THE OXFORD FOUNDRY
COHORT 3
SUPPORTED BY SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Housed at the Amersi Foundation Accelerator Space
BUILDING A NEW G OF VENTURES.
Mikesh Udani, Co-Founder of Albus Health from OXFO L.E.V8 Cohort 1
GENERATION
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WELCOME to our new cohort of OXFO L.E.V8 ventures
ANA BAKSHI DIRECTOR, OXFORD FOUNDRY UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
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We’re delighted to welcome these thirteen exceptional businesses, who will be resident in the Amersi Foundation accelerator space from now until the summer of 2020. Competition for places was fiercer than ever this year, and this new cohort represents the very best of the amazing entrepreneurial talent that the University of Oxford continues to generate. Universities have a unique ability – and responsibility – to nurture the entrepreneurial talent of their students and alumni, to grow their ideas, and develop great ventures. As a multi-disciplinary centre, the Oxford Foundry is ideally placed to leverage on strong networks of established alumni entrepreneurs and industry leaders, on incredible academic expertise via our faculty, and on the exceptional students and alumni that Oxford has to offer. Our mission is to democratise entrepreneurship, and to support and encourage new entrepreneurs from all backgrounds, offering them the networks, resources and opportunities that will enable them to build the next generation of ventures, generate more jobs, and contribute to the local, national and international GDP. We believe entrepreneurship leads to true prosperity, social inclusion and collective progress. We built our L.E.V8 accelerator using global best practice frameworks, and it is our firm intention to scale up and expand it in the coming years. We are providing a tailored, high-impact, high-value programme to build robust businesses, focusing on product market fit, revenue generation and impact. Collectively, the first two L.E.V8 venture cohorts - 19 teams in total - have already created an additional 70+ jobs globally, and raised £8m in funding. As we welcome our third cohort of ventures, we are delighted to be moving the dial on women in entrepreneurship too, with almost 50% of them having women on their founding teams.
Machine Learning, satellite imagery and natural language processing to tackle big challenges. From predicting brain disease, environmental monitoring and reporting, and streamlined 3D surveying in the construction industry, to the protection of online privacy and freedom of association, increasing the capacity and the efficiency of healthcare services and more. It is truly exciting to see these technologies being set to work for the good of people and planet. Oxford has an impressive track record in nurturing successful start-ups outside of research, many of whom have set the bar very high for those who follow in their footsteps. Oxford has produced more founders of billion dollar start-ups than any other institution in Europe.** As our new cohort of ventures joins us, we will support them to learn from one another, to establish their culture, and to focus on their core principles, so that they are fully equipped to launch and scale responsible, accountable businesses. Over the next six months, these ventures will be exposed to an incredible array of mentors, experts and opportunities that will dramatically accelerate their businesses. It is our sincere hope that through this process, they will be empowered to leave a positive footprint on the world. We are looking forward to sharing their progress with you in the months ahead! Warm wishes, Ana Bakshi * ‘The State of European Tech 2019’, published by atomico. ** Sage UK Report, 2017
The past year has seen a strong increase in investment in tech start-ups – over $34 billion in venture capital has been invested in European tech ventures in 2019.* Our cohort 3 teams are using AI, Robotics, 04
Pam Lui, Co-founder of Intellicharge from OXFO L.E.V8 Cohort 2
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APPLI
“Democratising university admissions with AI-powered support for all applicants� appliai.co.uk
Christian Holland
University of Oxford, BM BCh Clinical Medicine at Green Templeton College
Ruairidh Forgan
University of Cambridge, BA Natural Sciences
Appli uses machine learning & AI to help applicants to university improve their chances of admission. Appli is democratising university applications. Their AI-powered platform tells applicants their percentage chances of success at each university based on their grades, test scores, work experience, demographics and contextual data. It can also tell each applicant what they can do to most effectively increase these percentage
chances. Appli helps them to optimise their work experience volumes, choose effective volunteering placements, and optimise their preparation to attainment ratios in admissions tests. They are now growing rapidly, and targeting a range of other selection processes, such as applications for schools, apprenticeships, vocational training, internships and jobs.
