- Enhances focus on four macro investment areas: Infrastructure for data revolution, Human Health & Aging, Critical Resources, and Energy Security & Industrial Automation
- The new strategic direction aims to increase proactivity in portfolio management through a multi-vertical focus on global trends and more effective allocation of skills, resources and investments
LIFTT announces today a strategic transition of the business to becoming a “multi-vertical” player, focused on four investment areas: Infrastructure for data revolution, Human Health & Aging, Critical Resources and Energy Security & Industrial Automation.
The strategic shift comes five years after LIFFT became fully operational and aims to simplify its corporate structure and enhance strategic focus. It will allow the business to better interpret the overwhelming technological, economic, geopolitical, social and environmental transformations that are reshaping the global context, by fully exploiting its expertise and technical skills in each of the four focus areas, creating a critical mass of skills, resources, and investments and that bring greater proactivity in portfolio management.
Startups in the UK and globally will benefit from a scientific-entrepreneurial ecosystem that can support them in their growth journey “from cradle to market”.
To date, LIFFT has raised €110 million from 215 institutional and retail investors, and deployed €78 million across 56 portfolio companies. In the UK, these include early-stage startups including three university spinouts, namely health tech firm Keyron, biotech Neophore, deep-tech Microlub, AI computing Lumai and Evoralis, specialized in enzyme-based recycling.
Each macro-area is divided into specific sub-areas of focus, which identify priority thematic focuses and exclude others.
- Infrastructure for data revolution
In Infrastructure, LIFFT will invest in enabling technologies that drive the transformation of adjacent industries, includingemerging quantum technologies, photonic optics, semiconductor manufacturing and next-generation data centres. The objective is to intervene at an early stage to accelerate their development and ensure their positive impact on a global scale, both technologically and socioeconomically.
- Human Health & Aging
In response to ageing societies, LIFFT will focus on the most promising innovations across neurotechnology, with the use of predictive biomarkers; CAR-T and RNA therapies, effective against rare diseases and cancers; radio precision, tissue and organ engineering; bioprinting and cryopreservation; and robotics for health, from surgery to treatment. For LIFTT, investing in Human Health & Aging means focusing on a future in which every year of life gained is a year lived in health, autonomy and dignity.
- Critical Resources
LIFTT sees critical resources, such as lithium, cobalt, water, soil and human capital as the invisible infrastructure of the sustainable economy. Investments in this area will focus on safe and sustainable access of these resources, investing in deep tech startups that develop scalable solutions based on frontier technologies – such as synthetic biology, sensing, and materials engineering.
- Energy Security & Industrial Automation
To guarantee energy supply, strengthening infrastructure security, and transforming industry to be sustainable and resilient, in a context marked geopolitical crises, energy transition, and skilled labor shortages, LIFFT will invest in areas that include cognitive platforms and human-machine symbiosis; automation; AI for security, with reliable architectures and solutions for critical infrastructure; space observation and connectivity, through LEO satellites and hyperspectral sensors for environmental and industrial monitoring; advanced nuclear energy, with new materials and technologies for waste management and micro-reactors; energy efficiency, through power electronics and systems; and smart power grid management predictive maintenance and optimization of energy flows.
