ETH Zurich, Oxford, Cambridge top 3 for deep tech spinouts in Europe

With the boat race coming up, I wanted to take a look another area Cambridge and Oxford are head to head.

When it comes to transforming scientific discovery into commercial success, Oxford and Cambridge are in a league of their own in Europe. According to the 2025 European Deep Tech Report, these two institutions top the rankings for university spinout value in Europe.

The report quantifies spinout value by a weighted score of VC-backed startups, Series A+ companies, unicorns, and predicted unicorns. Oxford leads with the highest spinout value score of 814, while Cambridge is close behind at 776. ETH Zurich, long a global leader in research commercialization, follows with 692. Rounding out the leaderboard are institutions like EPFL, Technical University of Munich, Sorbonne University, and Imperial College London​.

It’s a definitive moment for the UK’s innovation ecosystem, which has faced recent headwinds over funding access, scale-up challenges, and policy volatility. But if there’s one signal of resilience, it’s the consistent output of high-value, VC-backed companies emerging from the Oxford-Cambridge flywheel.

Deep tech spinouts - startups that originate from university research in sectors like biotech, quantum computing, advanced materials, and AI - are notoriously hard to fund and scale. They’re often capital-intensive, IP-heavy, and slower to commercialize than software-first ventures. Yet, they’re also central to Europe's push for technological sovereignty, especially as the continent races to catch up with the US and China.

So what’s behind Oxford and Cambridge’s dominance?

Partly, it’s scale. The report notes that Oxford alone has produced over 205 spinouts since 2011, including publicly listed unicorns like Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Cambridge, meanwhile, boasts some of Europe’s biggest exits, from semiconductor pioneer ARM Holdings to cybersecurity giant Darktrace and AI leaders like PolyAI and Graphcore.

But the recent leap in spinout value is also tied to policy reforms. UK universities - Oxford in particular - have undergone a quiet revolution in how they handle intellectual property and equity splits. The 2021 overhaul of Oxford’s IP policy, which shifted from a variable model to a flat 20% university stake (with 80% for founders), helped increase founder satisfaction and made spinouts more attractive to VCs. Cambridge and UCL now take as little as 5–10% for IP-light companies, aligning with best practices at Stanford and MIT​.

The ripple effects are being felt. According to the report, UK spinouts have become some of the most funded across Europe, and the country as a whole led all others in deep tech VC funding in 2024, raising $4.2 billion - more than France ($3.0B) and Germany ($2.7B). London, Cambridge, and Oxford are all in the top six deep tech investment hubs by city, with Cambridge pulling in $3 billion and Oxford $2.7 billion between 2019 and 2024​.

The policy push behind this momentum hasn’t gone unnoticed. The UK spinout review, published in 2023, was described in the report as a “significant victory” for academic founders. It recommended clearer, more innovation-friendly spinout policies and appears to have influenced other ecosystems across Europe. The review’s guidelines - founder-first equity models, standardized term sheets, and faster deal timelines - have now been embraced by 92% of the UK’s Russell Group universities.

Still, it’s not all smooth sailing. The report notes that European deep tech as a whole remains underpowered compared to the U.S. when it comes to late-stage capital and founder “mafias” - that virtuous cycle where successful founders go on to fund or launch new companies. Less than 5% of European unicorn alumni go on to start deep tech ventures, while in the U.S., former employees of companies like Palantir or SpaceX routinely found deep tech startups.

But if deep tech is Europe’s best shot at global competitiveness, then the Oxford-Cambridge engine room is where the next generation of breakthrough technologies may well be built. From biotech to AI to advanced materials, the UK’s university spinout playbook - bolstered by capital, reform, and a growing cohort of seasoned academic entrepreneurs - is proving its value on the global stage.

And if the rest of Europe wants to close the gap, the blueprint is now clear: lower the friction, back the founders, and let the science scale.

Oxford and Cambridge have raised the bar for deep tech in Europe.