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UFONIA
“Reducing the cost, improving the quality and improving the availability of healthcare.” ufonia.co
Nick de Pennington
University of Oxford, BMBCh Medicine at Oriel College and EMBA Candidate at Keble College
James Godwin
Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design, BA
Guy Mole
Brighton & Sussex Medical School, MBBS
Claire Timlin
University of Oxford, MPhil Physics at New College
Ufonia automates telemedicine to increase the capacity and the efficiency of healthcare services. Ufonia is a digital health platform that replaces clinical appointments with autonomous natural language telephone calls. It meets the increasing gap between the need for healthcare and supply of clinicians. The company’s vision is to deliver tools that enable massively scalable preventative healthcare across the world.
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CHKD
“Promoting safety and confidence through convenient and accessible sexual health testing” Danae Maragouthakis
St George’s University of London, MBBS Medicine
Judson Alphin
University of Oxford, DPhil History at Kellogg College
Jason Lee
University of Oxford, DPhil Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at Worcester College
Nicholas Wright
University of Oxford, BMBCH, Medicine at Keble College
CHKD normalises sexual health testing through accessibility, convenience and privacy. In the age of modern dating, the stigma surrounding STI testing is breaking down. At the same time, individuals aren’t getting tested (or treated) because they’re struggling to access sexual health services.
order test kits through our app and get results within 2-5 business days. The app allows users to keep a record of their results, and serves as a portal to receive treatment, advice, and anonymous contact tracing. In short, we normalise sexual health testing through accessibility, convenience and privacy.
STIs are on the rise, but GUM clinics are closing across the UK, all in the face of growing demand. To combat this problem, CHKD offers convenient, athome sexual health testing. Individuals
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DEEP PLANET
“Using Machine Learning for the Benefit of the Planet”
deepplanet.ai
Sushma Shankar
University of Oxford, Executive MBA at St Catherine’s College
Natalia Efremova
University of Oxford, Executive MBA at Green Templeton College
David Carter
University of Oxford, Executive MBA at Green Templeton College
Deep Planet uses satellite data and AI to deliver actionable insights in agriculture. With the global population rising and food supply under stress, Deep Planet aims to disrupt agriculture with satellite derived intelligence. Deep Planet’s cost-effective and scalable solution finds crops, monitors problem areas on the field - soil moisture, nitrogen, potassium & temperature - and predicts crop yield.
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Our products are: VineSignal - Monitors vineyards, improves grape production and reduces irrigation and fertiliser usage. CropSignal - Detects crops and trees and predicts yield with over 95% confidence. Deep Planet was named as 50 Game Changers in Thames Valley and participated in the European Space Agency Business Incubation Center.
ARCHANGEL IMAGING
“Enabling human-machine teaming to tackle real-world problems that the cloud can’t reach” archangel.im
Dan Sola
University of Oxford, MEng at Pembroke college
Jonathan Mist
Brunel University, Electronic Engineering
Trang Tran
University of Oxford, MSc Pharmacology at Lincoln college
Archangel Imaging makes large-scale monitoring and responses in remote areas easier by delivering integrated computer vision, robotics, and analytics solutions without the cloud. Archangel Imaging solves those problems that the cloud cannot reach. They deploy award winning AI camera systems with satellite datalinks to tackle issues like safety at sea, endangered species poaching, illegal logging and oil theft. These problems are remote, urgent and sensitive; It isn’t possible to pull all the data back to the cloud so
the AI needs to be pushed out to the edge instead. Archangel Imaging deploy their technology bundled with an online management platform for humanmachine teaming. They can support collaboration between a complex team of AI cameras, people, drones, robots, geospatial (satellite) data analytics and IoT sensors.
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OXFORD CANCER ANALYTICS “Detect cancer intelligently. Give cancer no chance.”
oxcan.org
Peter Jianrui Liu
University of Oxford, DPhil in Clinical Medicine
Andreas Halner
University of Oxford, DPhil in Clinical Medicine at St. John’s College
Antonia Schultze-Mosgau
University of Mannheim, MSc Science in Psychology
Guillermo Valle
University of Oxford, DPhil in Machine Learning at Kellogg College
Oxford Cancer Analytics offers personalised platforms to detect cancer early through a blood test to enable targeted curative treatments. In 2018 Cancer resulted in 9.6 million mortalities worldwide. The deadliest cancers are often diagnosed at the final stage, when cancer has spread across the body and became incurable. Current diagnostics cannot reliably detect the deadliest cancers early, a driving cause for their high mortality. Cancers are curable when diagnosed early. When diagnosed at the earliest stage, 90% of patients will survive.
