CALL OUT TO BUSINESS FOUNDER ALUMNI

This is big, and its unusual. In fact we can’t think of any previous initiative that duplicates the specific idea here, that you, a business founder with a track record, come to Oxford for a couple of days early in 2025, meet a load of peers and brilliant Oxford IP creators, and out the other side you become the key founder/builder for one team. You’ll bring your own skills and contacts, and you can interface between the world of commerce and the world of Oxford. It’s a rare skillset yet a fair sprinkling of Oxford alumni have it. If that’s you we want to hear from you. The University and its investment partners will then put in real money to make it happen – up to £250,000.

Here’s the full description:

Oxford Venture Scouts was set up for founders looking to access world-leading scientific teams and bring that science to market.

We believe companies with exceptional scientific expertise in-house are best placed to adapt to evolving markets in health tech, deep tech and life science. We help founders with a specific idea for a science backed company and industry founders looking for an exciting opportunity.

Backed by Oxford University, Oxford Science Enterprises and Parkwalk Advisors, we will find you the right scientific team, venture build with you and look to invest up to £0.25m to ready a company for spin out.

Oxford is the leading UK university for spinout creation, with over 300 companies having raised £7.4 billion.

Our combined team will work flexibly around you to first source opportunities in your area of expertise and second to build conviction that the time is right to spin-out an Oxford company.

For each sourced opportunity we will work with you and the scientific team to answer the following questions:

Market: Who is this problem relevant to? What is, or what will likely be, the scale of the opportunity ?

Route to Market: Who needs or will need this problem taken off their plate? Are there clear milestones to deriving first paid customers?

Competition: Who are the other solvers and why is this approach better?

Tech: Is it novel? What are the steps to transforming it to a commercial proposition?

IP: What is the unique scientific defensibility and is it sustainable?

Spinout

Once we are confident in the above, we will work with you to:

1. validate a business model, based on that industry’s buying cycle and expected barriers, leveraging the extensive Oxford network for technical and commercial support.
2. build the team ready to spin the company out

Programme Commitment and Timing

• Onboarding February 2025

You will be expected to attend two all-day face to face on-boarding session in Oxford.

The first session you will be introduced to your fellow cohort and take part in OUI led sessions on IP and Oxford’s spinout expectations. The second session you will learn about the university’s vision for the Oxford spinout ecosystem and meet the relevant investment team at OSE and Parkwalk.We understand the opportunity cost for founders is high, so the core of the Venture Scout programme is designed to work flexibly to your schedule.

We will first map the university to your opportunity areas, before supporting introductions and evolving the opportunities using our source> spinout process to get you investment committee ready. The Venture Scouts fund is intended to support a final acceleration before any spin-out raise.

Use of up to £0.25m per project will focus on evolving customer value via:

• invention to product translation or research/trials
• and/or consolidating investment conviction via FTO strategy, reimbursement and regulatory consulting

The funding is aimed to work in parallel with investor diligence, patent and licensing work.