Foreword
Sam Cruickshank, Programme Manager, BIA
The BioIndustry Association (BIA) is deeply committed to fostering a thriving life science ecosystem in the UK. We recognise the pivotal role that early-stage companies play in driving innovation and addressing some of the world's most pressing health and environmental challenges. Supporting these nascent ventures is paramount, and business accelerators have emerged as a crucial mechanism in providing the necessary guidance, resources, and networks for success.
This report builds on our ongoing efforts to understand and enhance the support landscape for life science entrepreneurs. The BIA is proud to run the PULSE accelerator programme in partnership with the Francis Crick Institute, which exemplifies the power of collaboration in nurturing early-stage innovation, but there exists a wide variety of other programmes meeting a breadth of needs across the sector.
We are delighted to publish this analysis alongside the Start-up Festival on 22 May 2025. This event provides a vital platform for the very companies and support organisations discussed in this report to connect and grow.
This work is intrinsically linked to the BIA Innovation Map, our dynamic resource designed to help innovators navigate the landscape of available support. The data within the Innovation Map has been instrumental in shaping the insights presented here. Furthermore, TechBio Boost, delivered with KQ Labs and supported by the UK Government, is directly helping a cohort of data-driven life science companies scale up further.
More broadly, we connect start-ups with the wider community through initiatives such as the Women in Biotech mentoring programme and the Life Science Leadership Summit. Our ongoing work with government also continues to put SMEs at the heart of what we do.
Through this report, we aim to provide valuable data and analysis to inform policymakers, accelerator providers, and the wider community on the impact of these vital programmes and to identify areas for future focus, particularly in supporting companies as they grow beyond seed stage.
Executive summary
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There is a vibrant community of accelerators, incubators and other initiatives to support early-stage life science companies
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Companies that take part in an accelerator raise significantly larger seed rounds than their peers who do not
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Accelerated companies are no more likely to fail than their peers, but do fail faster, increasing sector efficiency
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Accelerated companies may be more likely to exit than their peers
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There is a need for further support to help companies grow beyond seed, particularly given current headwinds.
Introduction
Life science companies are an essential part of the UK economy, bringing in £3.7 billion in investment in 2024. In addition to the monetary benefit, these companies tackle some of society’s greatest challenges, from new diagnostic tools and therapies for currently untreatable diseases to novel manufacturing methods for the green revolution. Supporting the launch and growth of these companies is therefore immensely valuable to the UK, and historically we have been better at encouraging the spinning out of great science than at investing in and enabling companies to grow once established.
The vast majority of innovative life science work is done by start-ups and spinouts - and despite the UK producing consistently excellent and extremely dedicated entrepreneurs, it is extremely hard to succeed in a competitive landscape without significant support. Accelerators represent the best opportunity for many start-ups to find that support. These are programmes that provide a mixture of services for a small number of participating start-ups, including physical office and wet lab space, expert guidance, introductions to VCs, or direct funding. In exchange, some accelerators may ask for equity in the nascent company, or first refusal on investment and partnering opportunities. Others may recoup operating costs in other ways - often by using the accelerator to identify new clients for other services, such as real estate.
However, given the huge number of variables involved in making a company survive and thrive, the impact of accelerators can be difficult to see. This report will draw on existing literature and novel data analysis to try and identify:
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What differences are there in what various accelerators offer
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How accelerators are perceived by experts in the sector
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Whether accelerator attendance leads to greater success across a number of metrics
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Whether accelerators are uniformly successful in supporting companies across all success metrics.
Background
In 2019, the then-Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy published a report on the impact of accelerators and incubators. This report was sector-agnostic, but after review within the BIA, comparison to the dataset explored in this report, and consultation with external experts in our sector, we are confident in saying the following conclusions do apply:
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Most startups value attendance at accelerators
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Accelerator participation is associated with improved startup survival, growth and fundraising
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Accelerators vary in the activities they perform. Most activities help companies achieve some success measures but typically are strongly associated with a single measure each
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Interestingly, VCs invest more in regions with an accelerator, even if the company they invest in did not attend the accelerator
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Direct funding and help with team formation have the greatest effect on success measures versus other support types.
The report also looked in more depth at the effect of particular accelerator activities. We are confident that the following also apply to our sectors:
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Peer networking, business development (BD) and mentoring are the most common supports
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Where mentorship is provided, there is an even split between types (industry experts, consultants, founders, VCs)
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Accelerators themselves see VC access and business development support as their most important offering
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Start-ups attending accelerators see direct funding by the accelerator and provision of lab space and equipment as the most important
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Start-ups consider the peer network created by accelerators very important
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Start-ups think accelerators focus too much on the near-term, such as seeking the next investment round, over long-term planning via creating sustainably developing businesses
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Analysis suggests that access to partners/customers and help refining business models do not actually help start-ups achieve success measures
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Mentoring has a negative effect on employment growth, which is explained as mentors helping entrepreneurs focus rather than expand too rapidly
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Provision of physical lab space is less strongly associated with success.
