Loughborough University launched an investor network with the venture firm Haatch on 24 August, connecting its spinouts to alumni money at pre-seed and seed, with BidScript, Moti Me and Adclear AI already in the ecosystem1. Haatch partner Jonathan Keeling names the problem plainly: "the hardest money to raise is the first cheque".
He is describing a specific failure rather than a general shortage. A university spinout at pre-seed has intellectual property, two or three founders and no revenue, which gives an outside investor almost nothing to underwrite except the science and the team. Alumni carry information nobody else has: they know the department, often the supervisor, and sometimes the research itself. Turning that into a structured network rather than a chain of introductions is what converts goodwill into a priced round.
Spinout deals fell 33% by count last year, and a university that builds its own alumni pipeline is not waiting for that to reverse. Loughborough is not a Golden Triangle institution and does not attract the standing venture attention that Oxford, Cambridge and London do, which is precisely why owning the first-cheque layer matters more there than it would in Cambridge.
