Our Mission for 2026: Unlocking the Potential of Science-for-Impact

Paul Kirby & Ella Goldner, Co-Founders & Managing Partners, Zinc

The opportunity for science to transform our world has never been greater. From engineering biology that could cure previously untreatable diseases, to materials innovations that could decarbonise heavy industry, to AI-driven platforms that could make healthcare accessible to millions – breakthrough science is accelerating at unprecedented speed.

Yet much of this potential remains frustratingly unrealised. Promising discoveries languish in the lab. Many brilliant researchers feel constrained by systems that reward incentives misaligned with real-world impact. Entrepreneurs struggle to access the science they need. Clinicians aren’t able to drive the impact they want at pace, scale and depth. Mid-career professionals with deep expertise find themselves disconnected from the missions they care about most.

The problem isn’t a lack of talent, breakthrough research, or available capital. The problem is alignment: fragmented systems, misaligned incentives, and rigid structures that prevent extraordinary people from achieving extraordinary impact.

This is why Zinc exists: to unlock the potential of Science-for-Impact. 

Our Model for Science-for-Impact

Since our founding, we’ve been building a platform designed to break through this inertia. Not by creating another fund or accelerator, but by fundamentally reimagining how we create the conditions, capabilities, and coalitions needed for systemic change.

Over the years, Zinc has built capabilities, skills, experience and services, across three interconnected pillars, each addressing a critical bottleneck in the journey from scientific discovery to real-world impact:

1) Investment: Building ventures that transform health and the environment

Our Investment pillar backs Science-for-Impact ventures at their earliest and riskiest stages – from start to seed – when the foundations for scalable impact are first laid. We’re not waiting for proven business models or established markets. We’re backing world-class founders with the scientific depth and entrepreneurial vision to create entirely new categories of impact.

Our portfolio of 41 Science-for-Impact ventures spans breakthrough innovations across health and the environment. In health, we’re backing everything from breath-based diagnostics that could transform lung cancer detection, to precision antibody therapeutics for resistant cancers, to digital mental health services achieving unprecedented clinical outcomes. In the environment, we’re supporting innovations from battery recycling technologies that eliminate waste, to novel electrolyser systems for green hydrogen production, to AI platforms optimising renewable energy infrastructure.

What unites these ventures is their grounding in cutting-edge science – engineering biology, advanced materials, precision medicine, process engineering – combined with a relentless focus on creating measurable impact at scale. Through our Science-for-Impact Journey to Success framework, we’ve created a shared language for what excellent progress looks like across different innovation archetypes, helping founders navigate the critical path ahead and giving stakeholders confidence that ventures are advancing towards meaningful outcomes.

2) Zinc Innovation Partners: Reshaping the innovation ecosystem

Investing in great ventures alone won’t solve the innovation system’s structural problems. That’s why we’ve launched Zinc Innovation Partners (ZIP), a new initiative dedicated to working with leading funders and institutions to rewire how science achieves impact.

Through ZIP, we’re tackling the systemic barriers that prevent brilliant science from reaching the real world. 

Through partnerships with UKRI and others, we’ve supported over 150 research teams, convened thousands of innovators, and helped reshape regulatory frameworks to better enable digital health innovation. 

Our Multidisciplinary Food Systems Catalyst programme, delivered with UKRI, brought together over 100 biological and social scientists to spark cross-pollination and form 41 new interdisciplinary teams addressing critical challenges across the food system. Our Innovation Fellowships programme, in partnership with Vivensa Foundation and NIHR, has placed dozens of exceptional clinical researchers directly into mission-driven ventures, creating a powerful exchange where Fellows gain innovation experience while ventures benefit from deep scientific expertise.

These initiatives demonstrate what becomes possible when we coordinate across traditional boundaries. Rather than accepting fragmented funding streams, siloed disciplines, and disconnected stakeholders, we’re designing programmes that align incentives, combine resources, and accelerate the translation of research into scalable solutions.

ZIP is building the connective tissue of a new innovation system.

3) Inflection: Unlocking mid-career talent for impact

The third pillar of Zinc’s platform addresses perhaps the most overlooked resource in the innovation system: frustrated mid-career talent.

