Longwall Ventures
Oxford deeptech VC writing £500k-£2m cheques; Fund 1 backed OrganOx, sold to Terumo for $1.5bn.
Longwall Ventures, the Oxford deeptech investor whose Fund 1 turned OrganOx into a $1.5bn Terumo takeover in 2025, took a £50m cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank into Fund 4 on 27 May 2026.
Last refreshed: 22 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Is Longwall Ventures' 19x OrganOx exit a repeatable formula or a once-in-a-decade outlier?
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The British Business Bank anchored Longwall's fourth fund with a £50m cornerstone investment on 27 May 2026, delivered through its Enterprise Capital Funds programme; the fund was chasing a £100m close and stood at £86.2m when the commitment landed. Fund 4 is aimed at 14 to 16 early companies spanning life sciences, defence, clean energy and advanced manufacturing.
Set up in Oxford between 2008 and 2011, the firm's defining result remains Fund 1's stake in OrganOx: the university spinout's liver-perfusion technology sold in 2025 to Japan's Terumo for $1.5bn, seventeen years after OrganOx was founded and a 19.2x return on the Bank's original stake, the largest sum ever paid for an Oxford University spinout.
Longwall calls its niche the 'tier gap', the stretch between a university's proof-of-concept grant and an institutional Series A round where deeptech ventures most often run out of money. Bank figures published on 2 July 2026 gave that thesis fresh weight: university spinout equity deals fell 33% by number and 51% by value across 2025, with more than a third of rounds closing under £500,000, evidence the Bank cites for renewing its Longwall commitment rather than assuming the gap will close unaided.