OXFO L.E.V8 ACCELERATOR Cohort 3
Welcome to Demo Day 2020 from the Oxford Foundry
'We’re incredibly proud of the journey the ventures have been on this year.' When the ventures started back in November, no one could have predicted what was about to happen. But not only have the ventures survived, through determination, resilience and humility, they have thrived. In many cases they have directly supported the response to the pandemic and have been helping with recovery in healthcare, inclusive engagement and social mobility, education, and operations, supply chains and logistics – and they are creating new jobs for the economy and helping us as a society to build back better. Our immense gratitude goes to the experts, advisors and mentors who have given their valuable time and support to these teams over the past year. These incredible individuals have made a lasting impact on each of the founders and their teams, and we are hugely grateful for the guidance - both personal and professional - they continue to provide, and their optimism, dedication and flexibility under challenging circumstances. The tenacity, ingenuity and sheer grit of the ventures has been humbling to watch, overcoming challenges of their teams spread across the globe, markets changing overnight, personal lives to juggle, payrolls to balance, and in the case of our health ventures, working on the frontline of COVID-19 healthcare while building a startup. Our cohorts 1-3 ventures have now raised £27.9m in capital, created 104 jobs and are having wide-ranging impacts across the globe. For example Archangel’s Image Recognition drones are helping to prevent illegal poaching in Africa, myo’s
communication platform for elderly people in care homes is being used by 4000 families, Nye Health’s GP-to-patient remote consultation platform covers 10 million patients, and Ufonia’s technology is being used in Buckinghamshire Hospital NHS Trust to manage the follow-up of patients who have undergone cataract surgery – the most common operation in the world. These jobs and the new wealth created for the economy are now more important than ever as the UK struggles with a deep recession. Universities will play an even greater, critical role in driving forward wealth creation, tax contributions, and upskilling our future workforce. The pandemic has highlighted the immense value of community, networks, and of democratising access to resources, mentorship and practical knowledge to build solutions. We’ve seen the demonstrable impact a university community can have in nurturing, scaling and investing in high-potential startups, removing barriers to growth, and, where needed, being a safe haven for failure or better yet; learning. As we celebrate the progress of our third cohort of ventures on Demo Day 2020, we also ask for further support to accelerate more ventures - to welcome back more graduates and alumni being made redundant from the pandemic and increased automation, whether they are building a venture, or intending to reskill in entrepreneurship and technology to reflect workforce needs. Our OXFO COVID-19 Action Plan gave us insight into the sheer potential to build long-lasting evergreen communities where ventures are accelerated and talent is nurtured and hired. For example in the Action Plan we enabled ventures to take on paid interns through 180 people signing up to volunteer their time and expertise in less than a week.
The pandemic has made us all reflect and put what matters first. At the Foundry we continue to ensure that our ventures are mindful of their ESG footprint from infancy, and that as leaders they strive to put people and the planet first, whist still remaining commercial.
'We need entrepreneurs to build back better, but we need a different kind of entrepreneur, one that is both purpose-led and socially-driven.'
Our heartfelt thanks to all the ventures, team and the OXFO community. We look forward to continuing to work with every one of you. The Foundry is an evergreen community where established founders give back to new generations of ventures, supporting them with networks, and providing pathways for new opportunities. We know we will stay connected, you will stay connected with each other, and you will be the inspiring role models and mentors the upcoming generation of entrepreneurs needs right now.’ With warm wishes,
We continue to stay committed to democratising access to entrepreneurship and supporting the growth of ventures led by underrepresented groups in particular. We run a long-standing, dedicated programme for women founders, grant funds for diverse groups of student societies including the Oxford African and Caribbean Society and Oxford Africa Society, ambassador networks, and we supported the launch of the University’s first scholarship for Black students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We also partner with NGOs to widen access and participation with our entrepreneurship and technology learning programmes and idea competitions. In addition we have been working on building new initiatives and programmes with an increased focus on diversity in startup acceleration. We're putting actions in place to provide more resources, access to capital, and support to underrepresented founders, and encourage more students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue careers in entrepreneurship – whether that be as a startup founder, going into venture capital, or joining an early-stage, high growth business.
Ana Bakshi Executive Director Oxford Foundry
OUR VENTURE IMPACT, COHORTS 1-3 32 start-ups supported across three cohorts
ÂŁ27.9m investment raised
104
jobs created globally
9.1 net promoter score
ÂŁ100m + valuation of the ventures
75% of the companies have gone on to raise funding in Europe and the US since joining the OXFO L.E.V8 accelerator
80% of ventures are revenue generating
COHORT 3 2019-2020
PEERGOS ARCHANGEL IMAGING DEEP PLANET ILOF UFONIA APPLI SIBYL NOVOIC OXFORD CANCER ANALYTICS MYO YOXLY SMASHMEDICINE
Platform - Privacy & Security - Decentralised - B2C
PEERGOS
“Cutting edge privacy and security for your online life”
https://peergos.org
THE PROBLEM We’re generating more digital information than ever before – documents, photos, videos. Some of it is private and personal, and some of it we want to share with family, friends or colleagues. Consumers face a number of questions when making an informed choice, including: 1.
How is my data kept secure? What about my log-in details and password?
2.
Can my storage provider see my data? What about who I share it with?
3.
What happens to my data if my storage provider shuts down or their servers are compromise
The biggest providers: don’t encrypt data at rest, maintain control of the information used to store data, and tie consumers into their own eco-systems, making it hard to move to new solutions and disastrous if an account is ever compromised or locked.
