Oxford Early Investments: Current Investment Opportunities

Company A makes Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) equipment. This uses a specialist camera and software to make an instant electronic read of the numberplate of passing vehicles. ANPR is used not only by the police and security forces but also increasingly for other applications like congestion charging, access control to car parks and to enhance security at large premises. The UK market is estimated to be £40m p.a. representing 30% of global sales. This demonstrates the enormous overseas growth potential.

It has developed its core products and has a clear roadmap for future developments. Its existing products already have major technical advantages over legacy systems used by competitors. The flexible, leading edge, patent pending design gives us rapid access to new markets and fields of application, together with cost advantages. This also suits our strategy of selling via channel partners who integrate our products into their overall installation contracts. This keeps cost levels down whilst giving access to wide geographical markets.

Company A has made its first sales and is targeting sales of £700k in 2010. An investment of £240,000 is sought to fund further R&D and marketing to take the company through to profitability.

Company B has developed an innovative Personalized Learning and Course Management software product.

The product is market ready, and we have achieved sales and reference sites. It is a large marketplace. Initially we have focused on and sold into specific niche market segments that include: Prisons, Councils, Colleges, Education and Training providers in both the Government and Private sectors. The current market includes in excess of 4000 major organizations.

Our product helps learners who may have specific personal learning needs, such as offenders in prison, young people entering education with limited skills and Adult Continuing Education. It encourages and enables both tutor and learner to work closely together to record and recognise their learning achievements. A unique aspect of our product: it automates the processing of both paper and web forms generating immediate savings and better monitoring.

The product is available as a Hosted and Direct in-house implementation.

The company is seeking £200K to build the sales, support team, and the hosting infrastructure. The directors have previously built and sold a product successfully. Our product has the potential to be the ‘Product of Choice’ and achieving dramatic growth in the market and provide a favourable exit in the next 5 years.

High Definition(HD) television is not the ultimate because what we see on the screen is much less than the natural capability of our eyes. HD cannot display extremes of light and darkness, known as dynamic range. High Dynamic Range (HDR) television, in combination with HD and 3D techniques, can do so and is thus "the ultimate technology". Company C is a new company which is at the leading edge of this new HDR television, and is building a business around proprietary data-compression techniques, which are ideally suited to handle the large data requirements of HDR television. We have access to the first and, to date, only true HDR video camera system in the world, and an exclusive licence to a patent describing a method of compressing a stream of HDR video by 100-fold or more. Company C's encode/decode methods have the potential to become one of the major enabling technologies for the widespread adoption of HDR technology.

Although others may produce HDR encoding software, no-one else in the world is able to validate their products as no-one else has access to a true HDR video camera. Company C will work hard in the coming months to exploit this unique opportunity, capturing for ourselves a large share of the market opportunity before other HDR video cameras begin to appear.

Founded by a team with strong experience in mobile development and digital marketing, Company D is a patent pending mobile communications system which tackles the problem that conference goers face; they cannot locate this sought after business lead that will boost their business. Company D allows event participants to see on the screen of their mobile phones picture based profiles of their fellow attendees as they physically walk around them, and search electronically for those they are eager to meet.

In a global conference market of £250bn, with the UK representing 6% with 5,000 conference centres that attract 1.37m visitors per year, Company D provides its service as a white label offering by the event organisers to their sponsors. Event sponsors ‘dress’ the application with their brand at a price of £18 per participant.

Company D is currently negotiating ‘Services Agreements’ with RPM (www.rpmltd.com) in the UK and Freeman (www.freemanco.com) in the USA which offer event management solutions to corporate trade shows. Freeman alone organises 3,000 events per year.

Funding to date consists of the founder’s own money of £40K, a UK government grant of £13K and two rounds of angel investment of £60K in total. We are looking to secure an investment of £100K to bring the business to a break-even point by September 2010.