David McMahon

David McMahon (2021, Physics), an Oxford-Berman Graduate Scholar who recently completed his DPhil in Atomic and Laser Physics at Univ, is one of four students behind Cloq, a startup developing miniaturised, low-cost quantum clocks. The team has won £25,000 at the Reuben Entrepreneurship Forum. Now in the Forum’s fourth year, Cloq took the top prize, with the pitch delivered by David himself. The win builds on Cloq’s second-place finish at StEP Demo Day last month and comes as the team prepares for its next pitch at Stage Two in Berlin this October.

It was at StEP, an eight-week educational accelerator run jointly by Oxford Edge and Oxford University Innovation, that David met his three co-founders: Joel Klein, a fourth-year physics student from Christ Church; Aria Puri, a third-year physics undergraduate from Mansfield; and Yuanzhu Wang, a second-year engineer from Keble. Students can either develop their own idea or work on University IP; the four gravitated to the same project among those on offer, a University of Oxford patent for a compact, low-cost quantum clock developed by Professor Arzhang Ardavan and colleagues in the Department of Physics. Built around a nitrogen atom trapped inside a buckminsterfullerene molecule, or “buckyball,” the technology brings high-precision timing to industries currently priced out of it.

StEP is designed to introduce Oxford students to entrepreneurship and build the skills they need to start a venture of their own. Students learn the fundamentals of building a business, from market sizing to fundraising, receive expert mentoring, and hear from Oxford alumni who have gone on to found companies. At Demo Day, held at the Life and Mind Building, Cloq was named one of three winning teams from a cohort of nine, taking a £5,000 prize and securing a place at Stage Two in Berlin, Europe’s largest university venture competition.

Reflecting on the past few months, David said: “I am very pleased to have taken part in StEP. On top of the excellent training we received from experienced entrepreneurs, the programme presented an opportunity to meet the many other students at Oxford drawn to entrepreneurship, all of whom are on the path to achieving exciting things. It was also a fantastic introduction to the broad but close-knit entrepreneurial ecosystem that exists here in Oxford. Having done a DPhil in Physics, I’m very eager to see lab research translated into real-world impact, and I think StEP is one of the best places in Oxford to get started.”

University College was also represented on another of the nine teams. Juyeon Mun (2025, Engineering), an undergraduate, was part of Dono, a fundraising platform connecting university student groups with alumni networks in a transparent, seamless way.

Cloq will now represent the University of Oxford at Stage Two while continuing to validate the strongest applications with potential customers.

Published: 22 September 2026

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