Backing future industry giants, with Tom Adeyoola of Innovate UK

Innovate UK’s mission is to turn breakthrough ideas into industry giants and it’s best known for grant funding. Tech entrepreneur and business leader Tom Adeyoola took up the role of Executive Chair in April 2025 and quickly got to work developing a new strategy for the thousand-strong body. We sat down with him, one year in, to find out more about what he’s been working on - and what’s next.

FORM: Tom, you’re well known in the UK startup ecosystem, but for readers who don’t know your background, sketch out your own founding journey.

TA: I studied economics at Cambridge, started as a management consultant before moving into the internet startup world with Sportal. I then joined Hutchinson 3G pre-launch - at the time described as the biggest startup in corporate history - going from 0 to 1,700 people in a year and raising £10 billion before generating a penny of revenue!

I then had several strategy and product roles, including Head of Gaming Products at Inspired Gaming, before founding Metail, a computer vision startup solving online clothing fit. I was sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong looking for the best computer vision tech for a live card game were developing at Inspired, and I cold-called a Cambridge professor who seemed to be doing the best work. He picked up first time, we got talking, and I later saw the use case for clothing fit, which became Metail. I raised £25 million over 11 years, with 80% from Asia, and sold to a Hong Kong clothing manufacturer in 2019. Another one of that professor’s students was Alex Kendall, who would go on to found Wayve! [Read our interview with Alex here].

I wanted to make it easier for those following me on their startup journey, so I founded Extend Ventures (improving access to finance for underrepresented founders), joined the board of Startup Coalition, and got involved in Labour’s startup/scaleup review pre-election. I had extensive discussions with the pensions industry in particular, and it became clear how much work there was to do to mobilise pension capital. I also joined the board of Channel 4 and sat on the Creative Industries Task Force for the Industrial Strategy, before getting a tap on the shoulder about leading Innovate UK.

The role was interesting because it addressed the core thing I’d come to focus on: how can we truly mine our world class science and research base, and put firepower behind the ideas that come out of that? And I knew it would be an interesting challenge because, from the outside, I’d found Innovate UK quite hard to understand.

FORM: What were your first impressions on stepping into Innovate UK - your debut in the public sector after years in the world of corporates and startups?

TA: It was certainly a scale shift - Innovate UK has over 1,000 people, whereas Metail had around 60 at its peak. But the first thing that struck me was that the personal motivations of the staff are genuinely aligned - everyone is here to drive the UK economy forward.

But I also saw the need for a clearer, sharper mission, that was shared right through the organisation, rather than requiring individuals to work out their own interpretation of what Innovate was trying to do. This was partly because the organisation had roughly doubled in size from 2017.

It’s also because Innovate UK deals with that “messy middle” between the great ideas at one end, and scaled, successful companies at the other end. Good businesses have very clear alignment and clear focus of what they’re there to do, and even if the nature of what we’re doing is necessarily a bit messy, we can create that clarity, alignment and focus.

So one of my big early tasks has been to get that clarity of mission cascading throughout the team, as well as working on a new strategy.

FORM: We saw the new strategy drop a few weeks ago - what’s the big thing you’re trying to do in the next few years?

TA: The fundamental shift is from funding individual projects to supporting companies from breakthrough idea all the way to becoming an industry giant. Innovate will track companies through the ecosystem - not just when they hold an active grant - and provide both financial and non-financial support.

This means building a single customer view so Innovate knows where each company is, how they’ve progressed, and what support they’ve received. We’re sitting on a lot of disparate data, but it needs to be better packaged for investors, customers and others.

In parallel, we’re restructuring around growth sectors aligned to the industrial strategy, with each sector lead responsible for the holistic end-to-end: the science and research going on at one end of the company journey, the demand-pull for that technology at the other end, and the interventions needed in between. It’s going to take us 12-18 months to move to this new way of thinking, but there are some pilots already underway, one example being in concrete - literally laying the foundations!

I want Innovate to act as a tech due diligence engine - we may have seen a company through grants, catapult work, and/or research relationships. So we can do the work to give British Business Bank, the Sovereign AI Fund and others a pre-qualified view of what’s coming through the pipeline.

Finally, this is not just about the financial support - the grants and loans we’re best known for - but it’s also about the non-financial support where we are uniquely positioned in the ecosystem. We can support on procurement, policy engagement, a 10,000-strong expert knowledge base across UKRI - a host of things that being part of government allows us, alone, to do.

In the past we haven’t been as focused on that value-add bit, because we’ve tended to focus on the inputs in our reporting back to government, rather than the outcomes we’re driving - for a project, a business, a sector, and the UK as a whole.

FORM: Are there particular sectors or companies where this new approach is coming to life?

TA: Quantum is the clearest existing example of this model working. The EPSRC (a UKRI research council) funded core research in quantum; Innovate UK has come in behind to create the petri dish for companies to emerge, then alongside government NSSIF (the government’s national security investment fund) has then invested in some of those companies.

So there’s been clear connective tissue to help those companies grow, and grow in a way where we’ve built relationships with them - I’ve only been here a year, but I know each of those companies by name.

And despite the larger companies not having direct need of money from us, we’ve built relationships and engaged on a regular basis and take an understanding of their needs and progress into our work with earlier cohorts of quantum companies.

So that type of end-to-end thinking has now successfully positioned the UK as number two or three in the world in quantum, and I do feel it is a sector in which we could actually generate some really globally significant companies that could hit escape velocity, and not need to sell out at a pre-£10 billion valuation.

FORM: lots of startup founders will be reading this, as well as VCs - what’s your advice on how best to engage with Innovate UK, given this new approach?

TA: We’ve touched on the complexity that businesses sometimes experience trying to work with Innovate. So an absolutely key thing, our number one transformation goal has been making it simple for businesses to engage with us. We’re not there today, but we are working on clarifying what that first touch point is, essentially that front door.

The current experience - applying for a competition, maybe losing it, getting nothing - is what Innovate is actively trying to fix. The goal is a clear front door that brings companies into the ecosystem regardless of whether they win a specific grant.

Instead, the intended model is a one-step filter based on high-potential criteria: clear that bar and you’re in the stream, with non-financial support - whether it be connections, workshops, sector team access - available from that point. We’ll be tracking you and looking for ways to work with you, which includes but goes beyond grant funding.

On connections in particular, I find that in the UK we’re much slower and almost apologetic and worried about making connections, rather than doing them all the time. Whereas in Silicon Valley, it’s the connectedness, lightning-fast intros, boom-boom-boom. And this isn’t about handoffs to someone else. We need to keep tracking that organization to understand where they’re going, whether we’re having an outcome and actually still advocating them for them.

At the same time, we also need to push back on the expectation that government funds everyone. The point is that not winning a grant shouldn’t mean zero relationship, if a company has high potential. But we are selective, we are trying to identify future industry giants, and we can’t be apologetic about that.

Ultimately, I want Innovate UK involvement in a company to become a genuine badge of honour - a kite mark that signals quality to later-stage funders, government procurers, commercial partners.