Imperial College London recently launched an online portal that will empower startup founders to reach global investor audiences.

The investment portal launch coincided with a visit by Imperial President Hugh Brady to San Francisco and the Bay Area –?home to some of the world’s most recognised and established tech companies.  

The new Imperial Investment Portal was launched at a showcase event where five Imperial startups pitched to tech leaders and investors at San Francisco’s iconic SHACK15 venue.  

The Imperial Investment Portal is an exciting new offering to connect our student, staff and alumni founders directly with new and existing investors from around the globe Professor Hugh Brady, President of Imperial College London

Imperial’s President, Professor Hugh Brady said: “Imperial has built a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem to support our startup and spinout founders in developing innovative solutions that are helping to address global challenges. But for our ventures to grow, scale and reach their full potential they need vital early-stage investment from a wide range of sources.

“The Imperial Investment Portal is an exciting new offering to connect our student, staff and alumni founders directly with new and existing investors from around the globe – and I look forward to seeing the impact we can achieve together.”

Professor Mary Ryan, Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) speaks at the showcase

Providing investors across the globe with access to a curated range of startup investment opportunities through a single user-friendly platform is just one example of Imperial’s commitment to being accessible and responsive to do business with.

The investment portal provides a natural extension to Imperial’s current investment and marketing capabilities, furthering the ability to connect diverse investors and startups in our ecosystem, boosting the visibility of Imperial-associated startups seeking investment and offering up-to-date information about them.

Support for budding startups

The new portal will ease investment for budding Imperial startups like those that pitched at the showcase event, where Imperial’s entrepreneurial graduate founders working at the cutting edge of AI and healthcare showcased their innovations to an audience of alumni, investors and tech leaders from the San Francisco tech ecosystem.

The startups included MakeSense: a machine vision navigation device for the blind and vision impaired, Vera.AI: AI hyper-personalised women’s health platform, OSSTEC: 3D Printed Bone Healing Platform Technology, Phare Labs: The next gen AI smoke alarm, and dotplot: At-home breast health monitoring solution. 

Diana Canghizer, co-founder of vera AIArnau Donate Duch, co-founder of Phare LabsDebra Babalola, co-founder of DotPlotDr Max Munford, founder of OSSTECRobert Quinn, co-founder of MakeSense

Explaining the value of the new portal for startups like his, Dr Max Munford, CEO and Founder of one of the pitching startups, OSSTEC, and Imperial PhD graduate, said: “Fundraising is a crucial part of growing a venture but it can be difficult to connect with investors who are the right fit with your company.”

“Building and closing OSSTEC’s oversubscribed £1.2M seed round could have been much more efficient using the Imperial Investment Portal. More importantly, faster access to early angels means the team can focus on building the company.”

Fellow founder, Claire Trant, CEO and co-founder of Untap Health and Imperial PhD graduate, said: “We were lucky enough to be part of the Imperial ecosystem which was a huge help in our 2022 fundraise. But finding relevant and interested early-stage investors was a slow process. Having a portal where you can quickly see many investors and their interests would be a game changer.”

Building ties across the Atlantic

Imperial’s leadership and delegation of innovative startups attended the GBx Gala to network with fellow entrepreneurs, tech leaders and venture capitalists. The UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer gave the event’s keynote speech, as well as hosting a reception which was attended by Imperial’s President, Professor Hugh Brady, and Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise), Professor Mary Ryan. 

The Chancellor was in the area to meet with technology firms on the US West Coast as part of efforts to make Britain the next Silicon Valley and to encourage investment in the UK tech sector. Imperial’s newest campus in one of the most dynamic and rapidly changing parts of London, White City, echoes this ambition, and is fuelling an entrepreneurial ecosystem that mirrors the early days of Silicon Valley. 

During the trip, technology entrepreneur and Imperial alumnus Wendy Tan White welcomed the Imperial delegation to Intrinsic, a pioneering robotics software company, part of the Alphabet Group, where she is CEO.

The delegation also discussed collaborative and student training opportunities at cutting edge electric vehicle company Lucid Motors at invitation of CEO and Imperial alumnus Peter Rawlinson. 

More than just a shop window

Led by Imperial’s in-house Investment Services team, the Imperial Investment Portal is a web-based platform which allows members of Imperial’s Investor Network access real-time and relevant information on investment opportunities.

