VENTUREFEST OXFORD GROWS AGAIN THIS YEAR

This year’s VentureFest Oxford attracted hundreds of delegates, including innovators, academics and investors from across Oxfordshire, to make connections which could lead to new investments and business ideas.

Twenty start-up businesses competed to win a £1,000 cash prize and support worth £10,000. Each pitching session included input from an expert panel of investors including Prodrive Ventures, Metro Bank, KPMG, Richardsons Accountants, Dehns and Oxford Innovation.

The £1,000 prize was won by Measurable, a building control and monitoring platform helping to eliminate wasted energy.

A technology start-up returned triumphantly to VentureFest Oxford this year to reveal £800,000 of investment in its business after a chance visit to the festival last year resulted in meeting experts and investors at a critical stage of its growth.

Learning with Experts raised the money through the Oxford Investment Opportunity Network.

Set up by Elspeth Briscoe in 2014, Learning with Experts will now scale up its technology development and marketing teams, and hire new tutors.

Learning with Experts’ approach to community-based, global interactive online learning has flipped the percentage of course completion rates usually achieved by other online course models, often called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which can be free or a very affordable way to learn new skills or achieve qualifications.

“MOOCs have 80 per cent drop-out rates. Learning with Experts has 80 per cent course completion rates,” said Elspeth, a former strategy director for Skype and eBay, and for The Guardian.