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When diagnosed late, 90% of patients will die. Furthermore, treating early stage cancers costs only a third of the amount compared to late stages for the NHS. Thus, early cancer detection is key for saving both money and lives for healthcare systems. Oxford Cancer Analytics detects early cancer through DECancer.AI, an artificial intelligence platform that analyzes an affordable blood test combined with personalized medical history of patients, allowing early treatment and cure.
ILOF
”Enabling a new era of personalized, precision medicine for Alzheimer’s Disease” ilof.tech
Mehak Mumtaz
University of Oxford, DPhil in Pathology at St Edmund Hall
Luis Valente
University of Porto, Masters in Electrical Engineering
Joana Paiva
University of Coimbra, PhD in Physics
Paula Sampaio
University of Porto, PhD Biomedical Sciences
iLoF delivers an inexpensive, noninvasive way of stratifying patients for Alzheimer’s clinical trials, through detecting exosome-based biomarkers in the blood. After more than 14 years, and the failure of over 400 major clinical trials, Alzheimer’s trials need help. 90% of initial enrolled patients leave trials, due to invasive, inconvenient screening, which causes the development of potentially effective drugs to be abandoned. iLoF delivers an inexpensive, non-
invasive way of stratifying patients for Alzheimer’s clinical trials. This saves 40% of the total costs for screening, and 70% of the time spent screening for clinical trials of Alzheimer’s, which is crucial to enable a treatment for the disease. By using a non-invasive test, iLoF transforms the patient experience and makes trials convenient and patientcentric. Identifying gold-standard proteins and exosomes, using a patented, portable, inexpensive photonics and Artificial Intelligence system.
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MO INTELLIGENCE
“Bringing intelligent automation to the construction industry” mointelligence.com
Yishu Miao
University of Oxford, DPhil in Computer Science at St Hugh’s College
Sen Wang
University of Oxford, Post-doc in Computer Science
Linhai Xie
University of Oxford, DPhil in Computer Science at Kellogg College
MO Intelligence provides autonomous mobile surveying services using advanced machine learning and robotics technologies. It is an AI start-up focused on tackling the challenges in the construction industry, including the fundamentals such as surveying, design and construction. Their current product is a mobile surveying robot that autonomously scans the as-built construction efficiently and effectively. They provide an end-to-end neural network backend to process the scanned point clouds, understand 13
the surroundings, and monitor the whole process of the construction. It is an integrated digital-twin solution for capturing the data from offline construction site to online working space, so that the clients are able to carry out delicacy management and predictive analytics with accurate realtime construction information.
MYO
“Improving the communication between care home staff, residents and relatives resulting in high quality caregiving, good relationships and trust” myo.de/en
Richard Boeckel
University of Oxford, BA Philosophy, Politics, Economics at New College
Jasper Boeckel
ESADE Business School, MBA
Felix Kuna
ESADE Business School, MBA
myo is a communication platform for the care sector. When working as caregivers, the myo founding team discovered multiple pain points relating to communication. In many cases, residents have difficulty communicating their experiences, relatives struggle to visit regularly and are usually only contacted when something negative has happened. Caregivers usually do not communicate proactively, and as their valuable work often goes unnoticed, they may feel unappreciated. myo changes the way the care market
communicates by bringing relatives, residents and care home staff closer together. Via a mobile app, care home staff share photos and videos of the resident’s everyday life directly with their families. Families are invited to respond and interact. This creates a transparent, real-time social network, driven by positive, appreciative communication and trust. The care homes are the customers, who benefit from an improved reputation, increasing occupancy and profitability.
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SMASH MEDICINE
“Improving patient care from doctors-in-training by improving the efficiency and efficacy of medical education.� smashmedicine.com
Benjamin Harris
University of Oxford, DPhil Oncology at Green Templeton College
Samuel Harris
University of Manchester, BSc Neuroscience
Matteo Di Giovannantonio
University of Oxford, DPhil Oncology at Linacre College
Fergus Wood
University of Bristol, MSc (Hons) Economics
SmashMedicine improves medical education by combining artificial intelligence with gamification. SmashMedicine is an evidence-based EdTech platform that allows medical students, doctors and faculties to work together to produce high-quality content in the form of multiple-choice questions. By combining multiple learning modalities with artificial intelligence and gamification features, they make learning medicine personalised and fun. Supported by top European universities
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and national bodies, SmashMedicine intends to transform medical education, forever.
