To study the FY profit & loss account (to 31st July) of Imperial Innovations (IVO), the AIM-listed tech ‘incubator’ arm of London’s Imperial College, is rather to miss the point. Indeed, you could get awfully confused about the ‘mismatch’ between the 6% headline revenue decline (to £4.3m) and the near 8-fold increase in pre-tax profit (to £5.1m) and wonder how the heck did that happen? It happened, of course, because IVO is in effect a listed venture capital play and therefore what it’s all really about are investments, valuations, and realisations.
Most of the currently 82 portfolio companies that IVO has holdings in are in the technology and healthcare sectors, and much of the tech is hardware. But there are a few interesting software companies in the mix as well.
We had previously made note of visual search technology start-up, Cortexica (see Cortexica eyes next phase under Imperial’s wing), which figures among IVO’s ‘great potential’ Top 6, though did not attract significant investment during the year. Cortexica sits on IVO’s books at a £6.6m net carrying value, triple that of the prior year. Not sure how they got ‘from there to here’ on the valuation, so I might dig around a bit on that.
More recently, IVO invested in Cambridge-based data analytics developer (and ‘Little British Battler’), Featurespace (see here) and just last month, in Cambridge-born ‘big data’ start-up, Acunu (see here).
IVO invested £38m of its own (well, shareholders’) dosh in 29 companies last year, which leveraged an aggregate £147m of investments in the portfolio, 14% higher than the prior year. Not all the companies have been raging successes of course – indeed some failed – but that’s how it works in ‘VC-land’. IVO is doing a grand job in fostering UK innovation – and long may they continue to do so.