THE SOLUTION Peergos uses cutting edge technology to deliver private and secure online storage with seamless access control. Peergos is: 1. Secured with quantum computer resistant end-to-end encryption so files are always kept secure in transit and at rest 2. Decentralised so end users are always in control 3. Completely trustless and private – no metadata is shared with the server 4. Built on peer-to-peer tech and independent of DNS and TLS certificate authorities to be resilient against network attacks and service outages. Built on an extensible platform that embraces privacy by design, Peergos is the most compelling storage solution available and the first of many products in the company’s pipeline.
TRACTION Peergos currently have over 1,200 accounts on their alpha network. They are currently refining and testing the product and platform, with the launch of a paid beta service imminent. Peergos is highly regarded in several online communities and has built a strong relationship with IPFS and Protocol Labs.
CAPITAL RAISED Peergos have bootstrapped until now and have recently been awarded a £200k grant by the EU Next Generation Internet initiative. Grant/s: EUR200k EU Next Generation Internet Initiative grant, October 2020 £5k Oxford Foundry grant in July 2020 £5k Santander grant in January 2020 £45k Protocol Labs grant in December 2018
TEAM Currently 5 team members (4 male, 1 female), including: Dr Ian Preston - CEO MPhys and DPhil in Particle Physics, Magdalen College, Oxford Dr Jonathan Budd - Commercial & Product Director Dr Chris Boddy - Engineer DPhil, Particle Physics, Brasenose College, Oxford Kevin O'Dwyer - RnD Engineer Dr Joanna Bagniewska - Comms Lead DPhil Zoology, Linacre college, Oxford
Security & Defence - Off-Grid Asset Protection - B2B SaaS - AI Cameras
ARCHANGEL IMAGING
“Teaming humans and machines to solve remote asset protection and public safety challenges”
www.archangel.im
THE PROBLEM Until now, challenges such as safety at sea, endangered species poaching, illegal logging and oil theft have required massive networks of intelligence systems and manpower to have a chance of being effective. Safeguarding and warning systems around some of the biggest global issues are often hampered by the sheer scale of the terrains that need to be covered.
THE SOLUTION Archangel Imaging helps companies protect their remote assets in challenging areas in a whole new way. Whether those remote assets are the several million dollars’ worth of metal cables being stolen, or ivory taken by rhino poachers, Archangel Imaging gives security teams early warning in advance of incidents and better tools for remote follow up actions. We use our Argus off-grid, AI cameras with integrated power, communications (including satellite and IoT) and analytics onboard, alongside other sensors to detect anomalies in real time, with nearby drone, robotic or human staff to respond. Users can then coordinate these different resources, easily and effectively, through a human- machine collaboration platform called Cerebella. Cerebella allows best-in-class technologies (ours and our suppliers & partners) to be integrated into human workflows. The teams of the future will be hybrid, with human staff working alongside machine team members, solving those stubbornly persistent, global problems. Cerebella is the software platform for hybrid human-machine teams.
TRACTION The company has live engagements with defence, and live pilots deploying with anti-poaching and rail transport through 2021. Revenues support core development through 2021.
CAPITAL RAISED Archangel have been bootstrapping by delivering innovation projects that have been further vaildating their technology and applications across multiple verticals.
Several technology vendors are starting to market their equipment as ‘Cerebella compatible’. Archangel are currently generating revenue in the range of £1m per annum.
TEAM Currently 14 team members (11 male, 3 female, 11 nationalities), including: Jonathan Mist - CEO and co-founder Trang Tran - COO and co-founder MSc Pharmacology, Lincoln College, Oxford Dan Sola - CRO and co-founder MEng Engineering, Pembroke College, Oxford
AWARDS & MEDIA Archangel won the BT Infinity Labs Augmented Intelligence Award for their work with UK Defence. Archangel’s WAMCam (Wildlife Activity Monitoring Camera) won the Tech For Good category at the prestigious AI-conics awards, presented at No.10 Downing Street (back when you were allowed to visit someone else’s office). Archangel Imaging has been selected to join Applied AI 2.0, Tech Nation’s prestigious growth programme for Artificial Intelligence companies. - Tech Nation Applied AI 2.0 https://technation.io/news/applied-ai-2-0-cohort/ - Sifted article https://sifted.eu/articles/coronavirus-pivot-startups/ - Sifted article https://sifted.eu/articles/archangel-imaging-poaching/ - AIconics Awards https://aibusiness.com/document.asp? doc_id=760956&site=aibusiness - BT Infinity Lab Awards https://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/tech-news/btinfinity-lab-artificial-intelligence-competitionwinners-11364273506586
AgriTech - Supply Chain - Big Data - Satellite
DEEP PLANET
“Using machine learning for the benefit of the planet”
THE PROBLEM
www.deepplanet.ai
The traditional approach to global agriculture is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The first technology revolution in agriculture between 1961 and 2004 led to impressive strides with the use of modern farming practices including irrigation, use of fertilisers and pesticides, and the development of new and more productive crop varieties. As a result, today more than £200 billion is spent each year on irrigation and fertiliser, and 10% of the world’s water is used/wasted to supply the agricultural production. But efficiency gains are dropping, yield increases have slowed and the target to produce 50% more food by 2050 has become even greater. All without considering the impact of climate change. The above demonstrates clear inefficiencies in the agricultural production system which has led to sub-optimal yields, risk assessment and supply chain inefficiency. Growers have been facing lower yields, higher input costs and lower returns, but now must look to new technologies to face the bleak future that lies ahead of them without fundamental change. Large supply chain companies are equally challenged. They have large teams assessing supply chains on the ground, costing an average of between £500k - £1.5m on a single crop across multiple regions per year, but cannot consistently and accurately assess crop yield, health, quality and rotations. This can lead to millions in missed revenue and opportunities.
