Zinc VC’s Podcast: Obi Felten & lain Jordan Episode

Zinc’s mission is to make the UK the best place to successfully start a venture which can have a massive impact on the health of people and the planet. 

Increasingly, we are building deeper science ventures that serve global, industrial customers in environment and health, giving access to impact at a global scale.

Our 2024 Impact Report explores the challenges that need to be tackled to empower and enable talented founders from around the world to solve critical health and environmental challenges at scale, from here in the UK.

This report showcases success stories from the Zinc portfolio, and highlights how Zinc – and our growing community of hundreds of Founders, Fellows, Coaches, Partners and Funders – are working together to build a world-leading “Science-for-Impact” ecosystem for inception stage ventures in health and environment.

We started Zinc with the hypothesis that missions are an effective way to attract highly ambitious, talented and experienced groups of innovators, who might not recognise themselves as “classic entrepreneurs” but are ready and able to start a new commercial and successful venture to tackle some of our most pressing societal issues.

The world has overcome the sorts of challenges we face today when it has adopted a mission-based approach to the biggest problems and brought together world-class talent to invent and innovate, e.g: NASA and landing a man on the moon, the LSE blueprinting the British welfare state, or the Gates Foundation aiming to eradicate diseases.

On this basis and assumption, we designed Zinc as a new mission-based Venture Builder — a place where global talent, ‘impact makers’, can join to experiment and develop new solutions to our most pressing societal issues.