Every day, Global University Venturing rounds up the smaller investments from across the university innovation ecosystem in its deal net.
Ideon Technologies, a Canada-based mining imagery technology spinout of national particle accelerator centre Triumf, obtained C$1.3m ($960,000) on Tuesday in an oversubscribed seed round featuring University of British Columbia Seed Fund. The company has devised a bore-hole detector for identifying minerals up to 1km beneath the Earth’s surface, leveraging a technique called cosmic ray muon tomography billed as similar to X-rays. Ideon intends to use the seed money to refine its technology and augment its staff, with a view to launching its product in 2021.
University of Oxford yesterday spun out UK-based social enterprise Oxsed to commercialise a rapid Covid-19 test. Oxsed will provide throat and nasal swabs demonstrated during clinical trials to give comparable results to lab coronavirus diagnostics within an estimated 30 to 45 minutes. The approach uses primers with high-specificity to confirm whether a Covid-19 infection is present. Oxsed builds on work undertaken at the Department of Engineering Science in addition to Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research, the university’s China-based physical science and engineering research campus.