BIA Innovation Map analysis
As part of the BIA’s work to support UK start-ups, we have developed the Innovation Map. This is a directory of accelerators, incubators and other initiatives and organisations that support early-stage companies. The goal is not to provide all possible information on any given initiative, but rather to enable innovators to make apples-to-apples comparisons as they shortlist the right initiative for them.
Although the tool is an ongoing work in progress and so will not document every initiative in the UK, the data on the Map paints a useful picture of what is on offer.
For our purposes, an “accelerator” is an initiative that provides more in-depth services than an incubator, which focuses on providing space, but little other support. An accelerator also commits to actively developing a company alongside the entrepreneur, as opposed to a training programme which is focused on personal development.
It is interesting to note that there is a breadth of different approaches to supporting companies and that accelerators are by far the most common in our dataset, despite also being the most intensive to operate for the provider. This may represent a sector-wide belief that accelerators are more impactful than other initiatives, or that life science companies require more in-depth support to navigate the long pre-revenue period typical of the sector. However, we also cannot rule out sampling bias, since the Innovation Map was developed first as a tool for companies to find accelerators. Regardless of the reason, we can conclude that there are a large number of organisations in the UK willing to invest significant amounts of time and resources (financial or otherwise) into early-stage companies.
Finance and equity
It is interesting to see that the vast majority of initiatives do not take equity as payment, and perhaps indicative of the efforts of the broader life science community to support rising talent. A recurring theme at the BIA is that people in our sector are incredibly willing to support each other without financial compensation, and the provision of services without equity may reflect this.
Support provided
The most common type of support offered is expertise, closely followed by network introductions. This is perhaps unsurprising, since experts are also likely to be useful new contacts for a budding entrepreneur and can be relatively low-cost for an initiative to provide, assuming the organisation possesses a sufficient network. Investor introductions are less common, but still well represented in this dataset - although this does not distinguish between in-house funding or simply making connections.
Available support skews early, and the overwhelming majority of initiatives that are not stage-agnostic focus on seed funding at the latest. This is unsurprising for several reasons. Firstly, very early-stage companies are likely to require more in-depth and hands-on support than more established companies. Secondly, there is a higher barrier to entry to support later-stage companies, both in terms of capital required to achieve milestones and more specialised and tailored expertise. Because of this, more established companies may be better served by individual service providers or experts focused on their specific needs, rather than the multidisciplinary suite of experts provided by accelerators. Conversely, a relatively small investment, or relatively generalist advice, can have significant impacts on a very early-stage company, which encourages developers to focus their efforts here.
The BIA has previously noted that there is a relative lack of support for companies to grow beyond seed in the UK when compared to the support for start-ups. This data starkly highlights the relative paucity of initiatives for later stage companies, and we strongly recommend that the sector consider a development of tailored initiatives for better-established scaling SMEs.
Accelerator survival
The total number of organisations and initiatives in the Innovation Map remains largely unchanged between 2021 and 2024 (62 vs 63). However, there was significant turnover, with 22 offerings retired during that period, and 23 newly launched. This is an interesting phenomenon, and while we are unsure what prompts it, there are a number of potential explanations:
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The needs of start-ups may evolve. As one example, initiatives focused on TechBio companies may replace older offering
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The strategic focus of the providing organisation may change – particularly in cases where the initiative is not the primary raison d’etre of the organisation, it may be deprioritised
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Some initiatives are funded through grants that may expire
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COVID-19 may have forced some initiatives to shutter for duration, and they were subsequently not relaunched.
Further investigation into the causes of churn within the accelerator landscape would be valuable.
Drawing together the lessons from the Innovation Map, we can say that there are a significant number of organisations and initiatives that exist to support early-stage companies and that the majority of these do not require start-ups to pay for their services in cash or equity. Most provide expertise and opportunities to grow a network, rather than direct or indirect funding, and most are aimed at an early audience. This tallies neatly with the conclusions from the BEIS review.
The BIA Innovation Map therefore reveals a robust and diverse ecosystem of support initiatives, offering early-stage ventures crucial access to advice, capital networks, and infrastructure. These initiatives play a vital role in accelerating the development and growth of nascent life science companies. This readily available support empowers companies to navigate the initial challenges and potentially achieve key milestones at an accelerated pace.
Accelerator analysis
In order to assess the impact of accelerators in the life science sector, we have created an “accelerated cohort” from 200 companies that have attended five accelerators.
