Eka Ventures

We're excited to launch our weekly newsletter at Eka, and what better way to do it than to announce that we are now a certified B-Corporation 🥳! We share our key learnings in the post below. Subscribe to get the latest Impact VC news in your inbox every Friday, and feel free to share with the wider community. Jon Coker Camilla Dolan Hamish Law Alicia Walker

Oxford Cancer Analytics (OXcan) announced today that we have raised US$11 million in Series A funding from global investors, including in-field institutional investors in disease detection and diagnostics. With the close of this round, Dr Heinrich Roder, expert in lung cancer proteomics liquid biopsy, was appointed Senior Vice President of Research and Development at OXcan. The funding round was led by We Venture Capital and Cross-Border Impact Ventures with participation from return investors Eka Ventures, and Civilization Ventures, and new investors DigitalDx Ventures, Macmillan Cancer Support (Innovation Impact Investment Portfolio), Aurelium Ventures, OKG Capital , and prominent angel investors. This investment brings OXcan’s total funding to date to US$16.7 million, positioning the company to develop and globally commercialize a new generation of minimally invasive liquid biopsy blood tests for early cancer detection, starting from lung cancer. Concurrent with the funding round, Gemma Sturt, Senior Investment Manager at We Venture Capital (cc Louise Warme), Werfen’s Corporate Venture Arm and Annie Theriault, Managing Partner at Cross-Border Impact Ventures (cc Cyriac M Alappat CPA,CA, Donna Parr) have joined as Directors. Michele Colucci, Esq., Founder & Partner at DigitalDx Ventures and Anthony Vallance-Owen, Senior Investment Manager at We Venture Capital have joined as Observers. OXcan welcomes these experienced leaders in diagnostics, global health, and commecialization joining the board with existing members Dr Peter Jianrui Liu, Jon Coker, Marcus East, Dr Andreas Halner, and Brad Wilson. A sincere thank you to OXcan’s team members and many others who continue to drive forward early cancer detection innovation on a daily basis: Dr Daniel Szulc, Dr Ella Mi, Dr Emma M., Dr. Harriet Ferguson, Dr Honglei Huang, Dr Junetha Syed, Luke Hankey, Mrunmayee Dupalliwar, Dr Nikola I. Gushterov, Priyanka Bhattarai, and Taryn Reid. OXcan is always looking for likeminded people to help bring early cancer detection tests to those who need it most. If you want to help, please get in touch at info@oxcan.org! About Oxford Cancer Analytics Oxford Cancer Analytics is on a mission to drastically transform cancer early detection and management to impact millions of lives worldwide. OXcan's multidisciplinary team is developing a new generation of liquid biopsy blood tests using cutting-edge proteomics and explainable machine learning approaches that can detect the deadliest cancers early, when they can still be cured. This blood test can be conducted in an affordable, minimally invasive, and routine manner with superior accuracy and localization capacity in large populations. OXcan has applied their biomarker discovery and validation platform starting from lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide, and achieved ISO13485 certification status. For additional information, visit oxcan.org. https://lnkd.in/evXGzFKq

