Brightstar Partners started life in January 2000 as the corporate venturing arm of British Telecom (BT Brightstar) and was tasked with commercialising some of the 14,000 patents BT held . BT Brightstar was founded by Dr. Chris Winter and Harry Berry who have remained involved with Brightstar over the following 15 years.
Brightstar spun out 10 companies in its first three years of operation before spinning itself out of BT in a private equity deal and merging with New Venture Group, the corporate venturing arm of Lucent Technologies. Both NVG and Brightstar were benchmarked as best in their classes in the US and Europe respectively. The merger led to the formation of New Venture Partners (NVP), a transatlantic venture capital firm with $700m under management and which focussed on corporate spin outs, with Brightstar trading as NVPM-UK Ld the European office of NVP.
New Venture Partners invested in around 30 corporate spin outs worldwide, dealing with many of the biggest Fortune 500 companies.
Brightstar Partners also ran an innovation and IP exploitation consultancy business (Brightstar Innovations), which provided expertise in IP exploitation, spin outs and innovation to many major corporations.
In 2013 the team at Brightstar Partners saw an opportunity to repeat the model in the health sector, and to work with parts of the UK National Health Service to exploit its under used IP.
In 2014 the opportunity to work with the Korean Government to create a similar vehicle in Korea emerged following the visit of President Park to the UK and her establishment of Korea's "Creative Economy" initiative.
Subsequently Brightstar Partners closed its first medical technologies fund: the Korean-UK Innovation Fund I focussed on creating companies across the two geographies based on IP from medical insititutions.
Brightstar Partners has been working closely with InterMedi Group Ltd (UK) and DC Medical (Korea) to grow its portfolio of business. These affliated companies have activities in South Korea, UAE, USA, Finland, Bangladesh and China.
Brightstar is supporting the fund raising and trading activities of these partner organisations portfolio's in MedTech and Mental Health.