THE SOLUTION Deep Planet uses machine learning, satellite imagery, and agricultural data such as ground sensor, yield and weather data, to create a living catalogue of the world’s agricultural production. With the global population rising, and food supply under stress, Deep Planet aims to support supply chain companies and growers by monitoring 80 crops in the next two years. Deep Planet’s solutions help growers and supply chain companies to: • Lower variability and improve yield by 20% • Predict yield at 90% accuracy • Lower irrigation and fertiliser usage by 10% • Predict crop input and output over large areas • Substitute and complement manual scouting
TRACTION Deep Planet are already revenue generating, having processed more than £100k of bookings in the last 6 months. Their client list includes large wine growers and supply chain companies; with more than 40 growers using the platform. Now in a position where they are converting pilots into paying customers, Deep Planet have been able to provide successful case studies and data to monitor 8 crops with sub-terrain modelling, soil moisture interpolation, and yield prediction at 95% accuracy. Deep Planet also have patentable technology identified in an IP audit using a UK Intellectual Property Office and Innovate UK grant.
CAPITAL RAISED Pre-Seed/ Angel: £100k from Angel investors, Feb 2020 Grant/s: £380k in grants from the European Space Agency, Copernicus, SPRINT, and Innovate UK 2018-2020
TEAM Currently 10 team members (6 male, 4 female), based in the UK, Russia, USA, and Hungary, including: Sushma Shankar - CEO Executive MBA, St Catherine’s College, Oxford Natalia Efremova - Machine Learning Researcher / CTO Executive MBA, Christ Church, Oxford
IMPACT - 500,000 hectares of land has been monitored to date - Deep Planet's data supports sustainable tree harvesting, deforestation mitigation, and farmer training in Somalia - Data supports regenerative grazing and holistic management of African Masaai Mara rangelands in order to reduce animal fatalities - Data has enabled increased fruit production with lower water usage in grape farms in Australia.
David Carter - CFO Executive MBA, Green Templeton College, Oxford
AWARDS & MEDIA - Featured in Forbes and Real Business - Selected to participate in the European Space Agency's Business Incubation Centre - Featured in Australia's ABC News - Selected by EIT Food as a top 20 startup for the RisingFoodStars Accelerator - Selected as a top 15 ag-tech startup globally by Foodbytes! Rabobank - Selected to participate in Creative Destruction Lab - Selected as one of 13 companies in Australia’s WineTech Foment Accelerator - Named in the 50 Game Changers of 2020 by Thames Valley ConnectTVT - Selected by Innovate UK as a top 10 agritech startup to represent a UK delegation to Australia - Finalist on Deloitte's Gravity Challenge, collaborating with industry leaders on projects including smart water use, carbon sequestration and aquaculture monitoring.
Pharma - Disease Biomarkers - AI & Photonics - Stratifying Patients
ILOF
“Creating an AI-powered digital library of disease biomarkers – to accelerate a cure for Alzheimer’s”
www.ilof.tech
THE PROBLEM Alzheimer’s disease is devastating, and despite decades of research, we are still far from a cure. In the last 14 years, more than 400 clinical trials failed, without any new disease modifying treatment on the market. Clinical trials for the disease have major issues: they use expensive and invasive techniques, which cause 90% of the patients to dropout. In fact, drug discovery for Alzheimer’s is twice as expensive as oncology, and because of that, many pharma companies are forced to abandon even promising discovery and clinical programmes. With a growing acceptance of the need for personalised medicine for diseases like cancer, it’s clear that there is no magic bullet for diseases as multi-faceted as Alzheimer’s, and treatments need to be tailored to individuals, and especially their stage of disease. The challenge here is in stratifying patients, and in developing tools that are low-cost, non-invasive and easy to use.
THE SOLUTION iLoF is enabling a new era of personalized medicine, by using AI and photonics to build a cloud-based library of disease biomarkers. They are leveraging machine learning to create value for industry and for the patient by drastically reducing the cost and time of drug discovery and development, and providing screening and, clinical prognosis tools in an affordable, non-invasive, label-free way, such as working with leading hospitals, to quickly, affordably and comfortably pre-screen patients for rare or heterogeneous diseases. With ongoing verticals ranging from oncology to infectious disease (COVID-19), their main focus is to accelerate drug discovery for neuro-degenerative diseases by tackling one of the biggest problems of our time: Alzheimer’s disease. Through providing pre-screening and stratification tools, iLoF enables savings of up to 40% of the total costs for screening and 70% of the time spent screening for clinical trials. In addition, the platform transforms patient experience and make trials convenient and patient-centric.
TRACTION
CAPITAL RAISED
iLoF are already revenue generating. They are currently working closely with one Biotech firm in the UK, and one of the main hospital's in Portugal.
