OXFO Startup Runway Fund

20 ventures given critical funding to adapt and scale in support of others

When Covid-19 hit, our Runway Fund gave ventures the vital time and space they needed to continue to support others

The OXFO Startup Grant Runway Fund provided crucial support to OXFO portfolio startups responding to the pandemic. Donors to the Fund ensured that it reached its £120,000 target within two weeks of its launch. This fantastic generosity ensured that we could mobilise and leverage talent and innovation from across the University to support individuals and sectors hit hard by coronavirus. Grants of £5,000 were given to ventures following an online application process, and grants of £10,000 were given to the four solutions selected by judges to be scaled on the OXFO Covid-19 Rapid Solutions Builder. Examples of how the grants gave critical support to ventures include: hiring interns, software development, buying essential product equipment, evaluation, wellbeing resources for medical students and junior doctors, content-creation and awareness campaigns, and patent applications. As Ana Bakshi stated earlier this year, "The Runway Fund provided crucial funding to ensure our startups could scale and have a greater positive impact on society. The ventures in our portfolio have been helping hospitals, care homes, parents, schools and many other sectors hit hard by coronavirus. A huge thank you to everyone who donated or gave generous time and support to make the grant fund possible."

Exceptional thanks are due to contributors to the Fund including: Mohamed Amersi, Biz Stone, Pete Flint, Alexsis de Raadt St James, Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), Leith Ben Ammar, Mike Smith, Mark Evans, Holger Bollmann, Santander Universities, Mustafa Mohammed of Genix Healthcare, Citi Private Bank, and Dr Selva Pankaj and Tharshiny Pankaj. We are incredibly grateful for your support. We also owe a special thank you to the WPM team, the Saïd Business School Development team, and Oxford University’s Development Office and Finance Division for rapidly setting up the infrastructure to process these generous contributions. The OXFO Covid-19 grant recipients are: Appli Archangel Imaging Boresha Technologies Crowdless Devie Infogrid Lantana Publishing MO Intelligence My110 myo Novoic Nye Health Oblivious AI Oxford Cancer Analytics Ltd Peergos Scoodle SmashMedicine Sociability Ufonia Yoxly

“The funding has been used to support the infrastructure costs of our deployment in India and for onboarding our first hire. It is helping us broaden our impact by alleviating some of the technical costs associated with the build, its ongoing support, and the strength of the overall implementation. We have been able to add more functionalities and enable many more use cases of our technology for widespread application in both the context of Covid-19 and general commercial applications." Robert Pisarczyk, Oblivious AI "The £10k Runway Grant has enabled us to build and sustain our engineering and product team, allowing them to refine our Crowdless app and also build out other enterprise solutions. This massively improves our competitive positioning and our ability to respond quickly to customer needs." Alex Barnes, Crowdless