We reached the 100th edition of our newsletter! Today, we're publishing a lookbook of some of the UK’s top consumer-facing brands focussed on sustainability & health which are growing revenues very rapidly from a good base of scale. These have all been incorporated post 2016 and are true movers and shakers within our thesis areas. Many of these companies are in the Eka Ventures portfolio, but we also wanted to highlight others including Healf, Skin + Me, and Wild. The full list (in alphabetical order) ⬇️ 1.🚊 Byway: the world's first 100% flight free travel platform (Cat Jones) 2. 🧘♀️ Healf: curating the world's best wellbeing brands (Max Clarke, Lestat McCree) 3. 👟 hylo athletics: using material science to unlock sustainable sportswear (Michael Doughty, Jacob Green) 4. 💊 Jude: clinically-tested botanicals for a health bladder (Peony Li) 5. 💜 Paired: stay in love with Paired using daily conversation starters (Kevin Shanahan, Diego López) 6. 🏃♂️ Runna: take your running to the next level (Dom Maskell, Ben Parker) 7. 🧴Skin + Me: finding effective skincare should be simple (Horatio Cary, James Mishreki) 8. 🏠 Urban Jungle Insurance: simple, clean, & fair insurance (Jimmy Williams, Greg Smyth) 9. 🍩 Believe in Science Ltd.: unbelievable donuts (Anthony Fletcher) 10. 🧼 Wild: naturally effective personal care, without the rubbish (Freddy Ward, Charlie Bowes-Lyon). We know that we've missed a lot of incredible consumer companies (👀 ZOE, PerfectTed, SURREAL, DIRTEA, SURI 👀)... who else should we include in our list? Tell us in the comments or message some of the Eka team (Jon Coker, Camilla Dolan, Hamish Law, Alicia Walker, Anna Westall). ⬇️ Comment & tag below ⬇️

Delighted to see a number of the Women Founders Eka Ventures has invested into being featured in the Founders Forum Group 100-Women to Watch Report Shout out to 🎉 Cat Jones CEO & Founder of Byway - Flight free travel 🚂 🚅 🚉 Peony Li CEO & Founder of Jude - Raising the standard for bladder health 👩⚕️ Murvah Iqbal 📦 📦 Co-CEO & Founder of HIVED - Fully electric delivery 🚚 Dr Sonia Szamocki CEO & Founder of 32Co - Up-skill healthcare professionals 🦷 Read report here: https://lnkd.in/edG64Gw4 Eka Team Office drinks 🍹

We're continuing to look into Consumer Health, this time unboxing Daye in women's diagnostics👇 1️⃣ We know that early diagnosis enables better health outcomes. But there are certain communities where the public health pathway is especially long and under researched (looking at you gynae, but there are lots of others!). Daye & Evvy are a great examples of companies which are bringing clinically valuable diagnostics in a consumerised way, while improving health equity for all 🏥💡 2️⃣ Daye's entry into the microbiome diagnostics space is another example of interest in broader floral health (i.e. ZOE and other CGM + companies, gut-friendly toothpaste by Gutology, or the broader rise of Kefir on supermarket shelves). As with Neko, we will be looking forward to price innovation down the cost curve to ensure the solution can reach the most people in need 🦠 🥛 3️⃣ At Eka, we're incredibly lucky to have partnered with Jude innovating in the treatment flow of consumer health. We'll be exploring Jude in a later edition of the newsletter, when we move from diagnostics to treatment.🫀 📊 As always, feel free to reach out if you're building here and/or keen to chat ☕️ Camilla Dolan Jon Coker Hamish Law Alicia Walker Anna Westall P.S. article is in the comments 📝 #ConsumerHealth #WomensHealth #HealthEquity #Microbiome #BiomeInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #HealthTech #FemTech #StartupCommunity #UnboxingDaye #HealthUpdate #Newsletter