Seed: £2.54M Grant/s: £100k
They have also developed a strong pipeline and are currently engaged with a global pharmaceutical group. In terms of the technology they have been able to develop, iLoF have been able to showcase results not seen in the sector, seeing results of over 84% accuracy, while working with 10 partners from four continents to validate the agnostic platform on both gold-standard and promising targets & biomarkers
IMPACT Regarding Alzheimer’s: - iLoF is enabling a Biotech to take a new Alzheimer’s treatment to the market - Initiated two clinical studies with hospitals in the North and South of Portugal to screen hundreds of patients for Alzheimer’s disease, aiming to potentially save hundreds from invasive, risky procedures like lumbar puncture and PET Scan. Regarding COVID-19: - iLoF ran a government-funded project with a hospital in the North of Portugal, screening more than 400 infected COVID-19 patients, and successfully expanding the platform to forecast the clinical outcome of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients.
TEAM Currently 15 team members (7 male, 8 female), based in the UK and Portugal, including: Luis Valente - Co-founder and CEO Mehak Mumtaz - Co-founder and COO MBiochem at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and DPhil in Pathology at St Edmund Hall, Oxford Joana Paiva - Co-founder and CTO Paula Sampaio - Co-founder and CSO
AWARDS & MEDIA - Selected by Forbes as 30 under 30 for Science and Healthcare https://eit.europa.eu/news-events/news/eit-communityshines-forbes-30-under-30-list - Selected by CB Insights as one of the Top 150 Digital Health companies in the world https://www.cbinsights.com/research/ report/digitalhealth-startups-redefining- healthcare/ - Selected by the Financial Times & IFC as a global transformational business on Health, Wellness and disease prevention https://transformationalbusiness.live.ft.com/ page/1585335/health-wellness-and-disease-prevention - Winners of Microsoft & Melinda Gates' Deeptech Female Founder’s (Best Deep Tech Company) https://news.microsoft.com/en-gb/2020/03/18/ukwomen-working-to-speed-up-discovery-of-alzheimersdrug-shortlisted-for-major-award/ - Winners, McKinsey & Google's Digital Top 50 (Best technology) https://www.dt50.org/winners-2020 - Vice-winners, Roche's Neuroscience program (Building Tomorrow Together) https://www.corporate.roche.pt/pt/a-roche/parcerias-eapoio/building-tomorrow-together.html
HealthTech - Telemedicine - AI & Machine Learning - Operational Efficiencies
UFONIA
"Reducing the cost, improving the quality, and broadening the availability of healthcare"
www.ufonia.co
THE PROBLEM The gap between the need for patient healthcare and the supply of clinicians to deliver it is increasing. In post-surgery follow-on care in particular, this has led to hospitals having nurses, clinicians and doctors follow-up with patients manually and by phone, often without any form of appointment booked. Due to the need to have already exceptionally busy, qualified staff deliver this manual task, this has led to burnout of healthcare professionals, expensive temporary workers needed to fill this gap and in some cases, missed patient follow-up that has led to serious conditions getting worse and sometimes irreversible. Following COVID-19, this has only made matters worse. With more than 500,000 surgery cancellations across the UK in the first 12-weeks, healthcare providers will need to find a better solution for rescheduling surgeries. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven the widespread adoption of remote care, but this still requires human clinicians and is not flexible or scalable enough to meet current and future demands across the globe.
THE SOLUTION Ufonia is replacing routine patient healthcare interactions with next generation automated phone calls. They are providing increased convenience to patients, freeing up clinicians to deliver more complex care, and reducing costs for provider healthcare organisations. They use AI to deliver a like-for-like solution that doesn’t require patients to learn to use any new technology.
TRACTION
CAPITAL RAISED
The system is live at Buckinghamshire Hospital NHS Trust to manage the follow-up of patients who have undergone cataract surgery – the most common operation in the world. The work in cataract surgery has the support of the President of the European Society of Cataract Surgeons; and a formal academic study of the system is due to commence in Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) and Imperial College in early 2021.
Pre-seed: Ufonia raised a pre-seed round of £170k from Angel investors including Mark Evans, Charlie Songhurst and Jean Nehme. Grant/s: Ufonia have received grant funding, including from Innovate UK and NIHR of over £1.5million.
Further clinical use cases are also being developed with other hospital sites, including the use of the system to triage head and neck cancer care at St George’s Hospital in London, and rolling out a COVID-19 admin use case in OUH.
TEAM
The team is also focusing on identifying clinical client sites, in order to deploy the product for commercial use.
Currently 12 team members (8 male, 4 female), based in Oxford and London, including: Dr Nick de Pennington - CEO BMBCh Medicine, Oriel College Oxford, and EMBA candidate, Keble College, Oxford. James Godwin - Chief Product Officer Guy Mole - Medical Director Alexandra Swanepoel – Head of Operations
EdTech - University - Applications - Machine Learning - Students
APPLI
“Democratising university admissions with AI-powered
support for all applicants�
www.appli.co.uk
THE PROBLEM Students can only apply to a maximum of five UK universities per year, but these universities select in different ways. Therefore two students, who appear similarly strong at first glance, but who have different strengths and weaknesses across their profiles, will have very different chances of admission at different universities. Students are therefore poorly informed about where they should apply, and also what they should do to improve their chances. Furthermore, information on how to improve the chances of admission is unequally distributed and inaccessible to the majority of applicants, leading to inequalities in access to higher education and the opportunities it provides.
THE SOLUTION Appli is democratising university applications. Their AI-powered platform uses massive datasets of previous applicants to reverse engineer the processes by which universities make selection decisions. They can therefore tell future students their percentage chances of success at each university and what they should do to improve these. Whether students should improve their grades, secure relevant work experience or focus on admissions tests, Appli helps them prepare strategically for their applications to maximise their chances of success. Furthermore, by analysing the data provided by their student users, Appli can predict top performers from their wider profile - putting a student’s grades and achievements in the context of their educational background to provide a much more accurate measure of success and talent than grades alone. This holistic assessment of candidates will help to identify top performers regardless of background, helping universities and employers to identify and recruit talent that is currently overlooked, therefore allowing students from all backgrounds to reach their potential.
