UK pension funds bet £100m on high-growth tech and life sciences startups

Autonomous vehicle unicorn Wayve and deeptech darling Elevenlabs are among the fast-growing unicorns that have been backed in a funding round by the UK's first venture capital vehicle set up to cater for pensions.

Schroders Capital announced on Wednesday it had invested over £100m into British-based tech and life sciences scale-ups on behalf of its UK Innovation Long-term Asset Fund (LTAF), the maiden structure of its kind that gives pension funds access to early-stage companies.

The funding round, which mostly comprised cash held by local government pension schemes, is only UK Innovation LTAF's second of its kind, after it closed a £500m fund supported by pensions giant Standard Life and the British Business Bank last year.

Other unicorns backed in the second round included Cambridge spinout Luminance and the gene therapy venture Aavantgarde Bio.

"These companies are at the forefront of high-impact, world-class innovation, tackling enduring social need - from critical research into medical therapies, to powering the future of our essential industries," said Harry Raikes, head of UK venture investments at Schroders Captal, the private markets arm of wealth management giant Schroders.

The round marks a significant milestone for Britain's pensions sector, which has spent the past two years navigating a government-backed push to invest more in non-listed British companies.

The Treasury has been engaged in a multi-year effort to unlock billions of pounds of savings and plough them into British firms, in a bid to give savers exposure to fast-growing firms, and source capital for investment-starved British firms.

The push resulted in 17 of Britain's largest pension funds to ring-fence five per cent of their workplace portfolios for private markets and infrastructure investments in the UK, the so-called Mansion House Accord last year.

British pension funds have traditionally been among the most risk averse in the world, traditionally allocating an outsized share of their portfolios to bonds and fixed income and steering clear of riskier private markets.