The Catalyst Grant was born of our desire to help early-stage software ideas come to fruition. We invest in the community, and we come from the community. Our team is made up of people with research backgrounds and decades of experience within research software. For us, the grant’s real value is in starting conversations, some leading to awards, but the majority to the sharing of advice, the making of introductions and the cultivation of ideas.

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For any other inquiries, we’d love to hear from you

Steve Scott | Director of Portfolio Development

Get in touch

The post Catalyst Grant appeared first on Digital Science.

Built by founders, for founders.

Every single aspect of Digital Science is focused on helping game-changing founders succeed, building businesses that rewire the world of research for the better, for as many people as possible. We want to reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing innovations. By bringing our combined experience together, we provide access to an unrivalled array of knowledge, contacts, skills and capital.

We look for companies where Digital Science’s added value leads to competitive advantage. Our portfolio has grown because of the benefits each company can bring to each other. By combining our routes to market, data and commercial experience with great products, we succeed.

We work with companies from pre-seed through growth to series A and beyond, with a view to investing in businesses that are aligned with our strategic mission – to advance research for the broader good of humanity. 

For earlier stage ideas, our Catalyst Grant programme has received a wide-ranging set of proposals – from lab-automation tools and artificial intelligence approaches to just about every part of the research cycle. Several Digital Science investments have come either directly or indirectly out of the Catalyst programme, including Overleaf, Ripeta, Scismic, TetraScience and Writefull.

Have a questions? Please read our FAQs

We support a diverse set of businesses, markets and leaders

Got a really early stage idea?

Catalyst Grant provides funding opportunities up to £25,000 for early-stage innovation. With Research Integrity a pressing problem for all in the research community, in 2024 we are looking to support innovative ideas to ensure integrity in research.

Discover more and how to enter here

Are you a later-stage company?

We support later-stage companies with growth capital and acquire profitable businesses with the potential to be leaders in their domestic or international market. We are experienced investors and we want to help not hinder. Our approach is flexible on the transaction size and the shareholding in the company.

Get in touch

We work with game-changing founders

Founder Stories

Our founders are challenging the status quo to solve research’s biggest problems, dive into the stories behind the portfolios.

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To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2020 on 13th October 2020, meet six of our many Digital Science ‘Women in STEM’ role models

#FoundersFriday with Mark Hahnel from Figshare

We’d love to hear from you

Steve Scott | Director of Portfolio Development

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The post Investments appeared first on Digital Science.

BPT Analytics, Intoolab and MLprior, three projects aiming to disrupt the academic space, are the latest recipients of the Catalyst Grant award for innovative startups. The grant is our international initiative to develop innovative projects and technologies and we award up to £25,000 or $30,000 for concepts with the potential to transform scientific and academic research.

BPT Analytics is an online business intelligence tool for the pharmaceutical industry. The tool is built on top of an up-to-date database of life science companies, which tracks what they do and how they perform in the market. It follows the team’s already established and growing publishing platform BioPharmaTrend.com, which features articles from leading pharma professionals and business leaders.

Co-founder Dr. Andrii Buvailo commented:

“While there is a plethora of large-scale business intelligence platforms on the market, the majority of them are too general for such a domain-specific market as drug discovery, so they can’t grasp important nuances, critical for decision making. BPT Analytics aims to eliminate as much guesswork from the practice of pharmaceutical industry strategists, business developers, and decision-makers, as is possible. By providing them with visualized access to systematic and constantly curated data about the most innovative industry players, trends, and opportunities.”

Intoolab is an artificial intelligence platform built for pharmaceutical companies and researchers. Its main feature, Tzager, an AI scientific tool which scours through millions of research papers, helps find causal connections and join the dots between papers that would otherwise take significant time. The tool has been developed in collaboration with a number of universities worldwide and a pilot has been completed at Aarhus University in Denmark.