Startups are quality-assured by the Imperial team for investor readiness and their profiles are completed and updated by the founders – including links to video pitches, intellectual property and investment raised to date.

Members of Imperial’s Investment Network will get notified by email when companies move to ‘actively fundraising’ and investors can filter the opportunities by sector and contact founders directly through the portal – all free of charge to founders and investors.

Dr James Groves, Head of Investment Services at Imperial Enterprise, said: “More than just a shop window, the portal will dynamically alert members of the Investor community to new opportunities. If you are a registered member of our network, you will hear about new companies opening their investment rounds regardless of where you are on the planet.

“We know many investors find it challenging to secure high quality deal flow from UK Universities, with access to founders and opportunities often restricted to personal referrals. Rather than replacing the human interaction which is so key in early stage investing, we see the portal as a means to augment and accelerate the Imperial’s founders engage with the investor community.”

Untapped potential

The innovation ecosystem at Imperial is now extensive and well-developed – ranging from the Enterprise Lab co-working space, where students can experiment and test business ideas, to Scale Space, which takes companies to the next level in the heart of the thriving White City Innovation District.

Imperial’s startups are already having a tangible impact, delivering solutions to global challenges. For example, Dotplot is a healthtech company aiming to increase early detection of breast cancer – the second most prevalent cancer in the world with 2.3 million cases per year causing 685,000 deaths globally. With early detection, survival rates increase up to 93%. Dotplot offers a handheld device that pairs with a mobile app to help women perform breast checks every month.

Meanwhile, Makesense is developing a cost-effective, hand-held ‘sensory substitution device’ to help people with vision impairment navigate completely independently. Users hold the device in front of them like a torch, while advanced AI-based computer vision and localisation technology provides haptic cues to direct them. It could provide a cost-effective alternative to guide dogs, which cost £55,000 to train and are only offered to 1% of people with vision impairment.

Photography: Orange Photography

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Professor Aron Walsh was named to Web of Science’s 2020 list of Frequently Cited Researchers.

The 2020 List of Frequently Cited Researchers identifies influential researchers from around the world who have been most cited by their peers over the past decade. Selected researchers have authored several frequently cited articles and found to be among the top 1% by subject and year citations on the Web of Science.

These researchers represent the top 1% of their fields of expertise, meaning that researchers and social scientists highly cited by the world’s population are 1 in 1,000.

Professor Aron Walsh said, “When you present your new research to the world, it is difficult to know who is watching. While we always have to take citation metrics with a pinch of salt, it’s comforting to know that my work is widely read. I made the list thanks to the efforts of my research group and my staff. “

Imperial is a signatory to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which a Commitment not to consider journal-based metrics in evaluating the research performance of employees or candidates for recruitment.

Current research

Chemical Science, Vol. 11, No. 43

Professor Walsh’s group deals with the theory and simulation of energy materials such as solar cells, fuels and batteries. That year, his group developed a new technique or predicted the upper limit for the efficiency of converting solar energy into crystalline materials published in Energy and Environmental Science. The approach enables the rapid selection of next generation solar energy materials without expensive or toxic elements suitable for terawatt scale application.

His most recent discovery in collaboration with NIMS in Japan is a novel organic crystal, which is built up from a radical tetrathiafulvalene derivative and which leads to exceptional electrical conductivity. The publication was featured on the cover of Chemical Science.

Article text (without photos or graphics) © Imperial College London.

Photos and graphics are copyrighted by third parties and are used with permission or © Imperial College London.

Kayleigh Brewer

Department of Materials

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Imperial professor Peter Barnes was listed as one of the most cited scientists in the world on a list of 100,000 scientists in 22 fields.

Led by Stanford University in California, the work analyzed citation metrics from 22 scientific fields – from chemistry and clinical medicine to physics and astronomy. More than 500 researchers from Imperial College London are included in the list.

Professor Barnes of the National Heart & Lung Institute at Imperial College London ranked fourth in the world and first in medical research. His research focuses on COPD, a group of progressive inflammatory diseases that include emphysema and chronic obstructive bronchitis.

In the UK, COPD affects around 1 in 10 adults over 40 and kills more women than breast cancer. It causes the airways to narrow, causing shortness of breath, and the condition is difficult to treat, so it usually gets progressively worse. In industrialized countries, most people get COPD from smoking.

