Conception X runs a venture program that assists PhD researchers in establishing deeptech startups, focused on long-term impact.

Conception X

Conception X | 5,271 followers on LinkedIn. Creating deeptech startups from PhDs. Coined Venture Scientist. Now on Cohort 7 | At Conception X, we discover the next generation of venture scientists and help them launch research-backed deeptech startups focused on long-term impact. 

We coined the term “Venture Scientist” to identify a unique type of founder, at the intersection of research and tech entrepreneurship. 

Our 9-month programme and platform is designed to turn PhD students into tomorrow&#39;s deeptech founders, supporting them to build ventures that leverage their proprietary research while still at university.

Emeritus Professor of Entrepreurship Education at UCL School of Management

Dave Chapman

Technology and science venture creation. Venture Partner at Octopus Ventures, leading the academic agenda at Conception X, Lecturer at UCL.

Richard Anson

Ville Vesterinen

Clean tech spinouts, startups, scaleups, new market entry.

Peter Blake

❄️ Who else is at Slush this week? ✨ We kept this under wraps, but for anyone in our network who’s in Helsinki – we’re hosting an exclusive side event with our partner XTX Ventures today from 5pm. There will be five research-backed portfolio startups that are currently raising and are ready to demo their tech – from the University of Oxford , The University of Manchester and other leading UK PhD labs. 🧬 This event is especially relevant for deeptech investors, and you can be the first to test some early prototypes that could transform the future of energy, DNA and RNA analysis, B2C cancer tech, and more – Arielle Torres ( Pipeline Organics ), Dan Todd ( InvenireX ), Jakub Dziegielowski ( Bactery ), Jana Stella ( NeuWave Technologies ), Tiffany S. Ma, DPhil (PhD) ( GambitBio ). 🇬🇧 🫖 If you’re looking for an opportunity to connect with all the key UK deeptech ecosystem players in one place while at Slush – this is it! 🔥 You can request to join here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dqwMPdxR We’re here all week – drop us a message if you'd like to meet up!

🔄 Some things come full circle. 💡 Back in 2021 Myriad was born during the Conception X accelerator programme. Peter Taylor and I were both on the programme thinking of commercialising our own PhD research in renewable energy. About halfway through the accelerator, we had a chance call with Paul Pirrie , who we both knew well from our PhDs. Paul was researching multi-rotor wind turbines for his PhD. Together we all suddenly realised the positive impact that commercial multi-rotor wind turbines could have for the industry, if only someone could realise that vision... 🌟 Thus, Myriad began with the three of us. 🌱 Following weeks of hard work, Myriad won the Conception X demo day driving us on to make it happen. After raising investment, multiple grants, awards, the 2kW Proof of Concept and putting together a full-scale design, things have come full circle. We find ourselves back at Conception X demo day, this time as alumni, talking about where we've got to. But there's still much to do... and that seed that was planted in 2021 needs the nurturing to grow into a tree. For our next phase, Myriad is raising £1m in equity (EIS available) to build a Myriad Turbine large enough to blow your mind about what could be possible at full scale. Please spread the word! 🚀🚀🚀 🙏 Thank you so much for the brilliant conversations on Tuesday, you know who I mean. And well done to all the amazing startups currently coming through Conception X right now. #Startups #Innovation #WindEnergy #PositiveImpact #Fundraising

