The Mobius Life Sciences Fund has been launched by biotech incubator BioCity Nottingham to finance early-stage life sciences companies.

The Mobius Life Sciences Fund has been launched by biotech incubator BioCity Nottingham to finance early-stage life sciences companies.

The fund has the support of Nottingham City Council, which will provide unsecured loans alongside the equity investment from Mobius.

BioCity Nottingham, which was established by Nottingham’s two universities together with the East Midlands Development Agency, is the sole provider of investment funds for Mobius, using excess cash generated through the incubator’s internal operations. It is not clear how much money is available for investment, but Biocity’s CEO Glenn Crocker says companies will not have to be based in the incubator to be eligible.

Lucy Marcus, the fund’s chair and a board member of BioCity Nottingham says that developing strong relationships with other venture funds in the sector will be key to Mobius’s success, adding that the fund is already seeing business plans ‘with a great deal of potential’.

Crocker comments, ‘We currently have nearly 70 bioscience and life sciences firms either based in or virtual tenants of BioCity. Many have grown rapidly but there are still companies with great potential that are struggling to see daylight and we want to fill the critical funding and support gap.’