Samsung Ventures invests in Oxford Semantic Technologies

Samsung’s investment will enable Oxford Semantics to bring its powerful data integration and reasoning engine to more clients.

Samsung Ventures has led an investment round that raised over £3 million for Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited, an Oxford University spinout company founded by pioneers in the fast-growing field of semantic technology. The investment round was also supported by the University of Oxford and Oxford Sciences Innovation PLC.

Spun out of the University’s Department of Computer Science in 2017, Oxford Semantics is developing and commercialising RDFox, the high-performance knowledge graph and semantic reasoning engine developed by Professors Boris Motik, Ian Horrocks and Bernardo Cuenca Grau, pioneers in semantic technology. Oxford Semantics’ technology turns an organisation’s data into machine-readable knowledge, combining diverse data sources and then enabling users to query them with powerful reasoning. We call this the ‘semantic enterprise,’ inspired by Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the ‘semantic web.’

Peter Crocker, Chief Executive of Oxford Semantics, said:

“It is two years since we launched Oxford Semantics and RDFox is now being deployed with clients and showing its great potential. Samsung Ventures’ investment is a strong validation of the team, the technology and the market opportunity. Organisations are all accumulating increasing quantities of data, often across multiple systems, and are all looking to extract more value from that data. At the same time, many face increased compliance and regulatory requirements, including relating to privacy. We are uniquely positioned to help these organisations. For example, the ability of our technology to run directly on mobile devices means that user data can be combined and put to work without ever leaving the device. We will be applying the new funds to scale the business and help more organisations to become semantic enterprises.”