Skoll Venture Awards

We are no longer running the Skoll Venture Awards.

The Skoll Venture Award was an annual prize for early-stage social ventures founded by University of Oxford students, alumni or staff. The Award aimed to help high-potential social ventures overcome the pioneer gap, demonstrate traction, and access mainstream impact investment.

From 2012 - 2020, we invested £250,000 in 15 ventures working across accessibility technology, healthcare, mental health, agribusiness, energy, education technology, water and sanitation, Internet of Things, and machine learning. These businesses have gone on to raise USD$17.6m and have reached a quarter of a million direct beneficiaries.

We are deeply grateful to our partners at the Skoll Foundation and our colleagues at Saïd Business School for their immense support and guidance whilst running the award.

We have allocated Venture Award funding to the following early-stage social ventures:

2020

Jamii Life uses technology to increase access to home-care in Africa.

Wazi provides affordable, secure and accessible therapists in Africa.

2019

SociAbility empowers greater social inclusion for people with access needs of all kinds. By making it quick, easy and free to find access information, SociAbility is making the world a more SociAble place for all.

Devie was created by early years teachers to support every parent to be their child's best first teacher.

2018

Boresha Technologies acknowledges that small farmers need liquidity to operate their businesses. Boresha aims to provide reliable and low-cost sources of working capital for them, by managing invoicing and supply chain finance on their behalf.

Adelie Health is revolutionising the self-management of diabetes. Traditional care is not working as over 75% of people with diabetes, including our co-founder Liam, fail to reach diabetes targets.

2017

Virtue Health is an immersive tech company with a focus on mental health applications. It is currently developing a therapeutic tool for people with dementia using Virtual Reality.

Redbird Health Tech is changing the way patients interact with the Ghanaian healthcare system to better combat the rising burden of non-communicable and chronic disease.

PowerMarket, a product of SunReign Ltd, was founded with a mission – sustainable energy for all. It uses downstream satellite data and deep-learning to help individuals and companies globally assess their potential solar within a couple of clicks.

2016

Tulivu Imaging was a medical diagnostics service provider initially focusing on affordable ultrasound in Kenya. Their mobile teams brought existing health facilities the medical devices and expertise they needed.

I-Drop Water is changing the cost structure of drinking water sales by purifying water at the point of sale in formal and informal general grocery stores throughout Africa.

2014

Denra Systems (formally BioCarbon Engineering) aims to counter industrial-scale deforestation using industrial scale REforestation. Destruction of global forests from lumber, mining, agriculture, and urban expansion destroys 26 billion trees each year.

2013

Accomable - a web platform designed to make it easier for disabled people to organise and book travel across the globe. Accomable was acquired by Airbnb in November 2017.

Odyssey Sensors designs, develops and delivers affordable sensor technology, networks, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) innovations for smallholder, mid-sized, and family-owned farms.

2012

iGBL aims to bring interactive game-based learning to schools, NGOs, and businesses, introducing scalable technologies that enable highly effective and engaging ways to teach abstract concepts in schools and in the workplace.