Adam Harris

It's official – the Conception X deeptech Demo Day 2024 broke all records 💥 The first Demo Day we ever produced was in a basement, back in 2018. Since then, we've grown exponentially. Here's what this week looked like 👇 👀 498 of you signed up to join us in person and online 🤯 99 VCs and angels were in the room or tuned in live 😎 13 startups out of 108 PhD teams on Cohort 7 were selected to pitch live on stage + 5 teams ready to demo their tech – because the quality this year was that high! 🤝 In the first 24 hours, we've already made 100+ intros 👉 leave a comment below if you'd like to get the Demo Day pitchbook and connect with the finalists Every year, we bring together a critical mass of incredibly talented scientists from the UK and Europe, and we don't tell them what to build. We give them complete intellectual freedom to find THE ONE PROBLEM ON EARTH 🌍 that they're passionate about. To date, we've worked with 450 PhD teams, and created 140 deeptech companies with a combined valuation of £500 million. As our CEO Riam Kanso said 👉 "Aside from deep IP, one thing that all of our companies have in common is that they're able to radically alter the way that questions are asked. This leads to leaps forward in human knowledge, and fundamentally new markets. It's crucial for us as a society." "Currently, we have 120,000 technical researchers in the UK, but only 4,500 research-backed spinouts and startups, and 17% of these are deeptech. This is not because of a lack of ideas – the problem is that this path is difficult, misunderstood, restricted. And this is what we're solving at Conception X." We're already hard at work to recruit the next cohort of PhD founders – applications are NOW OPEN. If you know a PhD student who'd be the perfect fit for Conception X, we'd love to meet them – please ask them to join a Discovery Session 👉 https://lnkd.in/dPW3Feit Thank you for helping us grow this into the UK's largest event for PhD startups. And thank you XTX Ventures for helping us push it to the next level. Finally, congratulations to our finalists – Jani Shibuya , Joana Loureiro , Nickel Blankevoort Ph.D. , Gatleen Bhambra , Chelsea Williams , Dan Fountain, Louis Masters , Priyansh Gujarati , Kastytis Sidlauskas , Alara Dirik , Scott Dean , Robert C. , David Yacoub , Varsha Ramineni , Tim Weaving , Alexander Pomberger, Daniel Wigh – and our Cohort 7 on this huge milestone! 🚀 And for the first year ever, we worked closely with the only media outlet covering early-stage deep tech startups, PreSeed Now , and the wonderful Martin SFP Bryant – to fill a gap 👉 full story here: https://lnkd.in/dBScFTXm

🚀 Exciting News from Mater-AI ! 🚨 We are thrilled to announce that Mater-AI was a finalist and had the incredible opportunity to pitch at the Conception X Demo Day 2024! 🎉 The Conception X program has been an amazing experience for us, and we are proud to share that we have now completed our proof of concept. This significant milestone enables us to officially announce the opening of our pre-seed round! 📣 With this next step, we are poised to accelerate our mission to revolutionise materials discovery with physics-based AI. A huge thank you 👏 to the entire Conception X team for their exceptional support and guidance, and to everyone who believed in our vision. Special thanks to Olivia Ash , Riam Kanso , Agata Zborowska , Aurora P. , Nick Slater , Carrie Baptist , Artie Rice-Oxley , Ville Vesterinen for their support. Lastly, a massive thank you to our investors at XTX Ventures and the investment team Zhenteng Shen , Erwann Le Lannou , Gabriele Papievyte for believing in Mater-AI . We are just getting started – stay tuned for what's next! 👀 #DeepTech #Innovation #AI #MaterialsScience #ConceptionX #DemoDay #PreSeed #MaterAI

Mater-AI

I had the privilege of moderating the "Deep Tech: Bridging the Gap from Lab to Market" panel at last Friday’s Oxford Saïd Entrepreneurship Centre Forum at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford . Our discussion dove into the complex journey of deep tech innovations transitioning from lab to market, unpacking the unique challenges and opportunities that shape commercialization. From securing crucial funding, navigating complex regulatory landscapes, and fostering market readiness, we explored the key pillars needed to bring deep tech to the world. Thank you to the amazing panelists— Mairi Gibbs (Oxford University Innovation), Matthew Ritchie (Dendra), Riam Kanso (Conception X), and Alan D. Roth (Oxford Drug Design)— for making the session both engaging and thought-provoking. Lastly, thank you to Carlota Jimenez Rodriguez , Ahmed Adel Saad , and the rest of the OSEF team for putting on such a stellar event.

Rebecca Solomon

Yesterday was my first Conception X Demo Day, but it's their 7th since inception! It was great to see so many deeptech companies in one place working on difficult problems with world-class teams often with academic backgrounds (PhD)/affiliations. If you're not familiar with Conception X it is a 9-month programme that "turns PhD students into venture scientists" which filters down from ~100 participants at the start of the programme to the ~10-15 that present on demo day. There was a great buzz in the room, nice to catch up with some of the ecosystem and hear about the exciting companies presenting. Well done Riam Kanso and team! #deeptech #startups #venturecapital

