The £300m Cambridge investment

When Cambridge scientist, James Dewar, was researching very low temperatures, he needed a way to keep things cold. So, way back in 1892, he invented the vacuum flask, a design so effective that even today they're used to store super-cooled rocket fuel for space missions.

The chances are you even have one at home. But unfortunately, James didn’t patent his idea. It was two German glassblowers who saw the commercial potential, launched Thermos, and today the global market for their product is valued at over $5 billion

Great ideas need more than brilliance. They need the right environment to thrive. 

So, Aviva is investing in Cambridge to help people and businesses get ready for the future and turn breakthroughs into break-out success.  

Planting new seeds

The city is still one of the most productive places on earth for cutting-edge discoveries, with the most patent applications and scientific articles per capita in the UK.  Much of that innovation is in an area that matters a lot to our customers: how to stay healthy and well.

Ben Luckett, MD of Venture and Strategic Capital at Aviva Investors, explains, “As a health insurer serving patients and customers, by investing in new and emerging technologies, we can help map the future and bring the right products and services to our customers.”

Owlstone Medical is leading the way in just such a technology. They’re developing a breathalyser as a non-invasive test to diagnose illness at an early stage. Aviva Ventures first invested in 2017, helping them scale from spinout to start-up into a fully-fledged company.

Billy Boyle, their CEO describes how it works, “Every time you breathe out, there’s thousands of chemicals on your breath, and some of these relate to disease and illness like cancer, and liver disease.”

“Our technology is able to capture these chemicals, and then we analyse them. This means we spot more disease at an early stage, and patients can get treatment faster, at lower cost.”

“Being able to get patients under the right treatment first time is going to help save lives and improve patient outcomes.”

Aviva’s involvement is about more than just money. Our medical director sat on Owlstone’s Board from the outset, providing expert insight into what our customers need. 

And as Billy puts it, “the support of Aviva has been phenomenal. Such a well-known brand, globally recognised, has helped draw in international investors. They’ve helped the company to develop the technologies and deploy them into the hands of patients.”

In fertile soil

The benefits of this sort of investment can be significant. And it’s not just one company in isolation. 

Cambridge is a leading biotech hub, a cornerstone of the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ along with Oxford and London. The whole ecosystem offers the ideal conditions for taking ideas off the drawing board and developing them into workable products.  

There is, of course, the world-famous university where some of the finest minds in the world push at the frontiers of human knowledge. There are two excellent hospitals. Highly skilled graduates are plentiful, meaning an excellent source of employees for biotech companies. The cluster-effect of new start-ups and established companies working in close proximity also attracts major private investment. 

Between 2018 and 2023 about a quarter of all venture capital investment in the UK, around £5 billion, flowed into the city, helping make it a major contributor to the nation’s economy. 

Some of that money comes from Aviva. In February 2025, Aviva Investors made a £15m investment with Cambridge Innovation Capital, a leading venture capital firm specialising in early-stage life sciences.

This money helps support new businesses and jobs for UK plc, and it offers the opportunity for strong returns for customers. 

As Ben Luckett puts it, “We believe there’s a real growth opportunity in the UK, innovation and technology that can be supported by investment capital. By investing at an earlier stage, we can capture real value as those companies grow and scale.”

Building the ecosystem

But one big challenge facing these start-ups is space.  Those companies need labs and offices to operate in. David Seddon, Head of Asset Management at Brydell Partners, puts it this way, “Without the physical real estate for these early-stage companies to grow, Cambridge can’t succeed on a global scale.”

To help address that challenge, Aviva Investors recently completed a £40.3m debt facility with Brydell Partners, to help regenerate Cambridge’s Journey Campus.

Close to the university, the campus is being transformed into a mixed-use innovation hub. There will be a range of life-science laboratories, offices, collaborative break-out spaces and a café, all specifically designed for university spinout companies and early-stage startups.

When the companies grow and scale, looking for more room, there’s also Chesterford Research Park. Aviva Investors acquired the 260-acre life-science campus outside the city twenty years ago and have been investing in it ever since. So far, we’ve created 325,000 square foot of high-spec, lab-enabled buildings, with ambitions to deliver a masterplan of a million square foot in total.

And as with all our investments, the environmental impact is important too. So, we’re building a 12-acre solar farm on site to power the buildings and help reduce carbon emissions. 

Tim Russell, Aviva Investors Senior Fund Manager explains the attractions of the location, “We’re creating an ecosystem where people can collaborate, from academics to scientists, start-ups to multi-nationals. Be it in the canteen, on the golf-course, on the trim trail, people can share ideas and hopefully grow the economy.”

Looking ahead

As part of the investment, we also have worked with local schools to help find and inspire the next generation of talent, with a view to long term growth for the region.  

We ran an outreach program with students from Saffron Walden High School, which is near to Chesterford. A group of year 12s spent a week onsite to see how investment can turn ideas into a finished building.

Sharon Bertie, Careers & Future Aspirations Lead, says signing up was a “no-brainer…the benefit is that they get to see what roles are available, what skills are needed, and they come out feeling inspired and aspire to more than they would have done when they started.”

Moving from a break-through discovery to a world-beating company depends on many ingredients in the right time and place. 

That breadth of Aviva’s investments aims to offer benefits to our customers in the form of new products, good returns on their investments and reliable income in retirement. It’s also good for the local, and national, economy. 

Not every new idea will take-off, of course. But we’re playing our part in helping the creators of Cambridge get ready to seize their chance of success.