Key Points
- The University of Oxford secured £118 million in September 2025 through its partnership with the Ellison Institute of Technology to launch the CoI-AI vaccine research programme.
- Brainomix raised £14 million in March 2025 and extended the round by £4.8 million in February 2026, taking the total to £18.8 million.
- Samsung Electronics acquired Oxford Semantic Technologies in July 2024; its RDFox engine now powers the Personal Data Engine in the Galaxy S25 series.
Few counties anywhere can point to as dense a run of AI deal activity in a single year as Oxfordshire has produced recently — from a nine-figure university research partnership to a wave of spinout funding rounds and one landmark acquisition by a global consumer electronics company.
Oxford and the Ellison Institute of Technology
In September 2025, the University of Oxford secured £118 million in research funding through its strategic partnership with the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) — first announced in December 2024 — to launch CoI-AI (Correlates of Immunity–Artificial Intelligence), a new vaccine research programme led by the University's Oxford Vaccine Group.
The programme combines Oxford's expertise in human challenge studies and immune science with EIT's AI technology to better understand how the immune system responds to infection.
Brainomix: stroke and lung imaging AI
Brainomix, a University of Oxford spinout, has developed AI-powered imaging platforms for stroke (Brainomix 360 Stroke, deployed to more than 300 hospitals) and lung fibrosis (e-Lung).
The company completed a £14 million Series C round in March 2025, co-led by Parkwalk Advisors and the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, and extended the round by a further £4.8 million in February 2026 to fund US expansion — bringing the total raised in the round to £18.8 million.
Caristo Diagnostics: AI cardiac risk prediction
Founded in 2018 by University of Oxford cardiologists, Caristo Diagnostics develops the CaRi-Heart platform, which uses AI to analyse coronary artery imaging and predict heart attack risk.
In April 2023 the company secured £13 million to complete its Series A round, led by Oxford Science Enterprises with participation from BGF, Longwall Venture Partners, Oxford Investment Consultants and the University of Oxford itself.
Oxford Semantic Technologies: acquired by Samsung
Founded in 2017 by three University of Oxford computer science professors — Ian Horrocks, Boris Motik and Bernardo Cuenca Grau — Oxford Semantic Technologies built RDFox, a knowledge-graph AI engine.
Samsung Electronics announced its acquisition of the company in July 2024, and RDFox now powers the Personal Data Engine in Samsung's Galaxy S25 series. Early investors included Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Oxford Science Enterprises and Oxford University Innovation.
Oxa: universal autonomy from an Oxford spinout
Spun out of the University of Oxford's Robotics Institute in 2014, Oxa develops autonomous vehicle software for industrial and logistics applications. Headquartered in Oxford with offices in Toronto and Florida, the company employs more than 450 people and has raised $225 million to date.
Oxa was the first UK company to test self-driving vehicles on public roads (2016) and carried out Europe's first zero-occupancy journey on publicly accessible roads (2022).
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UK Inward Investment Guides: Oxfordshire
Every figure, date and monetary amount in this series is drawn from a company announcement, regulatory filing or independent business press coverage. Companies and institutions named here appear as editorial information only: inclusion does not indicate sponsorship, partnership, endorsement or participation in the UK Family Office Summit.