OX1 Alumni
Alike
Magdalen Grand Prize Winner 25/26
Team: Addi Haran Diman, Danial Hussain, Max Van Kleek
Founded by Danial, Addi, and Max, Alike’s mission is to help AI agents work in a team, not in isolation. The team got into a16z speedrun cohort (SR006) and raised $1m seed shortly after the OX1 Demo Day. Find out more about the team and their amazing work here.
Lucy Lyons (Kestrix)
During OX1, one of the most valuable things was meeting lots of different people who wanted to build companies. Although it wasn’t where the Kestrix co-founders met, it helped shape a much clearer idea of what to look for in a co-founder, both in terms of complementary skills and personality.
At the time, the focus was on Greenscale. As part of an MSc dissertation, more than 40 potential users were interviewed to understand the problems they actually faced. The research showed that Greenscale wasn’t solving a big enough pain point or saving customers money, so the decision was made not to pursue it. After graduating, the next step was Carbon13, a venture builder in Cambridge, with a simple goal: find the right co-founder first and the right idea second. That eventually led to Kestrix.
Today, Kestrix uses thermal drones and AI to show where buildings are losing heat and recommend the best retrofit options, described as a kind of “Google Maps of heat loss”. So far, the team has surveyed more than 12,000 homes for organisations including Clarion, Peabody and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, raised £3.5m, and recently reached 94% accuracy in identifying whether solid walls are insulated.
Simon Sällström (DirectEd)
DirectEd started while Simon was doing his MPhil in Economics at Oxford. Between his first and second years, he came across a grant opportunity and applied with an idea around using blockchain to make it possible to donate directly to students’ education. The idea changed quite a bit from there. DirectEd eventually moved away from the original donation model and towards finding talented young people in Africa, training them for global roles in tech — from AI and UI/UX design to go-to-market engineering — and connecting them with companies in Europe and the US.
After graduating in 2022, Simon had been considering doing a PhD but decided to work on DirectEd full-time instead. One of the biggest things he’s learned since is to start by selling. His view is that almost anything you eventually want to do with technology can be done manually at the start. The difficult bit is getting someone to actually buy it: finding customers, reaching them, working out what they want, putting together an offer, deciding what to charge and closing the deal. Those are the skills he thinks founders should spend much more time learning.
OX1 Past Committees
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Siddhartha Sensharma (President '25/26)
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Finley Braund (President '24/25)
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Patrick Ross (President '23/24)
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Felix Fabricius (President '23/24)
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Gideon Tay (President '22/23)
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Jack Chong (President '20/22)
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Gemma Timmons (President '18/20)
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Adrian Kozhevnikov (President '18/20)
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Simon Nedkov
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Tinu Reji
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Kenneth Poh
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Rupert Jackson
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Toby Wang
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Julius Chua
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Ferdinand Wieandt
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Jasvin Khurana
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Jamie Huddart
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Alfie North
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Nicholas McColgan
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Roger Xu
