Oxford Early Investments: Current Investment Opportunities

Company A is a new company established with support from Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) and the Rainbow Seed Fund to design and develop Compact Fusion Neutron Sources. While CCFE pursues the immensely challenging goal of fusion as an energy source, the company will pursue the more straightforward challenge of developing fusion as the world’s most intense Neutron Source.

The potential applications are: remediation of nuclear fission waste, breeding of fission fuel; medical isotope production; scientific research; and, in the longer term, production of hydrogen. Each of the 440 nuclear power reactors worldwide spends around £50m annually on fuel and waste, giving an indication of the size of two potential markets.

The company aims to develop, protect and own the neutron source design and to form collaborations to pursue each area of application. The team consists of world-leading fusion scientists from Culham and an experienced CEO with a physics research background.

The company has already secured an offer of support and collaboration from Oxford Instruments, is in dialogue with UKAEA Ltd and has passed the preliminary hurdle with an R&D Grant application and is now aiming to raise £100k of investment to match the R&D Grant and complete the design of the neutron source.

Company B combines UK’s first crowed sourced newspaper with an online community. Community members can post articles, photos and notes onto the website and rate as well as discuss all content. The highest rated and most discussed content is published in a monthly free paper and distributed around London.

Revenue is generated by advertising, community PR and subscription. Our financial projections show a net profit of approx 500,000 in year three. Our concept has several competitive advantages; we satisfy the bloggers need for exposure, we underbid ad-space market prices, we have a very efficient cost structure (no editorial cost) and we satisfy the demands of our readership.

During the ‘Beta Phase’ we published five issues (circulation 10,000) and generated a community of 2000 bloggers. We received a lot of int. media exposure (TV, Radio, Newspaper) and became the runner-up for the Guardian Media Awards. We acquired major international investors who invested substantial equity capital. We also created a network of major distribution and syndication partners such as; Vice Magazine, The Evening Standard, etc.

We are looking for an additional equity sum of £20,000 in order to finance our launch with 50,000 issues.

Company C is developing a portfolio of social applications for Facebook and mobile.

We have been studying the social applications market since summer 2008. Consequently, we have both a solid understanding of the business of social applications and an awareness of the opportunities that exist therein. Our innovative projects are carefully considered to address as yet underserved areas.

We are not just at the ‘ideas stage’: we launched an‘alpha’version of our first project, an app based on the Facebook status, in 2009. It has had over 40k installs and retains around 2k monthly users. We are currently working on a substantially improved first project, and also on a second project; a flirting community application for Facebook.

Our projects will be monetised via subscription payments and sales of virtual items. We have target revenues of £2m in 2011.

We are seeking seed funding of £75,000 for working capital, operations and marketing costs in order that we can launch these projects in the summer and autumn of 2010. We aim to achieve significant traction in terms of user numbers and revenues by Q1 of 2011. Our four-person team is based in West London.

“Bioinformatics on the Cloud”
Company D sells cloud computing products and services to the bioinformatics (life science) sector (healthcare and ICT)
The company has expertise in both grid/cloud computing (parallel processing on distributed computers) and in the domain of bioinformatics. Customers are large pharma and biotech companies performing research into new drugs.

The company is a spinout from STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Labs near Harwell. This national science institution is one of the largest centres of excellence in the cloud computing field in the UK and leads in several academic grid development programmes.

The market for bioinformatics and cloud computing are expected to grow enormously over the coming years. The main drivers for this market growth are

1. the ability to perform more computing for lower costs by using cloud computing technologies developed as part of the UK physic and general academic programmes,

2. The ability to use the latest in computational modelling applications and tools in bioinformatics from the European academic sector, and,

3. The significant drive towards reducing the cost of the human genome and the exciting potential of personalised medicine.

The company is raising £250,000 in this “A” round funding.