TRACTION Appli are revenue generating and have established paid distribution partnerships with educational consultancies, tutoring companies and schools across the UK and Hong Kong. They have had over 1000 students sign up and provide their application data for the 2020 admissions cycle. They are in early stage discussions with several universities about using their data to contextualise student performance in admissions. In response to COVID-19 they have launched schemes with three separate cohorts of students in partnership with multiple educational charities. Here they are providing personalised 1:1 support to these students to help them prepare strong university applications.
CAPITAL RAISED Pre-seed: Appli raised a pre-seed round of £105k Grant/s: £5k Santander Universities Pitch Competition £5k Oxford Foundry COVID Runway Grant
TEAM Currently 2 full time team members (male), and 9 paid interns (5 female, 4 male), including: Christian Holland – CEO BM BCH Clinical Medicine, Green Templeton College, Oxford, BA Medical Sciences, Trinity College, Oxford Ruairidh Forgan – CTO
AWARDS & MEDIA Appli were winners of the Santander Universities Pitch Competition at the Oxford Foundry in 2020. They were also invited to present to UNESCO at their headquarters in Paris in February 2020 on the role of technology in increasing equitable access to education. Appli were also awarded an Oxford Foundry COVID-19 Runway Grant for their work on improving access to university during the pandemic.
LegalTech - Claims - B2B SaaS - AI & Machine Learning
SIBYL
“Streamlining claims”
THE PROBLEM
www.sibylai.com
There are 3.25 million legal disputes worth £6k on average each year in the UK, ranging from car accidents to employment disputes to consumer rights claims. 7% of these claims are fraudulent and a further 13% are exaggerated, needlessly costing the sector £2.bn and £3.6bn respectively each year. A range of providers are paid around £1bn a year to handle these claims, including in-house teams at corporates (including insurers), specialist claims handlers, and in tough cases, law firms. But these providers only identify half of fraudulent and exaggerated claims. This is unsurprising. Skilled professionals are constrained in the time they can spend investigating a case due its likely value. In some cases, this means reviewing 20 pages of evidence in under 15 minutes.
THE SOLUTION Sibyl supercharges dispute professionals. Our B2B SaaS solution helps them investigate fraudulent and exaggerated claims more thoroughly. Sibyl frees up their time by automating specialised tasks, and enhances their capabilities by providing data based insights (such as the likely settlement valuation).
TRACTION Sibyl has completed a paid PoC with a top 50 UK law firm, validating OCR and NLP technologies by automating a specialised claim handling task, improving accuracy by 30% and saving 30 mins per claim (5.7k hours / year total). They have worked up a proposal for a live service under a paid consultancy contract, agreed commercials, and are currently working through practicalities for an ongoing SaaS contract worth ~£75,000 per year. This solution provides a gateway into the market and is already receiving further interest from other law firms and insurance companies. They have also completed a pilot for a leading European insurer demonstrating their ability to extract text from a range of low-resolution claim documents at 96% accuracy. In an effort to build a user-centric B2B product, Sibyl has created a community of claims professionals to prioritise and test feature development.
CAPITAL RAISED Bootstrapped - generated revenue through PoCs and consulting. Grant/s: Winner of Santander Universities grant (£5k)
TEAM Currently 8 team members, (6 male, 2 female), based in the UK and Bulgaria, including: Nikul Vadgama - Head of Product DPhil in Gas Turbine Aerodynamics, University College, Oxford Richard Strauss - Head of Commercial BA, English, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Sivo Daskalov - Head of Technology
AWARDS & MEDIA Winner of Santander Universities grant (£5k) Winner of the prize for “Coolest Tech” at the Online Courts hackathon, sponsored by HM Courts and Tribunals Service, Legal Geek and the Society of Computers and Law Featured in KTN AI for Services, Artificial Lawyer and the Impact Lawyers
Pharma - Digital Biomarkers - B2B SaaS - Alzheimer's
NOVOIC
“Predicting Alzheimer’s 20 years early through the way you speak”
THE PROBLEM
www.novoic.com
Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias will affect 1 in 3 people, causing progressive loss of memory – loss of what makes us who we are. No disease modifying treatment currently exists. We now know that the disease progresses silently for decades before symptoms become obvious and a diagnosis is made, which is a major reason why treatments don’t work. But very subtle changes do exist in the silent stages – in episodic memory, executive function, and language – and, with sophisticated enough technology, these changes can be detected in the way someone speaks.
THE SOLUTION Novoic is a clinical stage biotechnology company developing algorithms to detect neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease in their preclinical stages, by analysing audio-linguistic patterns of speech. We analyse both the words you say, and the way you say them. Building on decades of research, our company is currently testing these algorithms in a number of clinical trials, to validate them as software-as-medical-device, and bring the first clinically viable speech-based algorithms to market. “Novoic is the Apollo Mission for speech biomarkers. People had been staring at the stars for thousands of years. It took an incredibly concerted effort of the best minds coming together to finally put a man on the moon. We’re doing that now for speech biomarkers. Research in this area has been ongoing for 20-30 years with little to show in terms of clinical impact. We’re bringing together the best people and solving the foundational problems to make speech biomarkers work in a real world context.” – Emil Fristed (CEO, Novoic)
TRACTION
CAPITAL RAISED
Novoic has raised £2 million in Seed funding from leading institutional investors, are working with the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation and Gates Ventures to develop a global standard for speech biomarkers, and is the only speech company to have been backed by the NHS to test out its algorithms in 7 common neurological indications.
