Oxford Science Enterprises
Founded in 2015, Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE) is an independent investment company created to found, fund, and build transformational businesses through its unique partnership with the University of Oxford. The firm invests across life sciences, health tech, and deep tech, writing cheques from £50,000 to £25m and following on to exit. OSE holds a portfolio of around 40 companies and has backed notable spinouts including Vaccitech, OMass, and Caristo Diagnostics, with exits to Waymo and AbbVie.
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Portfolio
2 companies in our directory
Salience Labs
HiringSalience Labs develops silicon photonics-based optical switches for AI data centres, enabling all-optical connectivity between compute nodes to overcome data-movement bottlenecks. Spun out from the University of Oxford and University of Munster in 2021, the company was co-founded by Vaysh Kewada, Johannes Feldmann, Harish Bhaskaran, and Wolfram Pernice. Its OC-32M all-optical switch delivers 10ns latency (20x lower than electronic alternatives) at under 1W per port, with 32-, 64-, and 128-port variants in development. Salience has raised $88M to date, including a $30M Series A led by Applied Ventures and ICM HPQC Fund. The company was ranked #28 in Sifted's AI 100 and #2 in Hardware. It is headquartered in Oxford with an office in San Jose.
Fractile
HiringFractile is a London-based AI chip startup developing in-memory computing processors designed to run large language model inference up to 100x faster and 10x cheaper than current GPU systems. Founded by Oxford Robotics Institute PhD graduate Walter Goodwin, the company's novel chip architecture fuses computation with memory to eliminate the data-shuttling bottleneck that limits conventional hardware. Fractile emerged from stealth in July 2024 and has since announced a £100M commitment to expand UK operations, including a new hardware engineering facility in Bristol. The team includes senior hires from NVIDIA, ARM, and Imagination Technologies.