Inside the Scottish Incubator Turning University Research Into Deeptech Startups

Scotland's Venture Builder Incubator has supported 164 founders and helped raise £58m since 2021 — but its bigger mission is keeping homegrown deeptech talent in the country. We spoke to the programme's leaders and two founders about what it actually takes to move from PhD to startup.

Scotland has quietly become one of the UK's most important hubs for deeptech research. The Edinburgh-Glasgow central belt benefits from world-class university output, and the country hosts two of the UK's five quantum hubs. The raw ingredients for a thriving startup ecosystem are clearly there — but converting academic breakthroughs into fundable companies remains a stubborn challenge.

The Commercialisation Gap

Andrew Parfery, SVP Commercial & University Lead at Scottish growth platform CodeBase, identifies the core obstacle plainly:

"The biggest barrier to commercialisation from a university setting is the lack of commercial skills and experience required to do so. To convince somebody who is at the top of their field to take a different path as an entrepreneur isn't always as straightforward as we might want."

To close that gap, the University of Edinburgh, in partnership with the Scottish Government's startup programme Techscaler and CodeBase, runs the Venture Builder Incubator (VBI) — a five-month programme specifically targeting deeptech founders across Scotland. Since launching in 2021, the VBI has supported 164 founders and businesses, which have collectively raised £58m in grants and investment. In 2024, Techscaler scaled the programme into a nationwide initiative open to researchers from any Scottish university.

From PhD to Founder: The Mindset Shift

Two recent VBI graduates illustrate both the potential and the difficulty of the transition.

Shivoh Nandakumar founded Ridescan AI after noticing a critical flaw in robotic systems during his PhD — a robotic dog confidently reported picking up a box when it had actually picked up a table.

"This made me question what would happen if we deploy robotic systems into the physical world which are confidently claiming things that aren't correct. We independently monitor these robots to ensure they're safe and reliable when deployed into public spaces."

Eva Steele cofounded Amytis, an AI biotech startup building tools to help wet lab researchers manage experiments and biological data — a domain where computational literacy is often limited despite AI's growing role in life sciences.

Both founders emphasise that the shift from academic to entrepreneurial thinking is non-trivial. Researchers spend years solving well-defined problems in controlled environments; startups demand comfort with ambiguity and constant context-switching.

"As a researcher you have a bubble and you're surrounded by PhDs and professors. Since you now have this idea and you're moving towards commercialising it, you need a new bubble — and you can't get that in academia," says Nandakumar.

What the VBI Actually Teaches

The programme is primarily led by former entrepreneurs rather than academics or consultants — a deliberate design choice. Key areas of focus include:

Customer discovery: Founders are pushed immediately to spend time with potential customers before building
Storytelling and pitching: Programme managers invest heavily in helping founders articulate their value proposition
Investment literacy: Founders learn how funding rounds actually work — Parfery notes the programme will intervene if a founder proposes structurally bad deals ("If a founder turns up and says they want to raise £20k for 20% at pre-seed, we'll immediately put the brakes on that")
Investor introductions: VCs are brought in, and relationships formed during the programme can lead directly to funding — Nandakumar secured introductions to the University of Edinburgh's venture arm through VBI connections

Techscaler's Network Effect

Beyond the VBI itself, Techscaler offers an Entrepreneurs in Residence programme, stage-appropriate mentorship, and international market trips to destinations including Singapore, Silicon Valley, New York, China, and Japan.

For Steele, the Techscaler community produced returns almost immediately. A newsletter from the platform led Amytis to Bethnal Green Ventures, which provided match funding against a Smart Scotland grant the company had already received.

"It enabled us to carry on doing what we were doing."

Retaining Scotland's Talent

The broader ambition behind both VBI and Techscaler goes beyond individual startups. Scotland has historically exported research talent and early-stage companies to larger markets — London, the US, and beyond. Parfery is explicit about wanting to reverse that dynamic.

"We need to start pulling the bigger players into the Scottish market rather than exporting all of our talent and ideas outwards. We want investors from outside of Scotland to come and see what Scotland's great universities have to offer."

Applications for the next VBI cohort are open until July 20th.