BioWednesday | Overseas Capital and UK Life Sciences - Opportunity or Defence?

Findings from our latest report Capital, clusters and the scale-up gap, produced in partnerdhip with Beauhurst, show that overseas investors are not peripheral to UK life sciences scale-up funding. 

Since 2022, 81% of UK life sciences growth capital has come from rounds involving at least one foreign investor, with US investors involved in 69% of that capital. Life sciences is also the largest of the sectors analysed, accounting for £3.1bn of the £6.3bn total. For a company planning a growth round, the question is rarely whether overseas capital will be involved, but on what terms.

Our panel will explore what it means in practice when an overseas investor leads your round, for governance, for where the company builds its teams and labs, and for whether it stays and grows within its UK cluster. It will consider why life sciences is more exposed to foreign capital, at greater scale, than any other UK priority sector, and what that concentration means for the funding environment companies are raising into.

The conversation will also ask whether overseas funding, or even acquisition, is necessarily a bad outcome, whether for the company or for the UK, or whether the real question is how much economic value, R&D activity, talent and lab demand remains anchored here.