Professor Barnes said: “I was very surprised to see that I was number one among the medical researchers in the world and among all researchers in the UK, given that my specialty, respiratory medicine, has received little attention. This high rank pays homage to all of the outstanding researchers with whom I have worked for many years. “

The top 20 Imperial researchers based on study criteria are listed below. Read the full ranking online.

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Imperial College London, as a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), advocates a fair assessment of research achievements.

Imperial no longer takes journal-based metrics such as journal impact factors into account when making decisions about hiring and promoting academic staff.

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Photos and graphics are copyrighted by third parties and are used with permission or © Imperial College London.

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Global Challenges – Health and Wellbeing, Global Challenges – Data, Lung Diseases, Research


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Find a variety of new news and announcements from across Imperial.

From a vision of the world in 2050 if we successfully limit climate change to recognizing a solution that will help people with imbalance, here is some quick read news from across college.

The world in 2050

Technology has revolutionized our lives today, but the planet is under extreme pressure. Humanity is wreaking havoc on the natural world, leading to dangerous climate change, more turbulent weather and the destruction of biodiversity.

What would the world look like if we were successful in limiting climate change? Right now, inventors and entrepreneurs at Imperial are developing world-changing ideas that could change our relationship with the planet.

Inspired by their work, the Grantham Institute and TechForesight have developed an interactive feature that depicts the world in 2050. It offers a positive vision for the future by exploring technologies that exist today in the context of the next 30 years. Discover the function here.

For over ten years, the Grantham Institute has been helping startups turn good ideas into useful products that create wealth and help combat climate change. The institute has just launched The Greenhouse, an innovation program for climate-positive technology startups. Learn more about how to apply.

New hope for IPF

A natural metabolite called itaconate, found in healthy lungs, can slow down lung disease. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a chronic condition that causes scars in the lungs and makes breathing difficult. Patients with IPF don’t make enough itaconate, which can cause more severe scars (fibrosis) to develop.

Using preclinical models, Imperial researchers found that inhaled itaconate reduced fibrosis. Only two drugs are currently approved for the treatment of IPF. This study shows that itaconate or similar compounds are a potential new therapy.

Read the publication by Byrne, Ogger et al. in Science Immunology: Itaconate controls the severity of pulmonary fibrosis

Effects on education

In some regions of the world, poor education, low weight, and secondhand smoke are more important than tobacco smoking as a cause of chronic airflow obstruction.

This reduction in breathing ability is a feature of COPD, for which dusty jobs and tuberculosis can also be risk factors. A new global study by Professor Peter Burney and colleagues found large differences in the prevalence of breathing problems, but confirmed that the most important risk factor worldwide is smoking tobacco.

The authors say more research is needed to understand the role of poor education and career. However, this study should help prioritize public health programs around the world.

Read the publication in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine: Prevalence and Population-Based Risk of Chronic Airflow Obstruction in a Large Multinational Study.

Very quoted

35 Imperial researchers have been named among the most cited researchers in the world by Clarivate. One list included scientists and social scientists who had shown a significant impact by publishing several frequently cited articles.

Professor Stephen Curry, Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, said: “It is gratifying to have so many Imperial academics among the most cited researchers in the world. It is very rewarding to know that your articles are read and used well ! Colleagues clearly do important work in everything from experimental physics to neuroscience to sustainable energy, but at Imperial we continue to strive to guide research based on its inherent quality and researchers based on the full breadth of their contributions within and to be evaluated beyond college. “

Professor Curry chairs the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), of which the college is a signatory. This obligation ensures that journal-based metrics are not taken into account when evaluating the research results of employees or candidates for hiring.

Better balance

Innovation Design Engineering student WuQing Hipsh received high praise in the National Engineers in Business competition finals for her innovation in solving imbalances.

She won the trophy for developing WeAlign, a solution that helps people with imbalance disorders resulting from inner ear and brain problems. The innovation, an online rehabilitation platform, won WuQing second place in the college’s WE Innovate program.

WuQing said, “The engineers in the business contest introduced me to a network of inspiring startups, helped me improve my pitching skills, and practice quick thinking during the pitch questions and answers. I am so grateful that the jurors want to highlight my project with the new, highly acclaimed award. I am motivated to develop my business further. ”

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