2025 Cambridge deals pass $9.25bn as AstraZeneca and Honeywell step on the gas

The deals figure highlights the Cambridge Cluster’s enduring global importance, with significant M & A activity and a surge of capital flowing into DeepTech and therapeutic innovation.

The scale of two acquisitions stood out. The biggest transaction saw Honeywell acquire Johnson Matthey’s catalyst division for around $2.4bn in May. This divestiture allows Johnson Matthey to focus on its clean air and Platinum Group Metals (PGMS) segments.

On the life sciences front, AstraZeneca made a strategic move by acquiring Belgian pioneer EsoBiotec for $425 million up front, with the deal potentially rising to $1bn based on performance milestones. EsoBiotec’s in vivo cell therapy platform, ENaBL, is set to accelerate AZ’s ambition to scale transformative cancer treatments.

AstraZeneca, which recently pledged to invest $50bn over the next five years in the United States, has already put its plans into action. Last week the company announced it was spending $4.5 billion on a new manufacturing facility near Charlottesville, in Albemarle County, Virginia with work starting immediately. And this week AZ unveiled a newly-expanded, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Coppell, Texas representing an investment of $445m.

Other significant M&A activity saw UK financial services comparison giant Go.Compare buy Cambridge insurance innovator Rnwl for a consideration that could reach £63m, while natural extracts specialist Treatt agreed to a £173.8m sale to Natara Global.

Funding surge led by quantum computing and medical robotics

Total disclosed funding for Cambridge S & T companies in 2025 stood at over $1.697bn at the time of writing. Quantinuum and CMR Surgical account for nearly half of this, underscoring investor confidence in high-impact technologies.

Quantinuum secured the largest single raise, a $600m round at a $10bn pre-money valuation. Investors including Honeywell, NVentures (NVIDIA’s VC arm) and JPMorganChase backed the quantum computing leader as it progresses towards its next-generation system, Helios, and fault-tolerant computing.

CMR Surgical raised $200m via equity and debt to accelerate the global commercial expansion of its Versius Surgical Robotic System, with a critical focus on launching in the US.

Other notable tech funding rounds include AI materials search engine startup CuspAI pulling in $100m+ in a Series A and Legal-Grade™ AI pioneer Luminance closing a $75m Series C round. Graphene chip manufacturer Paragraf secured $55m in new funding.

Life Sciences continue to attract global capital

Life sciences fundraising in Cambridge totals $734.26m to date in 2025, with several companies drawing significant international investment for novel therapeutic development. Three companies account for more than half of the total amount raised – CMR Surgical ($200m), CellCentric ($120m) and Charm Therapeutics ($80m).

In May, CellCentric raised $120m Series C financing to advance its fight against an insidious form of cancer. CellCentric plans to use the proceeds to further support, among other missions, the advancement of its novel oral p300/CBP inhibitor, inobrodib, intro registration studies.

The financing was co-led by RA Capital Management in Boston US and new investor Forbion in the Netherlands with participation from US-based Avego Bioscience Capital, as well as BrightEdge, the American Cancer Society’s venture capital and impact investment arm.

Last month, Cambridge and London based CHARM Therapeutics unveiled an $80m Series B raise to advance development of a best-in-class menin inhibitor for Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). New investors NEA (New Enterprise Associates) and SR One led the round alongside existing backers OrbiMed, F-Prime, NVIDIA and Khosla Ventures.

Based locally at Babraham Research Campus, CHARM has now raised more than $150m and is advancing its lead menin inhibitor candidate towards clinical development in early 2026.

Other significant rounds this year have seen Maxion Therapeutics pull in $72m, Quibim ($50m), Cyted Health ($44m), Alchemab Therapeutics ($32m), TRIMTECH Therapeutics ($31m) and Owlstone Medical ($27m).

In March, Maxion announced an oversubscribed $72 million (£58m) Series A financing round led by General Catalyst with additional investment from new investors, British Patient Capital, a commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank, Solasta Ventures and Eli Lilly and Company and supported by existing investors LifeArc Ventures, Monograph Capital and BGF. Maxion is developing antibody-based KnotBody® drugs for ion channel and G protein coupled receptor (GPCR)-driven diseases.