CEO Nikos Tzagkarakis commented:

“The biggest problem in drug discovery is that there are millions of research papers with different information, but there are also millions of potential combinations of concepts that could solve specific problems. We are trying to solve the problem at its core by not just connecting information, but also creating an intelligence that understands the mechanics of ‘why’ things happen. The grant will enable us to develop our deep learning methods faster and also connects us with the valuable network of Digital Science. We are confident Tzager will become increasingly intelligent and we’re excited for the first time it will figure out an original solution in medicine and drug discovery.”

MLprior is a tool which uses AI-based analysis to predict whether a scientific paper will be accepted at a conference. The co-founders behind the product, Denis Volkhonskiy and Vladislav Ishimtsev, have both been actively researching AI with a focus on creating new models and algorithms at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology for the past five years. They are joined by PhD students Nikita Klyuchnikov from Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and Pavel Shvechikov from Higher School of Economics, who make up the four-person team.

Denis Volkhonskiy commented:

“Our product simplifies and speeds up the process of writing scientific papers,” says Volkhonskiy. “We use artificial intelligence for analysing the text of the article and suggesting improvements. We hope to become a must-have service for each researcher. Researchers spend several months on polishing scientific papers from draft to publication, checking formulas and correcting mistakes – our tool will hopefully help save a lot of time.”

Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science said:

“Once again, we would like to thank the community of researchers and entrepreneurs for sharing their ideas and passion with us. The field for this round of the Catalyst Grant was brimming with great ideas and narrowing down the entries proved a real challenge. The three winners reflect our belief that AI and machine learning solutions will offer step-changes in the way we analyse and interact with data, whether that be for business intelligence, discovery or creation. We hope the grant, and our ongoing support, will help each of them achieve their next milestone.”

The post From Artificial Intelligence and AI Scientists to Pharmaceutical Analytics – 2019 Catalyst Grant Winners appeared first on Digital Science.

Research industry technology company Digital Science has awarded the first Catalyst Grant of 2018 to a team from Belarus aiming to accelerate the research process through their Artificial Intelligence Platform sci.AI.

The team at sci.AI have developed an Artificial Intelligence that uses natural language processing and concept extraction to allow for hypothesis validation – in effect, understanding research papers and explaining them to analytics and search algorithms. Researchers can use the platform to save hours of time spent on reading irrelevant results from search engines and research information databases.

Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development, Digital Science said:

“The potential of sci.AI to enable researchers to test hypotheses through peer-reviewed articles, and avoid repetition of existing ideas, is really exciting. There can now be tens of thousands of published papers on any research topic, so Artificial Intelligence clearly has a role to play in the future of the research process. sci.AI will make a huge impact on the way researchers manage the explosion in research data.”

An international initiative to develop innovative projects and technologies The Catalyst Grant offers an award of up to £25,000 or $30,000 for concepts with the potential to transform scientific and academic research. Digital Science is well known for its engagement with the research community, and the grant supports ideas at an early stage of development, without the need for a complete business or development plan.

Roman Gurinovich, Architect, Sci.ai said:

“Just imagine the pace of biomedical discovery when a scientist possessing deep domain expertise will be able to instantly incorporate relevant findings from all over the world into their research. We strongly believe that modern researchers will benefit from exceptional ways to communicate their discoveries and utilize global knowledge. The Catalyst grant and wider support from Digital Science means that we can bring sci.AI technology to scale and make it widely available.”

Jon Treadway, Chief Operating Officer at Digital Science, said:

“This round of applications was extremely strong as the Catalyst Grant has become known as the origin of some very successful projects. The award will now include enhanced support from Amazon Web Services Activate, consisting of up to $3000 worth of hosting and infrastructure services, making it even more attractive. There are a lot of good ideas out there and we encourage everyone who was unsuccessful to consider our feedback and apply again.”

The next closing date for the Digital Science Catalyst Grant is June 30th, 2018 www.digital-science.com/catalyst-grant.

The post Artificial Intelligence Hypothesis Validation Platform sci.AI Wins Digital Science Catalyst Grant appeared first on Digital Science.