The insurance veteran is to chair Cambridge Innovation Capital as technology and life sciences ventures seek backing to scale up and become commercial successes

The City veteran Sir Nigel Wilson has been appointed chairman of Cambridge University’s main venture vehicle as part of a drive to funnel more pension money into private assets.

Wilson was chief executive of Legal & General, the insurance giant, for more than a decade and is chairman of Canary Wharf Group. He will replace Edward Benthall at Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) this month. Benthall, 62, is retiring after 12 years in the role, having helped to start the company.

CIC has £600 million of assets under management and has invested in more than 40 companies. It is the preferred venture vehicle at Cambridge University, with privileged access to the most promising investment opportunities. It backs tech and life sciences — ranging from cancer therapies and genomic diagnostics to AI, semiconductors and quantum computing — and its investors include pension and sovereign wealth funds and family offices.

Its portfolio currently includes CMR Surgical, the surgical robotics company. Other investments are in Pragmatic Semiconductor, a microchip manufacturer, and Riverlane, a quantum computing business.

CIC is among a number of university-linked venture vehicles in the UK, alongside Oxford Science Enterprises, run by Ed Bussey, and Northern Gritstone, headed by Duncan Johnson. Their purpose is to make a commercial success of the promising technologies emerging from universities and, alongside other institutional investors, to turn these ventures into big companies — a model that has been successful in the United States.

Technology and life sciences are among eight high-growth sectors earmarked by the government in its industrial strategy, published this summer. In a speech in January, Rachel Reeves vowed to create “Europe’s Silicon Valley” through a super-cluster in the Oxford-Cambridge “corridor”, by increasing infrastructure investment, such as in transport and water.

Under the government’s Mansion House reforms, pension funds have committed to increasing investment in private assets, amid concerns about a lack of scale-up capital for UK companies and the most promising turning to the US to grow.

Wilson, 68, said progress on this has been “painfully slow and we’ve got to speed it up. And so having someone who’s come from that background [pensions] should be helpful to scaling up the industry in the UK.”

He said that the UK’s most promising companies were funded by foreign money, which meant the “high returns” were getting “scooped up”. He added: “We have to get the pension funds and the insurance industry to invest at scale. That’s the difference. In America, they’ve been doing this for 20 years.”

Wilson said the vision to create the Silicon Valley of Europe “is the one that you want to have”. He said: “The IP is there; it’s the money that’s not there. We’ve got a hopeless misallocation of capital, so different from America.”

The government’s industrial strategy includes a headline ambition to help create the UK’s first trillion-dollar tech company. Wilson said this was “a catchy headline”, but he suggested that a “much more realistic goal” would be to create multiple hundred-billion-pound companies.

Panos Kakoullis, former chief financial officer of Rolls-Royce, has also been appointed as a non-executive director and chairman of CIC’s audit committee.