At the start of 2025, HealthTech company Quibim, which aims to revolutionise precision medicine using AI-powered biomarkers, closed a $50m Series A.

The round was led by Asabys (through its fund Sabadell Asabys II) and Buenavista Equity Partners (through the BHG I fund, created in partnership with Columbus Venture Partners), and joined by UI Investissement, and GoHub Ventures as new investors.

Current investors Amadeus Capital Partners, APEX Ventures, Partech, Adara Ventures, Leadwind (KFund’s early growth fund), Tony Fadell’s Build Collective, and serial biotech entrepreneur Dr. Jonathan Milner also participated.

Last month, Cyted Health and Alchemab announced key scale-up fundraisings. Cambridge University spin-out Cyted Health raised $44m Series B cash to accelerate expansion across the United States where it already has a foothold with its gastrointestinal molecular diagnostics technology.

The round was led by EQT Life Sciences, investing through its EQT Health Economics strategy, and co-led by Advent Life Sciences and British Business Bank with continued support from existing investors Morningside and BGF.

Alchemab Therapeutics raised an additional $32m to expand its portfolio, taking its Series A round past the $114m mark. The extension financing round included participation from Ono Venture Investment (OVI) alongside a blue-chip syndicate of existing specialist investors which includes RA Capital, SV Health Investors, DCVC Bio and Lightstone Ventures and strategic investment by Lilly.

Lily also backed young Cambridge biotech company TRIMTECH Therapeutics, which is harnessing targeted protein degradation for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. TRIMTECH closed an oversubscribed $31m (£25m) seed round earlier this year that featured a number of US investors.

The raise was led by Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) and Boston & London-based SV Health Investors’ Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF) with M Ventures in the US and Pfizer Ventures in New York joining. Additional investors included Eli Lilly and Company (US), MP Healthcare Venture Management (US), Cambridge Enterprise Ventures and Start Codon – now part of the CIC stable in Cambridge.

Owlstone Medical, a Cambridge-based global leader in Breath Biopsy® for applications in early disease detection and precision medicine, began 2025 with the first closing of $27m in its Series E financing round. The raise was led by Ventura Capital, which has major operations in London, Dubai and Tokyo. It was joined by Aviva Ventures, Horizons Ventures and other existing investors. The close also saw completion of a previously publicised investment from the Gates Foundation, which in total was worth £6.5m.

The new funds are being be used to support the ongoing development of Owlstone’s proprietary Breath Biopsy® platform and the development and commercialisation of novel diagnostic tests and point of care devices.

Owlstone also recently announced that it is partnering three influential US organisations in a multimillion dollar campaign to detect and eliminate cancer before the disease takes hold. The Cambridge Science Park company, which will receive up to $49.1m, is the only UK participant in ARPA-H’s POSEIDON programme which aims to develop over-the-counter, best-in-class, cancer screening kits engineered for at-home use.

Last month Enhanced Genomics completed a funding round that extends its total Series A raise to $19 million. Backers were BGF, Parkwalk and Meltwind. The funding will be used to expand Enhanced’s internal therapeutic pipeline in common diseases, including autoimmune conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.

The most recent funding rounds have seen Mission Therapeutics haul in $13.3m to progress clinical development of its lead candidate MTX325 through a Phase Ib proof-of-mechanism study in patients with Parkinson’s disease, and Cyclana Bio closing a £5 million pre-seed funding round. Cyclana Bio is pioneering tissue-level approaches to women’s health.

In June, Sortera Bio, based on IP developed at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, raised £7.5m pre-seed financing in a round led by CIC with participation from AstraZeneca and BioNTech.

Sortera has strategically utilised this funding to establish its Deep Screening platform, which experimentally collects sequence and functional data on hundreds of millions of biologics.

The innovative technology powering Sortera was originally developed and validated at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB), with support from AstraZeneca through the LMB-AstraZeneca Blue Sky Collaboration.

In February, Ignota Labs, an AI-driven drug turnaround company closed a $6.9m seed funding round, co-led by Montage Ventures and AIX Ventures in the US with participation from Modi Ventures, Blue Wire Capital and Gaingels. Ignota Labs applies deep learning, cheminformatics, and bioinformatics to uncover and resolve the root causes of drug toxicity – unlocking new opportunities for assets that would otherwise be abandoned.

