Allied Minds, a U.S.-based company that commercializes research and inventions from universities, plans to raise about $140 million of capital from investors in a London listing, it said on Tuesday.
Mark Pritchard, founder and president of the Boston-based firm, said London was already home to two of its peers, Imperial Innovations (IVO.L) and IP Group (IPO.L), and the model of funding companies derived from research was well understood.
“We are looking for game changing, truly innovative technologies,” he said in an interview. “We put them into subsidiary companies (…) with the view of taking the product or the service to the commercial market.”
Allied Minds has created 18 companies stemming from discoveries in physical and life sciences at 59 partner institutions, he said.
Chief Executive Chris Silva said its most exciting businesses included Spin Transfer Technologies, a memory chip company that came out of New York University, and RF Biocidics, a developer of equipment that uses radio waves to eradicate insects and pathogens from food such as nuts, invented at UC Davis.
Allied Minds plans to fund 5-10 new companies a year after the initial public offering (IPO), it said.
The company’s assets were about $500 million after it raised $100 million in a funding round in June 2013, Pritchard said.
