Kent's Discovery Park has admitted 10 companies and 13 founders to the eighth cohort of its Discovery Spark accelerator. The programme ends with an investor pitch day on 3 December, and its 77 alumni have so far secured more than £6.5m in UKRI funding.
Discovery Park is the former Pfizer research site at Sandwich, now one of the larger science parks in south-east England. It launched Discovery Spark in 2023 to prepare early-stage life-science and technology companies to raise investment.
Across its first seven cohorts, the programme has supported 77 companies and 115 founders. The new intake started on 4 November.
Who is in the cohort
The companies work in drug discovery, diagnostics, cell engineering, wound care and crop science. Two have already disclosed outside backing or a strong research pedigree.
London-based Ternary Therapeutics, founded in 2024, raised a £3.6m seed round in March 2026. It uses AI, physics-based modelling and laboratory testing to design molecular glues, a class of drugs aimed at proteins long considered "undruggable". Its programmes target inflammatory and neuroinflammatory diseases.
HiFe Plants is a spinout from Norwich's John Innes Centre. It is developing crop traits with high iron content, and its trials found that 25g of its pea shoots supply a woman's full recommended daily iron intake. The company is working with a commercial pea breeder in New Zealand to bring its HiFe1 trait into a commercial variety.
The other eight companies cover breath analysis to detect prediabetes risk, a non-hormonal treatment for endometriosis, and a cell-engineering platform that turns a patient's own cells into antibody producers. The cohort also includes a microneedle patch that changes colour to confirm a vaccine has been delivered, a ten-minute molecular diagnostic and several wound-care products.
Why it matters for the cap table
Discovery Spark does not take equity, and no investment terms are attached to entry. Its value is in preparing companies for their next raise. Founders spend November in specialist sessions in Kent and London on finance, tax, legal governance and risk before they present to active investors.
Renos Savva leads the programme as Discovery Park's head of innovation and venture development. He described cohort 8.0 as the broadest so far and said several members had already raised investment or come out of leading research institutions. The work over the coming weeks, he said, is meant to sharpen each company's investor pitch and commercial strategy ahead of its next round.
For investors, the 3 December pitch day offers access to companies at pre-seed and seed stage outside the London–Oxford–Cambridge triangle, where much of the UK's early-stage life-science capital is concentrated. Terms for any rounds that follow have not yet been disclosed.
Original source: Startups Magazine — https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/10-science-startups-join-discovery-park-accelerator
