Scotland's VBI Scales Deeptech Founders Nationwide
16 Jul 2026
A five-month bridge from lab to launch
The University of Edinburgh, in partnership with Techscaler and CodeBase, runs the Venture Builder Incubator (VBI) — a five-month programme designed to help deeptech founders in Scotland make the leap from academic research to commercial venture. Since 2021, the programme has supported 164 founders and businesses, whose companies have collectively raised £58m in grants and investments.
Applications for the next cohort are open until July 20.
From regional pilot to national ambition
Since 2024, Techscaler has partnered with the University of Edinburgh to scale VBI into a nationwide programme. The move builds on Scotland's existing deeptech infrastructure — the country hosts two of the UK's five quantum hubs — and aims to position the region as a launchpad capable of attracting larger industry players, though the report includes no specific commitments from such players to date.
The programme specifically targets academic founders and university researchers across Scotland who are navigating the transition to entrepreneurship — a group Andrew Parfery, commenting on the programme, says faces a particular barrier: "the biggest barrier to commercialisation from a university setting is the lack of commercial skills and experience required."
Founders in the pipeline
Two companies illustrate the kind of deeptech ventures moving through VBI:
- Ridescan AI, a robotics company building safety and performance monitoring technology for robots. Cofounder Shivoh Nandakumar says the company "independently monitor[s] robots to ensure they're safe and reliable when deployed into public spaces."
- Amytis, an AI biotech startup building a universal AI tool to help biological and wet-lab researchers map experiments and data. Cofounder Eva Steele says she and her cofounder identified an initial need for better access to computational tools in biology, based on their own domain knowledge.
Why founders should care
For founders emerging from academic or research backgrounds — particularly in deeptech, AI, and quantum — VBI's track record suggests a plausible pathway to funding: £58m raised across 164 supported founders indicates investors have historically been willing to back Scottish deeptech ventures coming out of structured incubation. The programme's five-month format likely offers a faster route to building commercial skills than founders might develop on their own, which matters given Parfery's point that commercial inexperience is a common barrier for academic spinouts.
Scotland's concentration of quantum research — two of the UK's five hubs — may also signal a specialized talent and research base that founders in that space could tap into, though the report offers no further detail on how accessible that ecosystem is beyond the university setting.
The 2024 nationwide scaling could indicate growing institutional appetite for this kind of support, which may be a signal worth watching for founders outside Scotland's central belt who previously lacked access to similar programmes.
What's still unclear
The report leaves several open questions. There's no breakdown of how the £58m in funding was distributed across the 164 supported companies, no data on outcomes or success rates for those founders, and no specifics on which "bigger players" the incubator hopes to attract to the Scottish market. There's also no detail on the size or selection criteria for the cohort applying by July 20, nor on how the VBI programme itself is funded or resourced.
The risk of scaling too fast
Expanding a regional programme into a nationwide one carries its own risks. Without careful management, scaling could dilute the focus or resources that made the original Scotland-based version effective — a tension the report flags but doesn't resolve with further detail. Similarly, whether Scotland can attract the larger industry players it's targeting remains an open question, as no specific commitments from such players are mentioned.
For founders considering applying before the July 20 deadline, VBI's numbers offer a reasonably encouraging signal — but as with any incubator, the fine print on selection, funding structure, and post-programme outcomes is worth digging into directly.