An Oxford student startup's tiny quantum clock takes the top prize at a major venture forum

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Cloq, a quantum clock startup founded by University of Oxford students, won the top prize at the fourth Reuben Entrepreneurship Forum, taking home twenty five thousand pounds and securing a spot representing Oxford at Stage Two of Europe's largest university venture competition in Berlin this October. The team is developing a compact, low cost quantum clock built around a University of Oxford patent, using a nitrogen atom trapped inside a buckminsterfullerene molecule, sometimes called a buckyball, to achieve genuinely ultra precise timekeeping.

The four founders, Christ Church physics student Joel Klein, DPhil student David McMahon, final year physics undergraduate Aria Puri, and second year engineer Yuanzhu Wang, all met through Oxford Edge's StEP accelerator, an eight week educational program run jointly with Oxford University Innovation. Cloq had already placed second at StEP's own Demo Day the month before, taking a five thousand pound prize there, so this Reuben Forum win represents genuine consecutive momentum rather than a single isolated pitch competition success.

Quantum clocks of this kind matter well beyond simply keeping accurate time for its own sake. Ultra precise atomic timekeeping underpins GPS accuracy, telecommunications synchronization, and various scientific measurement applications, and the pitch behind Cloq specifically is bringing that level of precision down to a price point that industries currently priced out of the technology could actually afford. That affordability angle, rather than pursuing the absolute cutting edge of precision at any cost, is what distinguishes this project from the larger scale national metrology lab efforts usually associated with atomic clock research.

The team will now spend the coming weeks validating their strongest potential customer applications before pitching again at Stage Two in Berlin, a stage that represents a genuinely major step up in scale and visibility compared to a university level accelerator program. Whether a compact, buckyball based clock design can actually compete commercially against more established atomic clock technologies remains an open question, but the underlying patent and the consecutive competition wins suggest the team has built something worth taking seriously

Oxford Quantum Startup Cloq Wins Top Prize at Reuben Entrepreneurship Forumthequantuminsider.com