Cashed-up IP prospers

IP Group , which invests in and develops businesses with promising intellectual property, is starting to put to use the £55m it raised last summer. The group more than doubled its level of investment in 2011 to £14.3m (2010: £6.9m) and realised a total of £3.7m. It plans to use a significant proportion of the funds raised to maintain or increase its interest in the most promising of its portfolio companies. The average capital deployed per company increased from £220,000 to £340,000 in 2011, and chief executive Alan Aubrey expects that trend to continue this year.

The group further improved its access to intellectual property opportunities by acquiring a stake in Technikos, a specialist medical technology fund that has a long-term commercialisation agreement with Oxford University's Institute of Biomedical Engineering. Meanwhile, Oxford Nanopore, an Oxford University spin-out and now IP's most valuable investment, plans to launch products later this year that could transform human gene sequencing.

The net fair value of unquoted investment companies increased by £6.2m, but this gain was tempered by a £5.3m net decrease in value of companies quoted on the Alternative Investment Market or Plus Markets. These have recovered in value by £10m due to the sharp rebound in market optimism since the year-end.

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