Quantinuum raise swells Cambridge tech funding to $919.73m

Quantinuum’s $600m raise at $10 billion pre-money equity valuation in September is by far the largest raise by a Cambridge company this year.

The raise will support Quantinuum’s advancement of quantum computing at scale, which includes continued progress toward the upcoming launch of Helios, the company’s next generation quantum computing system that is expected to launch this year. It will also support Quantinuum’s path to becoming the first to perform universal fault-tolerant computing.

One fledgling company that raised a few eyebrows was CuspAI – Business Weekly’s reigning Business of the Year. CuspAI raised $100m+ in a Series A round led by NEA and Temasek, with participation from NVIDIA’s NVentures, Samsung Ventures and new backer Hyundai Motor Group.

Other firms participating include Basis Set Ventures, FJ Labs, Giant Ventures, LocalGlobe, Northzone, Prosus Ventures, Tiferes Ventures and Touring Capital. Angel investors include Durk Kingma (OpenAI Co-Founder), Zoubin Ghahramani (Google DeepMind VP Research), Arash Ferdowsi (Founder of Dropbox), Thomas Wolf (Founder of Hugging Face) and Victor Riparbelli (Founder CEO of Synthesia).

CuspAI is building an AI ‘search engine’ for new materials - enabling customers to specify the exact properties they need, and to generate candidate materials up to 10x faster than traditional discovery methods.

The third biggest tech raise so far in 2025 was by legal AI specialist Luminance back in February. The Cambridge-based pioneer in Legal-Grade™ AI, raised $75m in a Series C round led by Point72 Private Investments, which is primarily based in New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Other backers were Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures and Schroders Capital, as well as existing investors including March Capital, National Grid Partners and Slaughter and May.

Former Business Weekly ‘Business of the Year’, Paragraf, raised $55 million in a new funding round but claims it almost ran out of money waiting for the UK government to clear $35m of that haul from UAE sovereign wealth fund Mubadala.

Paragraf chips are made of graphene and can be deployed in multiple environments, including advanced electronics, energy plays and even medical devices. The latest funding will support the expansion of Paragraf’s manufacturing capabilities and increase production output to facilitate the use of graphene electronics in mass markets.

Two other significant tech rounds featured University of Cambridge spinouts Cambridge GaN Devices (CGD) and Nyobolt.

CGD, a trailblazer in gallium nitride (GaN) power electronics technology, closed a $32m Series C growth capital round in February. The round was led by an unnamed strategic investor with participation from British Patient Capital and supported by existing backers Parkwalk Advisors, BGF, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Foresight Group and IQ Capital.

In April, Nyobolt – pioneer of high-power ultrafast charging technologies – announced it had secured $150m in contracts plus $30m in investment from international backers. The $30m investment came in from IQ Capital, Latitude – the sister fund of LocalGlobe – Scania Invest in Sweden and Takasago Industry in Japan. The funding will fuel Nyobolt’s technology development and market expansion, including providing battery technology for power-hungry data centres.

A trio of early-stage technology companies have also caught the eye this year – Trismik, Hiverge and Common AI.

University of Cambridge spin-out Trismik has raised £2.2m funding to transform how AI capabilities are measured. The company has introduced a unique approach to adaptive testing allowing AI builders to go from test to insight in seconds rather than minutes or hours.

Hiverge, which was launched by former Google DeepMind research leaders, announced in September that it had raised $5m seed cash to accelerate a pathfinding ‘algorithm factory’. Flying Fish Ventures in Seattle led the round, with Ahren Innovation Capital and Google DeepMind chief scientist Dr Jeff Dean among the other backers. Hiverge has reimagined algorithmic coding through program synthesis.

Cambridge tech guru Sir Andy Hopper is a key figure in a new initiative designed to revolutionise the impact of artificial intelligence in both the UK and wider Europe. Anthemis, a leading early-stage investment firm, and Cambridge AI Venture Partners (CAIVP) – a team comprised of industry experts Sir Andy, Prof. Rob Mullins, Dr Gavin Ferris and Mike Halsall – launched CommonAI, a collaborative engineering and computing platform for AI-enabled start-ups, enterprises, engineers, academics and investors.

