backed fund still takes shares, still negotiates a term sheet and still dilutes the founding team.

The one scheme founders apply to directly

The Bank’s Start Up Loans programme is the exception, and its terms are published in full. It offers an unsecured personal loan of up to £25,000 at a fixed interest rate of 7.5% per year, repayable over a term of one to five years, with no fees for arranging the loan or repaying it early. First-time recipients get 12 months of free business mentoring. Start Up Loans states that the average loan amount is £10,264, and that the programme has supported over 100,000 business ideas with more than £1 billion of loans.

Eligibility is broader than most public schemes. Start Up Loans states that a business starting up, or one that has been trading for less than 60 months, meets the first criterion.

The Bank’s overall scale gives some sense of how much of this money is reaching companies. In its 2025/26 financial year, published in its annual report on 21 July 2026, the Bank supported UK smaller businesses to access £9.4 billion of finance, made up of £1.3 billion of public funding, £4.3 billion of private capital crowded in by the Bank and £3.7 billion of lending it guaranteed. That funding benefited 38,000 UK businesses, including around 30,000 the Bank had not previously helped to fund, and the Bank returned a statutory profit before tax of £426 million, its largest since 2021/22.

Equity from a state-backed fund is one strand of a wider funding mix that also includes Innovate UK grants, SEIS and EIS relief for the investors putting money in, and R&D tax credits on qualifying development spend.