Pre-seed: £80k
Novoic is not currently raising, but open to inquiries from institutional biotech and data science investors (>£10m ticket sizes) to build relationships leading up to the company’s Series A round in 2021.
Seed: £2m from a global group of leading investors in the technology and digital health space.
TEAM Currently 7 team members (5 male, 2 female), including: Jack Weston - co-founder and CTO MPhys, Physics, St John’s College, Oxford Emil Fristed - co-founder and CEO MSc, Neuroscience, Merton College, Oxford
AWARDS & MEDIA Novoic has been selected by the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation’s (ADDF) Diagnostic Accelerator–supported by Gates’ Ventures–for a consortia on speech biomarkers, working towards making an open standard for speech biomarkers in early Alzheimer’s Disease, and accelerating clinical translation. - 8 July 2020, Express Newspaper, Novoic seeks a million volunteers to cough up and help curb Covid-19 - 30 June 2020, MedTechInnovationNews COVID-19 cough screening app in development - 23 June 2020, Yahoo News UK Coronavirus could be diagnosed using an app which listens to your cough
HealthTech - Cancer Detection - Biomarkers - AI & Machine Learning
OXFORD CANCER ANALYTICS “Detect cancer intelligently. Give cancer no chance”
THE PROBLEM
www.oxcan.org
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 become incurable. The numbers show that if diagnosed late, 90% of patients will die. However, when diagnosed at the earliest stage, 90% of patients will survive. In addition, this puts a huge amount of financial strain on the NHS in the UK. Numbers have shown that treating a late stage cancer patient will cost three times more than it does to treat an early stage cancer patient. But the big problem here is current diagnostics cannot reliably detect the deadliest cancers early, leading to the driving cause for their high mortality and significant costs to healthcare systems around the globe. According to Cancer Research UK health economics analyses, if the problem of late diagnosis is not solved, the NHS will experience a rise in cancer treatment costs of over £165million per annum due to lung, colorectal and ovarian cancers over the next ten years. Early lung cancer detection is the biggest unmet need among all cancers. Of ~50,000 new UK lung cancer incidences and 2 million globally per annum, ~75% of cases are diagnosed at a late stage. To address this problem, Oxford Cancer Analytics aims to revolutionise lung cancer early detection and treatment.
THE SOLUTION Early cancer detection is key for saving both money and lives for global healthcare systems. Oxford Cancer Analytics (OXcan) offers personalised platforms to detect cancer early through a blood test to enable targeted curative treatments. Oxford Cancer Analytics developed DEcancer, a machine learning software platform for early cancer detection by analyzing multidimensional results from a blood test combined with personalized patient information, allowing early treatment and cure. This blood test can be conducted in an affordable, minimally invasive, and routine manner in large populations, which are characteristics that are not possible for existing tissue biopsy and complex imaging methods for cancer detection. As a result, their technology could revolutionise the way in which the deadliest cancers are detected, monitored and treated to save millions of lives.
TRACTION
CAPITAL RAISED
DEcancer has already shown promise in dramatically improving early cancer detection compared to current approaches and other competitors.
OXcan have been boot-strapping to get to a POC and have received small grants to continue their work. OXcan are now raising a pre-seed/seed round and seeking value added by strategic investors with field experience.
Using open access data of 1800 patients including both healthy patients and up to 8 different types of cancer, DEcancer is able to more than double stage 1 lung cancer detection compared to leading companies in the field, achieving 86% sensitivity and 99% specificity. Furthermore, DEcancer accurately distinguishes between lung cancer and other cancer types, an ability often lacked by competitors. OXcan is currently establishing a first-of-its kind longitudinal biobank of recurrent lung cancer monitoring blood samples and are setting up a clinical trial with physician-scientists and professors in Oxford for detecting early stage and recurrent lung cancer. OXcan is also working with other NHS hospitals including in Newcastle to detect a variety of cancers at early stage using existing datasets. OXcan has been invited to join the European liquid Biopsy Society. OXcan has recently been selected as 1 of 10 companies to join the Francis Crick Institute’s KQ Labs accelerator programme, which is dedicated to high potential data-drive biomedical startups and comes with £40,000 in funding.
IMPACT OXcan is currently setting up a clinical trial which will help 190 non-small cell lung cancer patients (who have had their cancer resected) to have any recurrent cancer detected early for timely treatment over a 24 month follow-up period. By the year 2030, they hope to screen approximately 200,000 high risk UK patients annually to detect early lung cancer, help approximately 15,000 UK lung cancer patients who have had surgical resection to achieve early detection of any lung cancer recurrence and approximately 20,000 UK lung cancer patients to be stratified for optimal pharmacological therapy.
