Mission Studio 2.0: The future of mission-driven ventures

Nesta's Chief Strategy Officer Matt Seden shares the vision for the next stage of Nesta's Mission Studio: pushing the boundaries in venture building for social good.

Mission Studio was launched in September 2021 with the bold vision of creating commercially successful, mission-driven tech startups to tackle some of the UK's most pressing social issues.?

This ambition is a core part of Nesta’s 2030 strategy. We want to harness the power of entrepreneurship to give children a fairer start in life, reduce the prevalence of obesity in the UK, and accelerate the decarbonisation of the UK’s homes. We are firm believers that mission-driven tech businesses can create significant population-wide impact while delivering competitive commercial returns for investors.

Mission Studio’s goal is to positively impact over 20 million lives by 2030. Through its work on Nesta’s three missions the studio aims to set the benchmark for impact-driven venture studios. Nesta is in a unique position to deliver a world-class studio as it contains the core ingredients for success: teams of domain specialists with novel insights and strong networks, experts in cross-cutting methods such as behavioural science and data science that can uncover novel approaches, and the ability to deploy risk-tolerant capital to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

In the first iteration of Mission Studio (‘1.0’), launched in 2021, we collaborated with our partner Founders Factory to build 9 new mission-furthering ventures over three years. Our first venture was Furbnow, a digital marketplace for energy-efficient home retrofits that spun out from the studio in January 2023 and a year later raised ￡950k of third-party capital to accelerate its work decarbonising homes across the UK. More recently, Martee AI has developed an AI-powered platform to improve demand forecasting for fresh food vendors. With fresh food having a shorter shelf-life, more accurate demand forecasting can help retailers stock healthier food, reduce food waste, and improve profitability. Martee AI has raised over ￡500k in funding, expanded to a team of 6, and secured contracts with chains of fresh food vendors to further test and refine their approach.

Buoyed by the strength of this portfolio of ventures, with missions at their heart and potential to achieve impact and returns at scale, we have made the decision to continue building new ventures at Nesta, delivering on the ‘Venture Builder’ role in Nesta’s strategy.

Going forward Nesta’s in-house Mission Studio team will run the entire process end-to-end, from conceptualisation and ideation, through to design, validation, technical build, commercial strategy, and spinout. The team has grown from 2 to 7 people, with critical roles across venture design, venture build, product design, commercial strategy and technical engineering recruited and onboarded.

After a lot of hard work, ‘Mission Studio 2.0’ has now begun the fun part - designing and building new ventures! We recently launched a design sprint on Nesta’s Fairer Start mission, looking to identify problem areas that limit the development of children under 5, where we believe entrepreneur-led innovation can be an important part of the solution. Issues under exploration include the cost of childcare, challenges in nursery provision, and maternal health (including mental health). This design sprint and the subsequent work to rapidly test, refine and iterate on concepts is expected to culminate in the creation of at least one new venture to further this mission. Once this is completed, we plan to replicate the process across Nesta’s other missions.?

We do not expect that everything will be plain sailing. We are not averse to failure and know that the vast majority of the ideas we come up with will fall short - this is an inherent feature of early-stage entrepreneurship. Further, it takes a village for a new startup to succeed - whether that’s users, investors, advisors, founders or early hires. We will draw heavily on expertise across Nesta and beyond, and will seek to build relationships with founders, advisors, people with direct experience of each problem, investors and much more, to ensure we are focusing our attention in the right places and doing everything we can to make each venture a success.?

How can you get involved? Well, we are venturing out on our own with big ambitions (much like the startups we launch!) and would love all the support and engagement we can muster. If you have ideas on how you might help us accelerate then please let us know. And when we come knocking for your expertise, networks or just a listening ear to evaluate our ideas, we would be thrilled if you would open the door! We will be sharing more of our work? on LinkedIn - please follow along and share your thoughts as we go. We are early on in what we hope will be an exciting and impactful journey, and can’t wait to travel down that road together!

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