The Scottish Government will put £2.92 million into 17 university research projects to help turn them into businesses, it announced on 2 October 2026. The awards come from the research commercialisation Proof of Concept fund, which was piloted in 2025-26, when 18 projects shared £2.95 million. It is the second round of awards to university spinout projects under the scheme.
According to the government’s release, the money is intended to help researchers explore and realise the commercial potential of their work, and to speed up parts of the spinout process, from developing prototypes to market analysis and pitching to investors.
The Scottish Government has now invested nearly £6 million over the last two years to realise the economic potential of more Scottish spinout companies starting and succeeding.
Stephen Flynn, Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism & Transport, Scottish Government
How the Proof of Concept fund began
The fund was one of three measures the Scottish Government set out in June 2025 to help turn research in universities and colleges into businesses, according to an announcement by the University of Strathclyde on 26 June 2025. Alongside the £2.9 million Proof of Concept Fund, for prototyping, market analysis and pitching to investors, it listed £800,000 for a Spinout Pipeline Project led by Strathclyde to share commercialisation expertise across Scottish institutions, and £700,000 for an Entrepreneurial Campus Blueprint to help college students build business skills and meet investors. The pipeline project was due to end in a summit in February 2026 at which innovators would pitch to investors.
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes welcomed the investment at the time, Strathclyde reported. Sir Jim McDonald, Strathclyde’s principal, said the fund would “help to translate academic innovation into real-world economic and social impact”.
The pilot awards, for 18 university spinout projects, followed in October 2025. The University of Glasgow said on 7 October 2025 that it had won more than £540,000 for three projects in that round, including £247,225 for CRYSTAL-Q, which is working on wider adoption of quantum computers, £125,000 for an optical coupler from its Critical Technology Accelerator team and £168,824 for a drug discovery platform from a peptide medicine company. Glasgow’s three awards this year, by TED’s tally, come to about £624,080, a little more than in the pilot.
Where the money goes
The list of successful projects, published by the government’s Economic Development Directorate and updated on 2 October, names seven universities. TED’s tally of the individual awards on that list gives these totals:
- University of Edinburgh: four projects, about £743,750
- University of Glasgow: three projects, about £624,080
- University of Strathclyde: three projects, about £496,610
- University of Aberdeen: three projects, about £436,070
- Robert Gordon University: one project, about £249,900
- University of St Andrews: two projects, about £247,850
- Heriot-Watt University: one project, about £124,300
Individual awards range from £122,920 to £249,898.05. The largest is for SPIRES at Robert Gordon University, an AI-enabled optimisation platform for island and remote hybrid energy systems. Close behind is £249,877.04 for VasQX at the University of Glasgow, a dialysis graft with embedded biosensors. Edinburgh’s awards include £247,355.95 for laboratory-grown blood vessels intended to reduce reliance on animal models in drug testing, and £247,098.96 for NeurEYE, a retinal imaging platform for dementia risk assessment.
Other named projects include Scensai, a handheld chemical sensing device for beverage quality control at Aberdeen (£186,468.96); Merra-log, a low-cost aquatic environmental sensor at St Andrews (£124,934.08); Kinera, a wearable for Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor at Heriot-Watt (£124,303.66); and Revalint, a Strathclyde project on certified remanufacturing of aerospace components (£247,267.00). The subjects span health, energy, agriculture, environmental monitoring and aerospace.
University spinout projects and the UK picture
Scotland’s scheme runs alongside a UK-wide push on research commercialisation that began with the independent review of university spin-out companies led by Professor Irene Tracey, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and Dr Andrew Williamson. In its response of November 2023, the UK government accepted all of the review’s recommendations and promised a new £20 million proof-of-concept fund through UK Research and Innovation, with small projects of up to £50,000 and larger ones of £100,000 to £500,000. The review also suggested university equity of 10% to 25% as a starting point in life sciences spinouts, and 10% or less in software-only deals.
UK Research and Innovation followed with a £9 million proof-of-concept call in January 2025, offering grants of £100,000 to £250,000 for projects of six to 12 months, covering prototype development, user testing, business modelling and intellectual property strategy. UKRI said the call answered a key finding of the review, “the need for more proof-of-concept funding for academic researchers to build confidence in commercial ventures”. That is close to the range of the Scottish awards, which run from about £123,000 to about £250,000. The UK call was open to eligible UKRI research organisations, so for technology transfer offices handling university spinout projects in Scotland, the Scottish fund now sits beside a UK scheme offering grants of a similar size.
What is not disclosed
The release does not say how many applications were received, how projects were assessed, whether the government takes equity or any return, or whether there will be a further round and at what size. The descriptions of what each technology does are the government’s and the universities’ own, and have not been independently tested.
What it means
TED analysis:
- For university technology transfer offices: all but one award falls into one of two bands, of roughly £125,000 or roughly £250,000, which gives a practical guide to the scale of proof-of-concept work the fund will back.
- For investors: the published list is an early, public pipeline of Scottish spinout candidates, with Edinburgh and Glasgow alone accounting for about 47% of the money.
- For policy watchers: at under £3 million a round the fund is small beside UK-wide schemes, and it was announced a week before the Prime Minister set out plans to devolve innovation funding to mayors in England, a change that does not yet extend to Scotland.