There are huge pools of impressive professionals – clinicians, researchers, engineers, commercial leaders – with 10-25 years of experience who feel trapped and lacking direction. They’re working in science but struggling to see impact. Working in impact but cut off from scientific innovation. Working in business but disconnected from purpose. They have climbed a ladder only to realise it was against the wrong wall.

Inflection is our answer: a guided programme and peer-to-peer community for highly committed mid-career professionals striving for more impact. It’s not another course or consultancy. It’s an operating system for impact-driven careers, combining self-organised “Pods” for accountability and experimentation, AI-enabled coaching and collaboration tools, and a silo-busting community of fellow travellers committed to agency, reciprocity, and experimentation.

We’re on track to see 1,000 people benefiting from Inflection, with ambitions to reach 100,000 within a decade. 

Creating a Flywheel for Success

The power of Zinc’s model lies in how these three pillars mutually reinforce each other, creating a flywheel effect that accelerates Science-for-Impact.

Venture building becomes testing grounds for ecosystem change: When our portfolio companies navigate regulatory pathways, forge academic partnerships, or pioneer new routes to adoption, they generate insights that inform our ZIP programmes. The challenges faced by Respiro Diagnostics in breath-based cancer detection or Cellestial Health in neurodegenerative therapeutics help us understand what systemic barriers need to be addressed.

ZIP programmes generate entrepreneurial capability for the UK as a whole: Our Catalyst programmes and Fellowships create talent pipelines of entrepreneurial researchers and commercial-minded scientists. Many Fellows have gone on to found or join commercial ventures. The multidisciplinary teams formed through our Food Systems Catalyst represent potential future investment opportunities or valuable collaborators for existing portfolio companies.

Inflection builds the talent infrastructure: As mid-career professionals achieve inflections in their careers – whether founding ventures, leading corporate innovation, shaping policy, or transforming healthcare delivery, they become the mentors, advisors, investors, and partners that strengthen both our portfolio and our ecosystem programmes. They’re the Zinc coaches, the Fellows, the industry experts advising Catalyst teams, the early customers piloting new technologies.

This is how conditions, capabilities, and coalitions for transformative change are built – not through any single intervention, but through the mutually reinforcing connections between talented people, breakthrough science, and mission-driven institutions.

Why This Matters Now

As we head into 2026, the urgency of Science-for-Impact has never been clearer. Healthcare systems are breaking under the weight of ageing populations and chronic disease. Climate targets slip further from reach. Productivity stagnates. Public trust in institutions declines.

Yet the tools to address these challenges exist. Engineering biology can create new therapeutic modalities. Advanced materials can enable circular economies. AI can democratise access to data. The gap between what’s technically possible and what’s practically deployed is getting wider.

Closing this gap requires more than incremental improvements to existing systems. It requires new institutions capable of coordinating talent, capital, and science at scale. Institutions that can hold together the full arc from discovery to adoption. Institutions that back extraordinary people to do extraordinary things.

That’s what we’re building at Zinc. Not a traditional venture capital firm. Not a research funder. Not a consultancy or a community platform. But a new type of institution dedicated to Science-for-Impact: one that operates across Investment, Innovation, and Inflection to create the conditions for transformative change.

Our Invitation to you

The challenges ahead are immense, but so is the opportunity. Whether you’re an entrepreneurial scientist frustrated by the barriers between your work and real-world impact, a funder seeking more effective ways to translate science into solutions, a mid-career professional looking to maximise your contribution to missions that matter, or an investor believing that deep science can deliver both extraordinary returns and extraordinary impact, we invite you to join us on this mission.

Join us in backing the founders building breakthrough ventures; In reshaping the ecosystem to better support scientific innovators; In unlocking the potential of talented people to achieve the impact they want in their careers.

The world’s most important problems demand Science-for-Impact. And Science-for-Impact demands that we unlock extraordinary individuals.

That’s the mission Zinc is fully focussed on as we head into 2026 and beyond, the platform we’re building, and that’s the future we’re inviting you to help create.

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Paul and Ella are co-founders and managing partners of Zinc, a platform dedicated to unlocking the potential of Science-for-Impact to solve the world’s most important problems. 

This is the first piece in a twelve-week content series exploring Zinc’s Science-for-Impact vision and the innovations, partnerships, and people driving transformative change across the UK innovation ecosystem.