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BII aims to support 30 startups a year with new funding

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September 17, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The BioInnovation Institute (BII) will support a record-high 17 startups this year, fueled by a new EUR 736 million grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Each company will receive a EUR 560,000 convertible loan alongside access to BII’s innovation platform, designed to attract capital and accelerate commercialization.

BII Funding Enables Support for Seventeen New Startups

BII is allocating approximately EUR 9.5 million to 17 companies, extending its support beyond previous levels and signaling a deliberate expansion of its venture program. The selected companies will benefit from access to BII’s innovation platform, which provides not only financial resources but also a network of investors, laboratory facilities, and specialized business development expertise. BII aims to increase the number of supported startups annually from around 20 to 30, with potential for further growth through strategic partnerships.

This expansion is not merely quantitative; it reflects a commitment to fostering a more robust ecosystem for translating academic research into viable commercial ventures. “We are facing a historic opportunity to bring even more of the strong research being conducted at Danish and European universities and hospitals out into the world,” says Trine Bartholdy, Chief Business Officer at BII.

“The 17 companies represent exactly the potential we want to help unlock – research with the potential to become new technologies, products and companies that can make a real difference.” The 17 companies represent diverse technological approaches addressing critical societal challenges, spanning healthcare, biotechnology, and climate solutions. Fibernex, a spinout from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), is developing advanced 3D porous nanofibre electrodes designed to enhance the efficiency of green hydrogen production while minimizing reliance on nickel.

Sylvia Health, originating from the Novo Nordisk Foundation BioMedical Design Fellowship Programme at the University of Copenhagen, focuses on less invasive treatments for women’s pelvic floor and reproductive health, specifically rectocele and pelvic organ prolapse. KhaosGuard, also a DTU spinout, is engineering laser systems for real-time monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions at industrial sites, utilizing mid-infrared laser technology to quantify methane, nitrous oxide, and CO₂.

Bartholdy emphasizes that financial investment is only one component of successful startup development. “When you build a company based on advanced research, the path from a promising idea to a scalable business is rarely straightforward,” she explains. “It requires capital, but also the right competencies, partners and access to infrastructure.

Our role is to bring these different elements together around the founders, so they can focus their time and energy on developing their technologies and building companies with international potential.” This comprehensive approach is central to BII’s Venture Programme, which combines financing with comprehensive business, scientific, and team development support. Companies also gain access to BII’s Copenhagen facilities and a broad network of collaborators.

The program’s scope extends beyond Denmark, with companies like Launch Bioindustries, a biosolutions firm from the University of Toronto’s SpinUp Lab, and PureSurf, a spinout from the University of Graz supported through BII’s collaboration with XISTA in Austria. This international reach underscores BII’s ambition to establish a pan-European innovation ecosystem. Alvara Therapeutics, a biotech company spun out of the University of Copenhagen, is developing small-molecule medicines for chronic kidney disease, while Epimass, from the University of Copenhagen, is creating analytical and therapeutic systems based on real-time mass spectrometry for applications like rapid skin cancer diagnosis.

BII’s efforts are demonstrably building bridges between research institutions and the investment community, having already supported over 140 companies that have collectively secured substantial external funding. “Europe has some of the world’s strongest research environments, but we need to become better at translating that research into companies, products and solutions that can compete globally,” Bartholdy asserts. “With the long-term backing of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, we can take on that task at greater scale.

The 17 companies we are now welcoming are an important next step.” The selection includes companies like React Foods, which uses research from Aarhus University, the University of Tübingen, and Stanford University to create sustainable yeast proteins from CO₂ and renewable energy, and Human Thinking, a DTU spinout developing AI-powered educational tools. These new ventures exemplify the diverse potential BII seeks to cultivate, aiming to transform promising research into impactful global solutions.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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