LMH Finalist Danial Hussain (2021, PPE) has won the top prize at Oxford’s OX1 Incubator Demo Day alongside teammates Dr Addi Haran Diman (Lincoln) and Max Van Kleek (Kellogg).
Danial (second from left), and his teammates Dr Addi Haran Diman (second from right) and Max Van Kleek (right) with OX1 President and fellow LMH student Finley Braund (left).
The trio impressed a panel of expert judges with their startup, Alike, which seeks to boost workplace cohesion and team collaboration with AI-powered, science-backed social copilots.
The Demo Day attracted more than 250 attendees and featured pitches from the leading student-founded ventures in the OX1 programme. Danial and his team competed against over 50 other University of Oxford startups to secure the Magdalen College Grand Prize – an equity-free grant of £10,000 plus free office space worth £5,000 – to help them develop their minimum viable product (MVP) in collaboration with early design partners
Alike stood out for its strong scores in novelty, market potential, scalability, profitability and feasibility. The prize includes both funding and office space, enabling the team to continue developing their minimum viable product in collaboration with early design partners.
Danial said of the team's winning intitiative: "We built Alike to create the tool we saw was needed in every team we worked in. Teams today are overwhelmed by constant emails, misalignment, and burnout, especially in remote settings. Our goal is to fix that by making work feel more connected, with less noise and more clarity. Winning OX1 has given us the platform to accelerate our work, and the momentum since then has been very encouraging. It hasn't been a straight road, but we stuck with it, kept figuring things out as we went, and are looking forward to what comes next."
OX1 is Oxford’s first student-run entrepreneurship programme, designed to connect and support student founders through mentorship, workshops, and funding.
