Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

New Venture Partners, which has exclusive rights to build companies from the BT’s vast catalogue of ICT patents developed at Adastral Park, is in the process of closing the fundraising and will be making an official announcement shortly.

Dr Chris Winter, a well known technology entrepreneur and now partner at NVP, would not be drawn on the specifics, but we understand that the seed fund will be the biggest of its kind the region has ever seen, running into multiple tens of millions.

Business Weekly first reported NVP’s intention to raise such a fund in June 2004 and it is now almost ready to lift the lid. NVP’s international profile – it is headquartered in the US and has a technology access deal in place with Philips in the Netherlands in addition to the one with BT – means that it is able to throw the net similarly wide when it comes to its fundraising activities.

NVP succeeded BT Brightstar, the telco giant’s internally-funded incubator in a blaze of publicity in February 2003.

The $100m deal was heralded by the spinning-out of five new companies – ventures that had previously been ‘trapped’ in incubation because local VCs were unwilling to invest.

The tie-up with NVP, which is jointly funded by Coller Capital and BT, has since been comprehensively vindicated. All of the initial portfolio has achieved breakneck growth and some have already provided exits at admirable mulitples.

Most notable among its successes were Vidus, which was acquired by NASDAQ listed @Road for $55m in 2005 and Azure, which recently merged with India and Luxembourg listed Subex.

After a relatively quiet spell at least in term of new business creation – the only spin-out to emerge from BT since NVP took over venturing was mobile content venture iO Global in February 2005 – things are due to hot up.

The first fruit of the alliance between NVP and Philips – display start-up Liquavista – is set to make a considerable impact on the East of England technology cluster. The company is built around ‘electro-wetting’ display technology that actually becomes brighter in direct sunlight, in direct contrast to the LCD displays currently used in mobile devices.

Dr Winter told us that the company had received investment totalling Euros 5m (£3.4m) and was in the process of raising a “big series A round’ of between Euros 6m and 10m (£4m to £6.8m).

Although headquartered in Philips’ research campus in Eindhoven, Liquavista also plans to establish a “considerable presence” in the Cambridge area, with the intention of plugging into the region’s display cluster.

A member of the founding team at Cambridge Display Technology, Mark Gostick has been recruited as CEO.

“Liquavista has the potential to be a very large company, certainly the hottest company in my portfolio and quite possibly in NVP’s.”

Meanwhile a seedling venture, known at this stage as Smart Content, has been moved into incubation from the research labs at BT, with at least two more investment cases being prepared further down the pipeline.

Dr Winter said: “We have a very interesting pipeline at BT and I expect to see at least a couple of new companies spinning out of BT every year from now on.”