COMMENT: Why patient capital matters more than ever

By Raphael Coppini, DDI Innovation Manager, The National Robotarium

Last week, the Scottish Investment Bank made headlines when they revealed a ‘painful’ net loss of £138m in 2025-26, citing the collapse of three of its early investments as a major factor. The loss has, predictably, sparked a debate around the element of risk when using public money to support start-up businesses.

However, from my position as DDI Innovation Manager at The National Robotarium, I see things a bit differently and think we should be asking a bigger, and more complex, question:

What’s riskier – losing money on some investments, or hamstringing Scotland’s most innovative companies by failing to back them when they need capital?

Alongside others in Scotland’s innovation ecosystem, we work with talented researchers, founders and companies, all of whom are attempting to turn advanced technologies into commercially-viable products and self-sufficient businesses. In robotics and deep tech, that journey is rarely straightforward.

The technical risk is high. Development cycles can be long. Markets often don’t exist yet. And the amount of capital required to move from a promising technology to a scalable company can be significant.

That is why companies operating at the frontier of technology, including businesses such as M Squared Lasers and Orbex, will always carry a different risk profile.

Not every investment will succeed. And that is precisely why patient capital matters.

If public investment only backs companies that private investors are already comfortable funding, it is difficult to argue that it is addressing a genuine market failure. One of SNIB’s important roles is to provide capital where funding gaps exist and to help ambitious companies reach the point where they can scale.

Of course, investment decisions should be scrutinised and lessons learned when companies fail. A £138m loss deserves serious examination.

But losses alone do not necessarily mean the policy itself is failing.

What concerns me more is the wider scale-up challenge.

At the National Robotarium, we see first-hand the strength of Scotland’s research base, technical expertise and entrepreneurial ambition. The challenge is often what happens next: how a company moves from a strong idea, prototype or early customer base into a sustainable, high-growth business with the capital, talent and market access to compete internationally.

This is not just a Scottish challenge.

Europe is moving to address the same gap. The new Scaleup Europe Fund aims to mobilise around €5bn for high-growth technology companies across AI, robotics, quantum, semiconductors, energy, space and biotech, including €1bn from the European Commission alongside institutional investors.

UK companies will be able to access the fund, and as part of my work at the National Robotarium, I’m particularly keen to make sure companies in our network are aware of the opportunity.

Because access to growth capital can ultimately determine whether an innovative company scales where it was founded – creating jobs, capability and economic value locally, or whether it goes elsewhere.

Scotland does not lack world-class research, innovation or entrepreneurial talent.

And, as Shane Corstorphine’s Scaling Scotland report and others have highlighted, the scale-up bottleneck is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

So for me, the lesson from the SNIB debate should not be that Scotland needs less patient capital.

It should be that we need to get better at building the ecosystem around that capital: helping companies de-risk technology, access customers, attract talent, secure follow-on investment and navigate the difficult transition from innovation to scale.

That is the challenge we need to solve.