TEAM Currently 4 team members (4 male), including: Peter Jianrui Liu - Co-founder and CEO DPhil in Clinical Medicine, Jesus College, Oxford Andreas Halner - Co-founder and COO DPhil in Clinical Medicine & Machine Learning, St John’s College, Oxford Matthew Katzman - Chief Technology Officer DPhil in Computer Science, Magdalen College, Oxford Lecturer in Computer Science, Jesus College, Oxford
AWARDS & MEDIA - Overall winner of the inaugural Oxford Foundry University of Oxford All-Innovate competition selected from over 100 teams after four rounds of competition - Invited presenter at Founders Forum HealthTech Summit with guests including Sir Simon Stevens, CEO of NHS England, and Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Oxford Mail https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/ news/17500270.oxford-students-win-10-000-quickcancer-test/ Cherwell https://cherwell.org/2019/03/13/studentswin-10000-prize-for-using-artificial-intelligencecancer-diagnosis-kit/
Care Homes - Social Networks - B2B - Content
MYO
“Modern communication in care: increase productivity, transparency and appreciation”
www.myo-care.co.uk
THE PROBLEM When working as caregivers, the myo founding team discovered multiple communication ‘pain points’ in care homes. This broken communication negatively affects the well-being of all who are part of the care ecosystem - Residents, Caregivers and Relatives. Those in care are lonely, isolated, digitally-excluded and struggle to communicate independently. While caregivers deliver frontline services, they seldom have the culture and technical means of proactively sharing this valuable work with relatives, therefore lack appreciation and have high churn into other sectors. Relatives can only visit a few times a month and are contacted infrequently, typically with bad news, leading to them being under informed and often distrusting. The communication which does occur is scattered across multiple channels and is timeconsuming, error-heavy and stress-laden, giving rise to a grave public perception of ‘care homes’, which has suffered further during COVID-19. Together, these factors lead to care providers struggling with staff churn and reduced occupancy.
THE SOLUTION myo is a mobile communication app, 100% GDPR compliant, built by caregivers for the care sector. It allows for direct communication between residents and their families by enabling caregivers to share secure content, video and messages. Multiple caregivers quickly create posts throughout the day, sharing them with families who can comment, sending their appreciation and love. Relatives participate and gain confidence in care. Caregivers are appreciated and motivated. Residents are included and cared for. myo ultimately creates a positive cycle of trust and appreciation through time-efficiently connecting the care ecosystem, increasing transparency, creating peace of mind and bringing back appreciation. These effects funnel down to the care providers who have a better Care-Quality-Commission rating, improved staff retention and better reputation ultimately leading to increased demand for their care and profitability. During COVID-19, the engagement on the platform increased by 1000%, and 4000 new families in the UK and Germany have joined the service.
TRACTION
CAPITAL RAISED
myo’s revenues are steadily increasing and are currently resulting in a MRR of €22k. Since market entry myo’s revenue has grown 30% CMGR and their CAC to CLV is 1:12.
Pre-seed/ Angel: £400k ,March 2018 Seed: £1.5m Dec, 2018 Pre-series A: Currently raising with early commitments
The myo service is used in over 120 care homes across the UK and Germany. They are currently establishing a sales partnership with a large service provider in the UK. They also have a partnership with other service providers, acting as resellers, in the care sector in Germany.
IMPACT
TEAM Currently 3 UK team members (1 male, 2 female) and 16 team members in Germany and Croatia, including:
- 4000 new families have joined since the outbreak of COVID-19
Richard Böckel - Co-founder and Managing Director, UK BA, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, New College, Oxford
- Relatives are kept up to date, increasing their trust in the quality of care by 70%
Felix Kuna - Co-founder & Managing Director, Germany
- Caregivers save 30% time when using myo to communicate, and experience a 500% increase in positive communication with families; they receive 350% more appreciation for their vital work, which ultimately drives up their motivation
AWARDS & MEDIA
- Residents see a 300% increase in contact with their families, and benefit from more engaged and enthused carers. This is fed back to families and, in turn, helps perpetuate the positive cycle of appreciation. - Care providers experience improved staff retention levels, an enhanced reputation and increased profitability.
- Laing Buisson Awards 2020 finalist - Innovation in Care (also 2019) and Rising Star https://laingbuissonawards.com/the-2020-finalists/ - Care Sector Suppliers awards 2020 finalist https://www.homecareinsight.co.uk/finalists-announcedfor-first-care-sector-supplier-awards/ - Digital Social Care https://www.digitalsocialcare.co.uk/covid-19-guidance/ free-digital-tools-resources-for-covid-19/ - Health Service Journal (HSJ) https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/ supporting- techforgood-in-the-health-and-caresector/7025245.article - The Carer: Page 18 https://issuu.com/thecarer/docs/the_carer_digital_4 - Oxford Techtribe https://oxford.techtribe.co/app-designed-by-caregiverscombats-loneliness-in-care-homes/ - Cambridge News https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/special-features/ local-boutique-residential-care-home-17845817 - Digital Social Care https://www.digitalsocialcare.co.uk/success-story/myoapp-bringing-relatives-closer-to-the-care-of-their-family/ - Additional awards, articles and TV coverage in German can be found on the myo German website myo.de
Sexual Health - Testing - Platform - Consumer - Education
YOXLY
“The future of sexual health�
www.yoxly.com
THE PROBLEM In 2019, there were more then 468,000 new STI diagnoses at sexual health services clinics across the UK. STI rates are rising, but with recent public health budget cuts and the effects of Covid-19, people are unable to get tested and treated. Most genitourinary medicine (GUM) clinics have closed, and those remaining offer limited services which, owing to lockdown, individuals struggle to access. The pandemic has accelerated the trend towards remote healthcare, and Yoxly will be at the forefront of that transition.