SIBYL
“Simplifying legal claims to set professionals free.�
sibylai.com
Nik Vadgama
University of Oxford, PhD Gas Turbine Aerodynamics at University College
Sivo Daskalov
University of Varna, PhD, Machine Learning
Richard Straus
Solicitor, qualified 2015
Professionals are trusted with some of the most important jobs in our society, but are making poor use of new technology. Sibyl is putting that right, using expert AI to assess legal claims. Sibyl supercharges professionals to boost their impact. They are building a claim assessment tool for insurers and law firms, ensuring faster claim resolution at lower cost.
year, organisations spend around 16m hours on this task alone. Sibyl provides insights that allow organisations to resolve claims where the case is clear. This reduces costs and lets professionals concentrate on cases that require their expertise. Sibyl are currently working on pilots with a top 50 UK law firm and a leading European insurer.
For each claim a skilled professional has to read through a stack of papers and assess the likely costs and merits. Every
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PEERGOS
“Protecting people’s right to privacy and freedom of association, and the functioning of democracy.” peergos.org
Ian Preston
University of Oxford, MPhys and DPhil Particle Physics at Magdalen College
Chris Boddy
University of Oxford, DPhil Particle Physics at Brasenose College
Kevin O’Dwyer
La Trobe University, Bachelor of Computing
Jonathan Budd
University of Melbourne, BASc/BSc (Hons) and PhD
Peergos is a privacy-focused online platform for individuals and companies to store, share and communicate. It is decentralised, self-hostable and secured with quantum computer resistant end-to-end encryption. Peergos is your completely private online space and gives you total control over your data. You can think of Peergos as a mix between Dropbox, email, Slack and Facebook, with privacy built in from the start. It’s open source so you never need fear that the service you depend on will disappear, along 17
with your data. Oh, and no more spam. You are in charge.
NOVOIC
“Having your brain health checked should be as easy as having a conversation” novoic.com
Jack Weston
University of Oxford, MPhys Physics at St John’s College
Emil Fristed
University of Oxford, MSc Neuroscience at Merton College
Novoic is building a platform for predicting brain disease from the way you speak, decades before routine diagnosis. Novoic is a digital biotech company building a platform technology for identifying patterns of speech and language that occur in the earliest stages of brain diseases. With a strong R&D engine at its core, centred around natural language processing and deep learning, the company has an active pipeline in neurodegenerative diseases, motor diseases, and affective disorders – with multiple successful proof-of-
concept studies completed. Novoic’s technology exponentially brings down the cost of getting objective, high-frequency information about the brain and will transform neuroscience the same way next generation sequencing brought down the cost of genetic information for oncology. Novoic’s initial market is in pharma and biotechnology, where its technology integrates as a key part of their client’s digital transformation in fundamental use cases such as digital biomarkers, decision support, digital-first clinical trials, adherence, and beyond.
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GET INVOLVED
We’d love to hear from angel investors, experts and mentors who are interested in contributing their time and knowledge as part of L.E.V8. Please reach out to us, and we’ll be in touch with next steps.
Oxford Foundry, University of Oxford 3-5 Hythe Bridge Street Oxford OX1 2EW telephone: +44 (0) 1865 288990 email: development@oxfordfoundry.ox.ac.uk website: oxfordfoundry.ox.ac.uk
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THANK YOU TO OUR SUPPORTERS SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL THE AMERSI FOUNDATION EY MELTWATER DETAO EDUCATION GROUP BARCLAYS REID HOFFMAN BRENT HOBERMAN BIZ STONE TOBY COPPEL PETE FLINT MOHAMED AMERSI ALEXSIS DE RAADT ST JAMES JORN LYSEGGEN JEFF WONG PHIL LIBIN ARLAN HAMILTON
With thanks to the Amersi Foundation for the Amersi Foundation Accelerator space. 22
BUILDING A NEW GENERATION OF VENTURES.