We then looked at various success markers for the cohort - survival, company size, fundraising success - and compared these to a control cohort, consisting of a random selection of 200 companies with <100 personnel that (see methodology) had not been through an accelerator. Comparisons between the accelerator cohorts and the control cohort are given below.
Investment
When compared to companies that have not gone through accelerators, however, we can see some unexpected findings:
Companies going through accelerators have larger seed rounds, but subsequent funding rounds beyond the seed stage are smaller throughout the VC stage of a company lifespan. This seems to be counter-intuitive and suggests that taking part in an accelerator limits fundraising in future.
However, there are a number of other factors that may be in play. Firstly, it is possible that companies in accelerators may self-select in favour of those that require more support to achieve the necessary milestones to attract later stage funding.
Secondly, the accelerator cohort skews younger than the control group (median company foundation date of Aug 2018 vs May 2016). The funding environment has changed dramatically in the last five years. The significant increase in fundraising in 2021, and the headwinds seen during 2022-23, has created a situation where a company that is only slightly older may have had a significant advantage in securing funding.
In addition, the funding environment has changed dramatically in the last five years. The significant increase in fundraising in 2021, and the headwinds seen during 2022-23, has created a situation where a company that is only slightly older may have had a significant advantage in securing funding.
Strikingly, non-accelerated companies attract fewer grants, but at a greater average size, for a similar total than accelerated companies. Once again, this appears counter-intuitive but is likely to be a function of more successful seed raises at accelerators, such that entrepreneurs at accelerators are less dependent on winning very large grants for survival.
Growth rates
When compared with companies that have not passed through an accelerator, there is a clear trend for a greater number of accelerated companies to reach 10-24 employees. This matches the BEIS report, which notes that most accelerators typically speed a company’s development from 0-10 employees (The lowest bracket they measured) to 11-50 (the next smallest bracket). Our accelerated dataset shows a similar trend - faster growth to 10-24 employees, and then less growth beyond this as the accelerated company is enabled to focus on its core offering.
Exit events
Comparing between accelerated and non-accelerated companies shows that both sets have 9 exits. Controlling for the date of exit, however we see all 9 accelerated exits occurred after 2021, while the control cohort shows only 4 exits in the same time period. While the numbers of exits in both groups are too low to be definitive, this suggests that accelerated companies are more likely to exit, despite being an overall younger cohort.
Given the accelerated dataset trends younger, we might expect to see this reflected in the number of companies still extant, since younger companies simply may not have existed long enough to demonstrate that they are not commercially viable. We therefore have taken a subset of both datasets, limiting it to companies founded between 2015-2019.
We can therefore see that the survival rates of companies in accelerators are not meaningfully different to companies not passing through an accelerator. However, interestingly the lifespan of companies that fail is significantly shorter for accelerated companies.
Since the survival rates are not meaningfully different, merely the lifespan, we suspect that it is not that companies entering accelerators are of lower commercial viability. Instead, we believe that access to an accelerator, with the associated expertise, may expose flaws earlier. Therefore, a shorter lifespan may actually be to the benefit of an individual entrepreneur, as long as survivability as a whole is the same, as it avoids pursuing sunk costs and enables them to pursue alternative projects. A less-advertised advantage to accelerators, therefore, may be in screening viable projects at an earlier stage.
Conclusions
Our primary recommendation is the further expansion of the UK accelerator ecosystem to support companies beyond seed. We have seen companies that attend accelerators grow faster, and are better able to raise seed funding, with a corresponding lower use of grant funding. This may be that companies emerging from accelerator programmes develop more targeted strategies and business cases, leading them to pursue smaller, more specific grants with greater efficiency. This enhanced strategic clarity also strengthens their ability to secure private investment, potentially reducing their overall reliance on grant funding. Companies that attend accelerators appear to raise less follow-on capital, but we believe this is most likely to reflect the age of the cohort and correspondingly more hostile funding environment – see above. Accelerators are effective in enhancing fundraising capabilities, particularly in larger seed rounds and early-stage VC investments. This underscores the significant role these programmes play in equipping early-stage ventures with the necessary resources to attract initial capital.
However, most accelerators skew towards earlier stages of development. While the prevalence of accelerators catering to the early stages of development is a significant strength of the UK life science support landscape, providing a strong foundation for innovation, the success of accelerators in supporting early-stage companies only emphasises the need in the UK to significantly step up the development of tailored initiatives for better-established scaling SMEs. Other BIA work has highlighted a potential gap in funding support for companies as they seek to grow beyond seed stage, and this report shows that a similar gap exists for accelerator initiatives. Given the efficacy of accelerators seen here, this represents an area where the UK ecosystem could be further strengthened to ensure that promising ventures can continue their growth trajectory within the country. In addition, the reduced funding rounds beyond the seed stage in the accelerated cohort only accentuates the need for an overall improved funding environment, as advocated for by BIA across our policy work.
