University venturing fund Oxford Sciences Innovation has added an additional $290m to its assets as spinout Oxford Nanopore attracts another $126m in funding.

Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), the university venturing fund of Oxford University, on Friday raised an additional £230m ($290m) from investors including the institution’s endowment fund to bring its total to £580m. Oxford University Endowment Management participated alongside commercialisation firm IP Group, Wellcome Trust, Woodford Investment Management, Lansdowne and Invesco Asset Management. Private investors Charles Dunstone and Dennis Hassabis have also taken part in the latest fundraising effort. Additionally, Temasek and Oman Investment Fund, the respective government venturing arms of Singapore and Oman, as well as unnamed Asia-based technology companies and Europe-based investors have injected cash into the fund, according to the Financial Times. GV, formerly Google Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of diversified conglomerate Alphabet, provided an extension to £320m in June 2015, though it is not known if the unit returned for this latest effort. OSI’s fundraising comes at an interesting time for the university sector, which is facing a wide range of challenges as a result of the UK’s decision to leave the EU. One the one hand, Cambridge University warned last week that applications from European students could nose-dive, and to an extent already have, with the institution having experienced a drop of 17% for undergraduate degrees. Imperial College London meanwhile noted that “the impact of the loss of EU research funding on the research productivity of the UK’s universities will be substantial, especially given that Imperial wins more than its pro-rata fair share of research funding”. Then there is also the fact that researchers at British universities are being asked to step down from leadership roles or are ignored entirely for cross-border collaborations. These cooperations represent approximately £1bn worth of funding from the EU through research programs such as Horizon 2020. None of these realities appear to have had an impact on OSI’s ambitions. The fund, launched in May 2015, was the largest of its kind in the world even before the latest extension. OSI was created to provide capital to spinouts originating from Oxford University, a major difference between the vehicle and its similarly ambitious peer Imperial Innovations, the commercialisation firm spun out of Imperial College London that backs companies throughout the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. Among OSI’s recent successes are biotechnology developer EnzBond, spun out last week, smart material producer Bodle Technologies, which raised funding in November 2015 before attracting Richard Holliday, former deputy head of technology transfer at the university’s tech transfer office Oxford University Innovation (OUI) as a senior…

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