Acquisitions of Cambridge companies

Former Business Weekly Awards ‘Business of the Year’ Treatt is among the latest companies in the Cambridge Cluster to be acquired. Directors of the Bury St Edmunds based natural extracts specialist agreed a £173.8m sale to fellow UK company Natara Global after macro headwinds knocked the stuffing out of global markets.

Another former Business of the Year, ieso Digital Health sold its tele care services business to Stockholm-headquartered Mindler for an undisclosed sum. Mindler is one of the UK’s leading online talking therapies services, currently available to more than 20 million adults through the UK’s National Health Service. The strategic move brings together two of the most clinically advanced platforms in digital mental healthcare, creating an unparalleled offering for patients and buyers – including employers, health insurers and public health bodies.

Around the same time, Congenica was being acquired by French company SeqOne. The new entity will retain a base at the Wellcome Sanger Institute from where it was spun out. The buyer, based in Montpelier, is a pioneer in AI-driven genomic analysis and the acquisition will create the largest global ‘software pure player’ in the genomics space, serving over 160 labs in more than 30 countries. The deal terms remain undisclosed.

In March, financial services comparison company Go.Compare bought Cambridge insurance innovator Rnwl for £3 million up front consideration but that stacks up to as much as £63m in five years.

Founder by entrepreneur Goncalo de Vasconcelos, Rnwl earned major investment in crowdfunding rounds and early backers include some of Cambridge’s best-known investors – Simon Thorpe, chairman of Cambridge Angels, Google’s William Russell and serial life science entrepreneurs Jonathan Milner and Sunil Shah.

Cognidox launched ambitious expansion plans after being bought for an undisclosed sum by US business Recur Software this month. Cognidox provides electronic Quality Management System (eQMS) software used by life sciences, medical device and hi-tech product development companies and is planning to hire more staff following the acquisition.

The biggest transaction by a Cambridge Cluster company in 2025 saw Johnson Matthey sell off its catalyst technologies business to Honeywell International for $2.4 billion (£1.8bn) on a cash and debt-free basis.

The catalyst division sale leaves JM to focus on clean air and PGMS, driving sustained strong cash generation to support attractive ongoing returns to shareholders.

Acquisitions by Cambridge companies

The first major acquisition of 2025 by a Cambridge company saw AstraZeneca swoop for EsoBiotec in Belgium, paying $425m up front, and up to $575m in contingent consideration based on development and regulatory milestones. EsoBiotec is pioneering in vivo cell therapies that has demonstrated promising early clinical activity.

Other deals in the Life Sciences arena featured Cresset Group buying Molab.ai in Germany and Source Bioscience acquiring Cambridge Clinical Laboratories (CCL). Figures for both deals were undisclosed.

In July, Cambridge cyber security company Darktrace paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Mira Security in Harmony, Pennsylvania.

Mira is a leading provider of network traffic visibility solutions and the acquisition is designed to strengthen Darktrace’s network security leadership by providing more insight from encrypted network traffic, more comprehensive decryption for customers in regulated industries, and help drive the next generation of Darktrace technology.

Grant Instruments (Cambridge) Limited, a global leader in scientific and data acquisition technologies, announced the full acquisition of Eltek Limited, a Cambridge-based developer of data logging and cloud based environmental monitoring platforms.

And in April, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of advanced materials and metals – Goodfellow – announced it had completed two landmark acquisitions in a matter of weeks.

The Huntingdon company bought UK-based Bureau of Analysed Samples (BAS) and Suisse Technology Partners (STP) in Switzerland in deals that will give it access to state-of-the-art laboratories, testing facilities and Certified Reference Materials (CRM) capability. The company also revealed that other acquisitions were in the pipeline.

In June, Cambridge’s holistic and highly acquisitive SDI Group (16 acquisitions since 2014) dipped into its treasure chest again for the £8.32m purchase of Severn Thermal Solutions Ltd’s entire issued share capital.

Severn Thermal Solutions is a designer and manufacturer of high temperature furnace systems and environmental chambers for advanced material processing and testing.

SDI makes scientific products for use in applications including life sciences, healthcare, consumer manufacturing, aerospace, astronomy, water treatment, motorsport and art conservation.