There are also some secondary conclusions that may be worth considering further. Survival rates of companies are not noticeably different for accelerated companies, but companies that cease operating do so faster following accelerators - potentially to the advantage of all involved. The accelerated timelines and focused support provided by these programmes may contribute to a more efficient identification of non-viable ventures, allowing entrepreneurs to pivot or pursue alternative projects more quickly, and avoiding sinking too much capital into these businesses, ultimately benefiting the sector's overall efficiency. Accelerated companies also appear to be more likely to exit, with a larger number of exits in a shorter timeframe – although the sample size of exited companies in the dataset precludes certainty on this.
We also attempted to compare the impact individual accelerator supports (funding, lab space, expertise etc.) had on success metrics, but were unable to draw any meaningful conclusions from this, finding instead that success rates of individual accelerators trumped any impact of support types. We conclude that simply assessing whether or not support is offered doesn’t sufficiently consider the nuances involved in exactly what is provided by a given accelerator, how it is delivered, and how tailored it is to the needs of the company.
We therefore recommend that a holistic view is taken of successful accelerators, and that rather than asking what support accelerators should provide from a menu of available support, the sector should look at which accelerators are most effective in particular spheres. Steps can then be taken to identify the most successful practices at these, in a more nuanced way than whether or not support is offered.
As an initial step towards this goal, we have asked a number of sector experts for their views on what contributes to a good accelerator:
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Accelerator programmes are the most effective when they have a clear identity and know what they are offering to whom and at what stage
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Mentoring is of highly variable value and depends on the experience of the mentor, how much time investment they commit, and how closely aligned their experience is to the goals of the entrepreneur
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Lab space is only useful if it can be guaranteed for a reasonable length of time, sufficient to outfit the lab appropriately and conduct a full series of experiments without placing undue time pressure on participants
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Experts and start-ups generally consider accelerators that invest in companies early to be better. Not only does this support the company, but it commits the accelerator to the company and means the accelerator is better incentivised to wholeheartedly support development
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Questions were raised around how accelerators advise people to develop business models and understand customers – and whether some push companies towards higher VC raises rather than steady business growth
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We should advocate for a global pharmaceutical company, or other invested large corporates, to deploy an accelerator in the UK that provides direct funding.
We also recommend that accelerators be encouraged to share metrics more readily with potential attendees - by ensuring a better match between company need and accelerator specialism, companies will be better served, and accelerators are likely to see better outcomes within their specialism. Sharing success metrics, as we have begun to do here, is likely to be the first step in raising the capabilities of all accelerators in the sector.
Overall, this report serves as a compelling demonstration of the effectiveness of the existing support mechanisms, particularly accelerators, in propelling the growth and development of life science companies in their crucial early stages. However, the comparative lack of initiatives focused on companies growing beyond seed may be a contributor to a general failure of the UK thus far to encourage life science companies to continue to develop within the country.
Methodology
To assess the impact of accelerator programme participation on the growth and sustainability of UK life sciences companies, data were gathered for 200 companies that had taken part in one or more of the following accelerator programmes: Accelerator C, Accelerator E, Accelerator D, Accelerator B, and Accelerator A.
Company-level data were sourced from Beauhurst and PitchBook, with a focus on four key indicators:
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Capital investment raised (2014-2024)
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Number of employees, as a proxy for company scale and growth
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Company status, classified into the following categories:
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Seed – Young companies with low employee counts, grants, or early-stage investments
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Venture – Companies that have secured venture capital funding
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Growth – Companies operating for 5+ years with strong revenue or investment profiles
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Established – Companies trading for over 15 years, or for 5–15 years with three consecutive years of £5m+ profit or £20m+ turnover
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Exited – Companies that have undergone mergers, acquisitions, or IPOs
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Dead – Companies that have been dissolved
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Zombie – Companies showing no operating activity or experiencing financial distress
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Survival rate, based on continued operational status at the time of analysis.
All data collection and analysis were conducted in-house by the BioIndustry Association (BIA).
To provide a benchmark for comparison, a control group of 200 UK-based life sciences companies with no accelerator participation was randomly selected. The same indicators and data sources were used to ensure consistency between the two groups.
Comparative analysis explored differences in investment, growth, and survival between accelerator-backed companies and the control group to assess the potential impact of accelerator participation.
In this report, "scaling companies" within the UK life sciences and biotech sector are defined as those businesses that have moved beyond the initial seed funding stage and are actively engaged in significant operational and strategic growth. This includes companies that are raising or have secured Series A, Series B, and subsequent venture capital rounds, focusing on expanding their research pipelines, clinical trials, commercial operations, or market reach.
