Post Urban Ventures

AI and Deep Tech venture builder that built the next generation of highly disruptive companies. Founded in 2016, it has hand built a portfolio of deep tech startups worth over £60m in four years.

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What was Post Urban Ventures?

Post Urban Ventures (PUV) was an AI and Deep Tech venture builder that built the next generation of highly disruptive companies. Founded in 2017, it has hand built a portfolio of deep-tech startups worth over $72m in 5 years.

PUV was powered by a team of serial deep-tech entrepreneurs and their networks of UK and European founders, academics and investors.

What did participants get?

team building & interim CEO and CTOs
commercial support & IP creation
help to secure external funding
global trend identification
validation of academic research

Post Urban Ventures and TEAM SY launched a new Venture Builder in South Yorkshire. Together, we developed connections to build strong, scalable deep- tech companies in the region to support the local tech ecosystem. 

What did we do?

Deep tech startup founders are typically professors and students who often have limited experience of turning research into scalable products and businesses. This lack of experience may result in ill-informed, out of sync tech and product development that wastes time, money and depresses portfolio returns in deep tech venture capital.

PUV identified global macro-tech and business trends to form a vision of the future. This allowed us to get ahead of how the world is thinking and changing, whilst our systematic venture building model lowers the risks associated with turning world-leading academic research into scalable and saleable products.

PUV hand-built startups, explored and validated academic research, created IP, developed a world class team and worked with them to define a scalable tech and product roadmap.

We also took interim CEO and CTO roles when needed at the early stage. What’s more, we worked closely with teams to secure external funding, build tech, win commercial proof of concepts and set and track objectives to scale startups.

Other Collaborations

Having successfully built and funded five new companies in the past four years, Post Urban Ventures is also one of the main partners in delivering the ‘Get Funding Fit’ Programme for startups in South Yorkshire.

Post Urban Ventures has a track record of providing commercial support to entrepreneurship programmes, with a particularly notable collaboration with University College London (UCL) to help foster spin-outs from the Computer Science Department.

The PUV Venture Builder ran from July 2021 until June 2023.

Programme Experts

Dr Luke Robinson

Dr Luke Robinson

Senior Technical Lead - AI & Quantum

PhD in Quantum Computing from Cambridge. Research Fellow at Oxford and Cambridge. Founder and CEO of Sunfish Energy. Chief Scientist at Hazy and LGN. Co-founder of Scalefree and CS Photonics.
Nick Slater

Nick Slater

Senior Investment Manager

Investment Manager at Capital Enterprise and LCIF. Partner at AI Seed. Founder of Dibbz. 6 years experience managing SEIS and EIS funds, identifying, evaluating strong deep tech investment opportunities.
Lotus Qi

Lotus Qi

Community and Outreach Manager

Sustainability Manager at Pensana Plc (IPO’d on LSE mainboard in 2020), Programme Manager at CyLon (Oman) & UCL AI Labs, Marketing and Branding for Shell & HSBC, BA in Mandarin & Economics.