Sports nutrition business plans to bulk up at incubator

A SPORTS nutrition business with ambitions to become an international brand has become the first company to move into the Barclays Eagle Lab at Birmingham’s iCentrum incubator space.

The £8m development on the Innovation Birmingham campus opened a month ago, which has now been followed by the launch of the Barclays eagle labs, one of four parts of the Serendip Smart City Incubator.

Khurum Choudhry is head of commercial at PharmaNutricals, whose customers include Great Britain’s boxing and judo squads and football club Reading FC.

“As an entrepreneur it can be quite solitary,” he said. “This provides me with access to lots of things. We want to be an international brand. To do that we need to be very savvy online.

“To really grow the business I need to be working with like-minded people.”

He added: “Business has changed a lot. In the past people would ring-fence what they were doing and how they had been successful. Here, together we can work collaboratively.”

It is the fourth Barclays Eagle Lab to open, after Cambridge, Brighton and Bournemouth, and the first to be set up away from Barclays’ premises. The bank plans to support up to 10 businesses at any one time within the space at iCentrum.

Ray O’Donoghue, managing director for Barclays in the Midlands, said: “I want to encourage businesses to grow, to put like-minded people together – the support, the mentoring, the access to finance and capital.”

Tim Virgo, who heads Barclays’ high growth and entrepreneurs work in the Midlands, added: “iCentrum is effectively the follow-on from Innovation Birmingham. Its businesses had an 80% survival or success rate and £10m equity invested. As a blueprint, we want to follow that.

“Success is measurable in lots of different ways. A starting point is for lots of people to benefit from the use of the facility. We are not putting an income measure or a financial measure on it.”