Anthony Lyall

Our Cohort 7 deeptech Demo Day kicks off in ONE HOUR! 🔥 We're excited to introduce you to our 13 finalist startups – selected out of 108 teams from top PhD research labs across the UK and Europe. They're the very best, building anything from organoid intelligence applications to new materials that can turn your body heat into energy. They are: Hychor ( University of Aberdeen ): Developing electrolyser technology to produce hydrogen directly from seawater. FTNanoAD ( Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto ): Biocompatible nanoparticles that enable the targeting of brain tissue for drug delivery. Mater-AI ( University of Warwick ): Reducing waste heat by leveraging physics-informed and AI-accelerated thermoelectric materials discovery. Eterna Biologics ( University of Oxford ): Proprietary CRISPR system to target disease-causing RNAs. Hydra Manufacturing ( University of Leeds ): Manufacturing hardware powered by deep learning for high-precision 3D printing of difficult-to-process materials. Synthlab, Inc. ( University of Oxford ): Building deep learning models to predict the behaviour of small molecule drugs in the body. Digital-Histo ( Queen Mary University of London ): AI software to transform breast cancer diagnostics. Puncta ( UCL ): The first visual suite that unifies text-to-image generation and image editing in a single model. Graphene Trace ( The University of Manchester ): Flexible graphene electronics & AI to automate pressure ulcer prevention. Omnibio ( University of Bath ): Organoid intelligence applications to create energy, data and space efficient solutions for the distributed sensor and robotics sector. SynthFairAI ( UCL ): High-quality synthetic datasets reflecting real-world populations to test AI models for hidden bias more efficiently. QMatter ( UCL ): Accelerating drug design with quantum-inspired molecular simulation tools. ReactWise ( University of Cambridge ): No-code AI co-pilot to accelerate and automate chemical process development for drug manufacturing. Watch them pitch live from 3.30pm – via this link 👇 https://lnkd.in/dDqvccgQ

Our October update 🚨 In this issue: 🎓🔥 The story of how Cohort 4 founder Samyakh (Sam) Tukra built a tool that saved lives in eight hospitals, failed to crack the business model, started a new journey to find the biggest problem of all and raised $5 million in a round led by Stride.VC shortly after launching Kashmir Intelligence ⛽ 🌊🔧 Currently, the world only has access to low-quality data for conditions at sea, meaning wave height measurements often come with an error margin of >1.5 metres. This has key implications for the growth of the offshore energy industry. Now, Jana Stella and her NeuWave Technologies team are developing the first high-resolution database for wave data. 🎬 “It’s essentially like remastering an old movie,” Stella says. 📢 Cohort 4 Jakub Dziegielowski raises $525k for Bactery 's soil-powered batteries; Cohort 5 Dr Sigourney Waibel, PhD is looking to make her first engineering hire for Radiant Science – and more👇 https://lnkd.in/dDPJEdhz

We're delving deep into our third OSEF24 panel, deep tech! 🧠 ⚙️ Mairi Gibbs - CEO, Oxford University Innovation 🍃 Matthew Ritchie - Co-founder & CFO, Dendra Systems 🔎 Riam Kanso - CEO, Conception X 🦠 Alan D. Roth - CEO, Oxford Drug Design In this panel discussion, our industry experts will be bridging the gap from lab and market. Purchase your ticket today to watch this panel live, plus much more! 🎫 https://lnkd.in/e8Aybjwb #DeepTech #entrepreneurship #Founder #OSEF24 Saïd Business School, University of Oxford EnSpire Oxford

Oxford Saïd Entrepreneurship Centre

🚨 About the Conception X deeptech Demo Day 2024! 🚀 Earlier this year, we scouted and selected 108 PhD students from 26 universities across the UK and Europe, working on research with transformative potential. We can't wait to introduce the top 10-15 early-stage deeptech companies in our Cohort 7 live on stage on 12 November. This event has already sold out THREE times in less than two weeks, and we were able to extend capacity each time – but the demand keeps growing! 🙌 We don’t want anyone to miss out, so we’ve made it possible for you to join us online. Whether you’re halfway across the world or simply couldn’t secure a ticket, we’d love for you to still be part of the biggest event for PhD startups building meaningful technologies you haven't heard of yet. More details soon. Register now to secure your virtual spot 👇 https://lnkd.in/dUpXUZPk

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