Magnitude Biosciences, a Durham University spinout, has raised £1.3m led by Northstar Ventures, which invested from three separate vehicles in the same round. The raise also unlocks a £217,000 Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant, taking total new capital available to the business to more than £1.5m.
The County Durham company is a contract research organisation built around VivoScan, a high-throughput screening platform that tests drug candidates in a whole living organism rather than in cell cultures. It uses hundreds of C. elegans nematode worms, combined with imaging, machine learning, agentic AI, automation and robotics, to generate whole-organism data in weeks rather than years.
Its initial focus is ageing, longevity and neurodegenerative disease — areas where conventional models have a poor record of predicting clinical outcomes.
The round's structure is unusually layered for a cheque of this size. Northstar Ventures led, committing from the North East Spinout Inspire Fund, the North East Innovation Fund and the Northstar EIS Growth Fund. The £22.5m Inspire Fund is itself backed by the universities of Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside together with the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority, via the North East Fund, and exists specifically to commercialise research from the region's five universities.
Maven-managed regional vehicles also participated. NPIF II – Maven Equity Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, returned to the register after first investing in May 2025. The Finance Durham Fund, established by Durham County Council and overseen by Business Durham, joined alongside new angel investors.
Terms were not disclosed. Neither valuation nor the resulting equity split between the university, the regional funds and the founders has been published.
The money will scale the VivoScan platform, expand commercial work with global pharmaceutical companies, fund additional equipment and automation, and support new hires.
"Our ambition is to become the first company to provide a platform to screen millions of compounds in a whole organism," said chief executive Dr Fozia Saleem. "This investment in VivoScan gives us the opportunity to turn that ambition into reality."
Dr Will Cousins, investment manager at Northstar Ventures, said the firm had worked closely with the company "throughout its journey" and pointed to the North East's capacity to produce companies that "compete on the global stage".
Sarah Newbould, senior investment manager at the British Business Bank, said the follow-on showed the value of backing businesses across successive rounds rather than at a single entry point.
The deal is a working example of how North East cap tables are now assembled: university-backed spinout capital, British Business Bank money through NPIF II, a council-established local fund and angels, stacked in one round and topped up with non-dilutive grant funding.
Original source: UKTN — https://www.uktech.news/funding/magnitude-biosciences-raises-1-3m-to-scale-drug-discovery-platform-20260915