THE SOLUTION Yoxly will be the one-stop-shop for sexual health. It operates as a remote diagnostics service, offering athome test kits and granting users peace of mind through convenience, privacy, accessibility and control. Yoxly is creating informative content and curating an online community of engaged followers, whilst exploring partnerships with organisations and advocacy groups focused on improving sexual health. In the coming months, Yoxly aims to raise a pre-seed round in order to expand into an online pharmacy, build an app, and collaborate with dating apps for seamless and positive integration between lifestyle and sexual health promotion.
TRACTION
CAPITAL RAISED
Yoxly is fully compliant with all medico-legal and data protection requirements, and has launched their B2C MVP.
Grant/s: £10k raised
In addition to sexual health testing, Yoxly has been approved to test for Covid-19, and will soon be offering this option. They are now experimenting with different marketing strategies, and are holding preliminary discussions with specific stakeholders across the UK to roll this out in the months ahead.
- £5k - February 2020 - Santander Universities Grant - £5k - June 2020 - OXFO COVID-19 Runway Grant
TEAM Currently 3 team members (1 female, 2 male): Dr Danae Maragouthakis - CEO Dr Judson Alphin - COO DPhil, History, Kellogg College, Oxford Dr Jason Lee - CTO DPhil, Physical & Theoretical Chemistry, Worcester College
EdTech - Machine Learning - B2B SaaS - Optimizing Learning
SMASHMEDICINE
“Improving the efficiency and efficacy of remote education�
www.smashmedicine.com
THE PROBLEM A significant historic underinvestment in digital learning has left educational institutions struggling to deliver engaging materials at a distance. As a result, students are finding remote learning tedious, isolating and inefficient. This has been exacerbated worldwide by the current pandemic. The move towards online education which was seen as a long-term trend by industry experts pre- Covid-19 has now been catalysed by the pandemic and will continue to develop as the industry norm. However, without the necessary tools, students and faculties will continue to struggle, leading to higher student and staff attrition. For the medical sector, this will place even more strain on an already overstretched NHS as the supply of future medical professionals is disrupted with potential knock-on deleterious effects to patient care.
THE SOLUTION SmashMedicine is an online educational platform that makes remote learning more engaging, collaborative and efficient using gamification, peer-to-peer learning and artificial intelligence. Students experience deep learning through co-creating exam-style questions and providing feedback to one another interactively but remotely in a game-like environment. Question creation is streamlined by advanced artificial intelligence, which improves learning efficiency, while adaptive learning algorithms provide students with a more tailored educational experience. This methodology can boost student performance by upto 15% and reduce dropout rates by over 30%. While the complete platform delivers an effective learning experience, the question creation and review processes provide additional content while simultaneously generating feedback. It gives university staff a tool to improve the student experience while producing valuable educational content and identifying bottlenecks in understanding. This can lead to significant time saving for the faculty. The concept behind the platform is applicable to various domains inside and outside education.
TRACTION
CAPITAL RAISED
Since April 2020, SmashMedicine has launched at six top-tier universities across Europe including at the University of Oxford (ranked one of the top five universities in the world in 2020), Barcelona and Uppsala.
Grant/s: ÂŁ150k from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT Health), Santander Universities and Cancer Research UK
Additional partnerships have been established with EIT Health, Cancer Research UK, Oxford Universities Hospitals network (theHill), The Spanish Council for Medical Students (CEEM) and DEX-innovation centre. Five additional top-tier medical school pilots have been agreed for early 2021.
IMPACT Over the last six-months, SmashMedicine has had 11x user growth. In September 2020 alone, over 2500 unique pieces of student generated questions and model answers were produced on the platform at one institution. In response to Covid-19, SmashMedicine partnered with universities and national medical student groups, providing additional educational content to support both students and faculties during their transition to online education.
TEAM Currently 6 team members: 5 male, 1 female. Ben Harris - Co-founder, CEO and Head of Product BM BCH Clinical Medicine, Green Templeton College Sam Harris- Co-founder and Head of Growth Sam Mason - Head of Software Development Matteo Di Giovannantonio - Head of AI DPhil Oncology, Linacre College, Oxford
AWARDS & MEDIA - Winners of EIT Health HeadStart (2019) - Winners of EIT Health Campus (2020) - Winners of the University of Oxford Vice Chancellor’s Education Award (2020) https://ctl.ox.ac.uk/vice-chancellors-educationawards-winners-2020 - Winners of Santander Universities OXFO Pitch Night (2020) - National finalists of Santander Universities Emerging Entrepreneurs Programme (2020) - Featured in Startups Magazine (2020)
GET INVOLVED We’d love to hear from investors, experts and mentors who may be interested in contributing their time and knowledge as part of the OXFO L.E.V8 accelerator. Please contact us to start a conversation.
Oxford Foundry, University of Oxford 3-5 Hythe Bridge Street Oxford OX1 2EW web: oxfordfoundry.ox.ac.uk email: development@oxfordfoundry.ox.ac.uk telephone: +44 (0) 1865 288990 Twitter: @oxfoundry LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/oxford-foundry/
THANK YOU TO OUR SUPPORTERS SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD REID HOFFMAN BIZ STONE MOHAMED AMERSI BRENT HOBERMAN TOBY COPPEL PETE FLINT ALEXSIS DE RAADT ST JAMES JORN LYSEGGEN JEFF WONG PHIL LIBIN ARLAN HAMILTON THE AMERSI FOUNDATION MELTWATER DETAO EDUCATION GROUP BARCLAYS EY SANTANDER UNIVERSITIES RIPPLE UBRI OSI
With thanks to the Amersi Foundation for the physical Amersi Foundation Accelerator space
BUILDING A NEW GENERATION OF VENTURES.