A briefing given to start-up traders round this time confirmed an formidable imaginative and prescient for NSSIF. The fund would “combine the best of HMG engineering expertise and private sector venture capital expertise”, the doc learn.
Maybe unsurprisingly, it maintains a low public profile. Its single public internet web page says it goals to again UK know-how together with methods to “move data securely and without detection”, quantum computing, robotics, methods to trace monetary info, and strategies to seize and analyse audio and video.
The Sunday Telegraph has seen a presentation given final 12 months by Amadeus Capital, the funding fund co-founded by veteran know-how entrepreneur Hermann Hauser, which confirmed it was in talks with NSSIF for a £25m funding.
“I’ve been waiting for this day to come and you have finally delivered it where I’m going to have to blow my cover on being an NSSIF investor,” says Alex van Someren, a managing companion at Amadeus Capital.
“We make it our business to see a huge number of early stage start-ups every year,” van Someren says. “As we filter through those, one of the things we’re able to do is just bear in mind the kind of requirements that the customers of the NSSIF programme have.”
He offers the instance of a start-up which makes use of synthetic intelligence to detect little one pornography. “I don’t have to be James Bond to figure out that’s actually a really useful technology to be able to offer to the NSSIF folks,” he says.
Notion Capital, one other British enterprise capital fund which has backed oil market evaluation start-up Vortexa and fintech enterprise Upvest, has additionally been in talks with NSSIF about an investing partnership. A spokesman for the fund declined to touch upon the progress of the talks.