Q&A: Antonia Jenkinson – ARIA’s approach to funding

We recently published our approach to funding. In this Q&A, ARIA’s Chief Financial + Operations Officer, Antonia Jenkinson, explains how we came up with this approach, and why it sets us up with a strong foundation to move fast and minimise barriers to scale.

How did you align on ARIA’s funding terms? Who did you speak with to inform your approach?

We spent our first six months meeting with existing funders and funding recipients in the science R&D community. We knew we had a unique opportunity to design funding terms that were tailored to achieve our mandate – we saw this as both a responsibility and a privilege. 

Our first priority was to create terms which would enable us to move fast and attract the best potential talent and ideas to our programmes. We aimed to produce agreements which would be science-founder friendly and as frictionless, logical and concise as possible. After 10 years in the public sector and with a previous background in private equity backed companies, I had seen contracts take months, years or often fail altogether over IP clauses. Some industry or individual participants are not able to engage with clauses such as foreground ownership and claw-back rights, and this halts inventive ideas and solutions in their tracks.

To align on our initial set of funding terms, we reviewed ideas and precedents from a variety of sources. We talked to overseas and philanthropic funders, UK government bodies, private and public recipients of funding, technology transfer offices, venture capitalists and other investors. We also ensured alignment with Managing Public Money and current legislation (in particular the Subsidy Act). We are really grateful for the time invested by so many people to assist us on this journey and are excited to start awarding our first funding calls shortly.

Who is ARIA looking to fund?

We hope to fund the best ideas and expertise – wherever they come from. This means funding individuals or teams from across the R&D ecosystem including start-ups, small and large companies, philanthropic organisations, research institutions and universities. 

Within ARIA’s principles there is a reference to terms designed “to promote inventor-led start-ups”. What does this look like in practice and why is that important to ARIA?

We are cognizant that one of the most effective ways to accelerate scientific advances is when an individual is driven by a strong belief or vision and incentivised to pursue it. This principle sits at the core of ARIA – we are empowering our Programme Directors by providing them with the space and freedom to direct their research. 

In practice, the principle extends into our funding terms for inventors in three key ways. First, ARIA will not take ownership of foreground IP; secondly, we have included a requirement for universities to offer IP licensing terms to the inventor in the first instance; and thirdly we have capped the amount of equity/royalty return a university can take in spinouts to free up the share cap table and maximise the incentive for downstream value creation. Together these terms should encourage inventor-led start-ups and provide a stimulus for science entrepreneurship in the UK.

How will you work with the R&D community more broadly through the funding process?  

We feel fortunate to be operating in such a rich and world-class R&D community. ARIA’s success in part relies on our ability to engage and stimulate the best ideas and research outcomes from within the ecosystem through our programme funding and management. Immediately after joining ARIA in October 2023, our Programme Directors embarked on a series of workshops and discovery engagements. They have now all published their areas of interest in their opportunity space documents and are seeking feedback from the relevant R&D communities across these areas. This includes engaging with industry, trade bodies, Royal Societies & Academies, universities, UKRI organisations such as the Research Councils and Catapults, the PSREs and other government arm’s-length bodies to ensure the UK benefits from the most relevant expertise as we build our programmes.

How have you set up your approach to maximise public benefit to the UK? 

ARIA is operating primarily in the UK, but there may be sources of research, ideas or even facilities outside the UK which are crucial to a programme’s success. Beyond the research phase, access to global markets or overseas manufacturing may also be essential to the creation of a scalable company. In these cases, ARIA is first seeking to encourage the activities to take place in the UK and, in addition, we’ve included contractual mechanisms to ensure an economic return to the UK. If foreground IP is commercialised by an overseas company, whether as a direct recipient of ARIA funding or by way of acquiring the UK entity as a whole or the IP from a UK entity, there will be a fee payable to the UK as well as appropriate access to the commercialised product for the UK Government. ARIA will also be accredited for the funding it has provided and have the right to monitor any agreed commercialisation metrics. 

What excites you most about the approach ARIA has designed? 

There are two aspects which should make a material difference to ARIA in terms of contracting speed and achieving the results and impact we are seeking. 

The first is our decision not to own the foreground IP, or even to have automatic step-in rights. This should remove a fundamental barrier to funding; it will enable industry to engage with us more readily and provide more equity to drive growth and scaling of university start-ups and companies. 

The second is the fact that we are covering 100% of the costs of the projects we are funding (e.g. we will fund all verified costs, including direct and indirect overheads). The reason for this is to speed up the contracting process and to ensure access to our funding is equitable as we are supporting projects that would not typically be funded by traditional sources. Seeking contributions or match-funding would be counterintuitive to our criteria. This has a double benefit in that we will save time and cost by not having to verify sources of match-funding, in-kind contributions and shared costs. These two critical decisions were made based on our private and public sector experience and a united desire to make the funding cycle smoother and faster at every step of the way.