If you need any further proof – after our five-year data review in May and biannual analysis last month – that technology transfer in the UK is in terrific shape, look no further than University of Oxford’s tech transfer office, Oxford University Innovation (OUI), unveiling figures last week that show its spinouts have collectively raised £506m ($655m) in funding over the past 12 months alone.
That is more than 25% of the total $2.45bn raised since 2011 and represents a 40% increase since July 2017. What is more, of the 160 spinouts established over the past three decades, a third were incorporated in the past three years.
Those are impressive numbers on their own, but the really interesting part is that university venture fund Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI) represented a mere 6% of that $655m. The hypothesis that a university doubling down on its own spinouts will attract more external backers looks to have been proven true – in fact, Global University Venturing’s look into the first half of 2018 illustrated that Oxford was in the top five globally for capital raised by its spinouts.
The university fared even better when it came to the number of deals in its spinouts, taking third place behind University of California Berkeley and Purdue University.
Looking specifically at the second quarter of 2018, OUI’s report noted that its spinouts had secured $53.5m in funding across 20 deals, of which $3.9m were seed-stage investments – bringing the total seed financing since 2011 to $166m.
OUI also disclosed three new spinouts in its report, though a regulatory filing indicates that two of them, quantum-era sensors developer Oxford HighQ and 3D printed honeycomb helmet technology producer Oxhex, were founded in October 2017.
Mass spectrometers developer Arago Biosciences, meanwhile, was formed in April 2018. OUI separately made Global University Venturing aware of a fourth spinout, post-quantum cryptography developer PQShield, which was spun out in May this year.
All four companies remain in stealth mode for the time being, though the speed and efficiency at which OUI has been churning out companies presumably means more will be revealed soon. Oxford shows no intention of slowing down, with Matt Perkins, chief executive of OUI, saying: “On the surface, it may have seemed that OUI has had a quiet quarter. However, here at Buxton Court, things have been anything but quiet. We are currently in the middle of a renovation, both in terms of our internal decorating and in what OUI does as an entity.
“We have updated our vision, mission, strategy and corporate goals – placing impact right at the centre of what we do. Our incubator offer is changing with a new deal on equity that has seen our new incubator manager’s inbox swamped. We will soon be unveiling a new commercialisation option geared towards our colleagues in humanities and social sciences divisions.
“We are fully behind the proposed clarification on student IP which will help students feel secure that they can innovate with the full support of the university and keep their ideas. All of this and more is going towards our new goal of creating a world-leading innovation ecosystem with University of Oxford at its heart.”
Quiet from an outside point of view is a relative expression, too. Some of the deals highlighted in the report include a $9.8m round for imaging diagnostics software developer Brainomix in April 2018 that featured not only the University of Oxford Innovation Fund (UOIF), managed by investment firm Parkwalk Advisors on behalf of OUI, but also Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, a corporate venturing subsidiary of pharmaceutical firm Boehringer Ingelheim.
There was also a $5m round led by OSI for wireless charging technology developer Metaboards in June and an investment of undisclosed size made by Parkwalk in oilfield monitoring technology producer Salunda in May.
UOIF also put its weight behind Bibliotech, which raised $4m in June and will use that money to expand into the US.
University of Oxford’s success is not isolated in the wider innovation ecosystem. University of Pittsburgh revealed in its annual report last week that it had produced a record 23 spinouts during the 2018 fiscal year, up from 15 and 13 companies in 2017 and 2016 respectively.
Even institutions that have seldom appeared on Global University Venturing’s radar have been making impressive strides. University of Notre Dame, for example, formed a total of 27 spinouts and startups in 2017-18 through its commercialisation hub, Idea Centre, surpassing its already ambitious target of 16 companies.
Elsewhere, the news may have looked less great at first look, such as University of New Mexico revealing it had generated 11 spinouts during the 2017-18 period, down from 12 incorporated the year before. However, the university’s aim to retain more of its portfolio businesses in the state worked exceptionally well, with all 11 companies committing to staying in New Mexico – a stark contrast to the two-thirds that left in 2016-17.
Will the good news keep on coming? There will be stumbling blocks along the road – such as commercialisation firm IP Group disclosing a $24m loss for the first half of 2018 – but overall it appears that for all the current affairs around the world trying to bring everyone down, tech transfer offices are having none of that negative energy. And rightly so – there is too much good to do.
