21SEP

Two spinouts close on British money

1 min read

16:52UTC

Imperial spinout Certain Energy raised £10 million on 26 August and Leeds spinout MicroLub raised £7 million on 17 September, both funded without an American lead.

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Key takeaway

A state bank and a northern university investor funded two spinouts without foreign leads.

Imperial College London spinout RFC Power renamed itself Certain Energy on 26 August after a £10 million Series A that included £3.5 million from the British Business Bank⁠¹. The company commercialises manganese flow batteries, a grid-storage technology that holds energy in liquid electrolyte tanks rather than in cells, which suits long-duration storage more than it suits vehicles.

Northern Gritstone put £4 million into a £7 million round for MicroLub, a University of Leeds spinout, on 17 September⁠². MicroLub makes protein-and-water food ingredients and has reached industrial-scale manufacturing, which is the stage where a food-science spinout either finds a buyer among the large manufacturers or runs out of patience.

Neither round is large next to the raises at the top of the life-sciences table, and both closed on British money from a state bank and a northern university investor respectively. Spinouts at this size have historically been the segment where a British round stalls and an American lead arrives to complete it. These two did not need one. The Bank's regional vehicles have been deploying into the same gap, and its South West fund reached a deployment milestone in July.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Two university spinout companies each closed funding rounds built entirely from British money. Certain Energy, which came out of Imperial College London and used to be called RFC Power, raised £10m, with £3.5m from the government-owned British Business Bank. MicroLub, a University of Leeds spinout, raised £7m, with £4m from Northern Gritstone, a fund set up to back research coming out of Northern universities. Both show a pattern: dedicated British funds built specifically to back university research reaching the market.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Both rounds are university spinouts backed by dedicated regional vehicles built for that purpose: Northern Gritstone was set up specifically to commercialise research from Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, and the British Business Bank's participation in Certain Energy's round reflects a similar mandate to back university-linked deep tech.

Neither round needed to look outside Britain because the institutional plumbing for backing this specific type of company, university spinouts, already exists domestically.

Sources:Northern Gritstone·Imperial College London

Mentions:Certain Energy →Imperial College London →British Business Bank →MicroLub →Northern Gritstone →London →

First Reported In

Update #15 · Nscale takes $103.4bn of contracts to NYSE

Northern Gritstone· 21 Sept 2026

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Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.