Our recent Neko Health visit prompted us to re-visit our consumer health thesis. This week, we published the first part of a three part series on consumer health diagnostics 👇 1️⃣ Early diagnosis enables better health outcomes. Neko Health is a great example, bringing scalable preventative screenings to consumers (to those who can pay £299 - more on that further down!). There are many more companies in this consumer diagnostic category like Daye and Oxford Cancer Analytics. We will be exploring these in the coming weeks 🏥💡 2️⃣ The Neko experience prides itself on cardiovascular and skin health. But there are many more tests beyond this, including: eye pressure, grip strength, and tissue composition. There is value in this 'point-in-time' snapshot, but the true unlock is in the trend data which Neko will observe if people rebook scans on a yearly basis. Early Neko data suggests 76% users rebook... 🫀 📊 3️⃣ The data moat is going to be huge. Neko is essentially building the primary care infrastructure of the future. Beyond the data and diagnostics, the consumer experience is very high quality (I know that building design is besides the point, but it also kind of isn't... they've transformed preventative health into something to be enjoyed. There's bias here as I know I feel particularly accountable when I see my health data) 📈 🤖 4️⃣ There are two BIG pushbacks to this approach. (1) Encouraging mass-screening can cause health anxiety for low-level problems and can therefore cause more harm than good at the aggregate level. We cover this in the note but believe that this misses the core point of preventative health. To us, the good outweighs the harms. (2) The £299 price point is inaccessible for the majority of people. Health equity has always been important to us and we believe there is a long way to go before many consumer diagnostics become truly accessible and equitable 😟 💰 5️⃣ At Eka, we back health companies which enable a move from a reactive treatment-led healthcare model to a more proactive and accessible system. We're lucky to have backed some incredible companies in Consumer Health including Oxford Cancer Analytics, Flok Health, Isla Health, and others 💼💊 As always, feel free to reach out if you're building here and keen to chat ☕️ Camilla Dolan Jon Coker Hamish Law Alicia Walker Anna Westall P.S. article is in the comments 📝 #HealthcareInnovation #ConsumerHealth #EarlyDiagnosis #HealthTech #Investment #FutureOfHealthcare

Congratulations to Karl Bach and Archy de Berker on their seed round led by Accel . We first invested in their pre-seed round alongside Picus Capital last year and have been blown away by what they have achieved in such a short period of time. This is a properly complex problem and the speed at which they have built a network of 15,000 connected assets and started generating real cash for the underlying home owner is extremely impressive. Looking forward to watching them build from here! https://lnkd.in/e-ynhcDi

At Eka, we are firm believers that consumers drive change in Sustainability and Health. We’re on the lookout for founder(s) who are building the next generational consumer company  ⬇️ We wrote about the state of the UK consumer in our latest newsletter (below). As part of this work, we are digging into what it takes to build the the next wave of companies and will be releasing a larger report in the coming weeks alongside our updated mapping.    We've already backed some incredible consumer-facing companies including Believe in Science Ltd., Byway, hylo athletics, Jude, Paired, Runna, and Urban Jungle Insurance. Now, we’re on the lookout for the next outlier founder(s) in Impact. Reach out if you’re building, or you know another outstanding founder who might be a fit 👋   Jon Coker Camilla Dolan Hamish Law Alicia Walker

Wrapping up an exciting events week at Eka Ventures 🎉 What better way to kick off the summer season than with ecosystem mixers? We hosted two thematic events across our climate & health networks to link up operators, investors, and policy makers.. read on! 🤖 💊 Sitrep: Health x AI x Policy with Form Ventures 💊 🤖 How can we best scale AI within the NHS to enable lasting system change? Startups must decide between building broad versus building deep, and building regulated versus unregulated, which in turn shapes their commercial opportunity. This seems to be the 2-D axis that innovators are building against, and not all of the combinations work in the NHS context.. We've written up some more detailed notes alongside Andrew Bennett which will come next week. Watch this space 👀 Thank you to Finn Stevenson from Flok Health and Johan Ordish at Roche for leading the conversation, alongside many others beyond the LinkedIn tagging limit! Special thanks too to Mohadeseh A. at Molten Ventures for hosting us in your offices 🙏 🛻 ⚡️ Urban Environment x Decarbonisation with Sustainable Future Ventures ⚡️ 🛻 What does will an electrified future look like for the urban environment? We asked Archy de Berker at Axle Energy, Mathias Krieger at HIVED, Natasha Jones at Metris Energy, ⚡ Mike Strahlman ⚡ at Piclo, and Luke Le Brun at PATRIZIA SE to crystal ball what the future holds in each of their respective industries from transportation, flexibility markets, solar energy, to real estate investing. A big thank you to Matthew Chagan at Sustainable Future Ventures for co-hosting this with us and moderating the panel 🙏 Can't wait to see what the rest of summer holds.. stay tuned 👀 ☀️ Jon Coker Camilla Dolan Hamish Law Alicia Walker