Start or grow a venture.
Start with the CBIT Venture Builder: one-to-one support for founders and SMEs.
0% equity · 0% profit share · £0 fees, for founders and SMEs
For founders and early ventures, researcher-founders, SMEs and scale-ups, and businesses in funded innovation projects.
Turn research into a venture: an AI-first lean start-up journey for researchers, technicians and student founders.
For ventures from outside the UK: register in the UK and grow in the UK and EU, with market validation, introductions and soft landing.
Put AI into your operations, co-funded: bring research and new technology such as AI into your business, through a KTP, Innovate UK or EU projects.
Doctoral study with your own company as the living case.
TNDRX, CBIT’s tender-matching platform, uses AI to profile a company’s capability, match it to live tenders and broker consortium bids, so smaller firms can bid together for contracts none could win alone.
Leading AI-Driven Business Transformation: an NTU award of 10 credits at level 7, stackable to the PG Cert in Leadership and Management Practice. Three days in person plus an online drop-in, as open enrolment or in-company.
MSc Strategic Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management: a year of week-long “Build → Measure → Learn” sprints, AI-empowered, full time, starting in September, at City Campus, Nottingham. For postgraduates, founders, family-business successors and intrapreneurs.
Graduates who run each Build → Measure → Learn sprint with AI as part of their method, on their own venture or a real case.
0+
live ventures in the CBIT Venture Builder
as at September 2026
£0m+
of private investment raised by ventures while in the programme
since 2022
CBIT Venture Builder
Technology Innovation Champion, 2024
2024
Source: CBIT figures registry v1.8 (1 October 2026). Figures and sources →
See the venturesIn a testimonial, Healthy Air says the support “enabled us to enter four new countries”.
Who: Healthy Air Technology, a UK maker of air-purification products and a member of the CBIT Venture Builder cohort.
More about the CBIT Venture BuilderYou contract with Nottingham Trent University (NTU). CBIT, the Centre for Business and Industry Transformation, is part of Nottingham Business School at NTU. NTU signs grants, contracts and agreements; CBIT delivers the work. The CBIT Venture Builder is CBIT’s programme for founders.
Start small: apply to one pathway. Businesses can also ask about a funded innovation project, such as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP).
Tell us about your venture, its stage and what you need next.
