Commercialisation, engineered from the inside.

Hatch Oxford takes physical and technical products from laboratory and prototype through commercial evidence, spinout formation, and production engineering. We combine engineering depth, certification pathways, product architecture with commercial structure viability assessment, market positioning, sales-process design, and company creation. Our clients are researchers, spinouts, founders, and scale-up companies whose products are physical, technical, and consequential.

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Our mission

Hatch Oxford is an independent commercialisation firm, engineering-led and commercially fluent. We sit on the client's side of the table taking the technical work seriously and structuring the commercial decisions against the engineering evidence. Our clients come to us because the decisions ahead of them, whether to spin out, which product architecture to commit to, which certification pathway, which go-to-market are too consequential to take on incomplete evidence.
We work across the full arc from research to production. Every engagement pairs technical work with commercial work, and delivers the evidence the decision needs.

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Our people

Lesley Blaine

Co-Founder

Lesley co-founded Hatch Oxford and leads its commercial work. She is at her best at the moments a technical product first has to prove itself commercially with the first customer conversation, partnership, the first hard founding decision. Direct, pragmatic, and commercially aware, she is the person clients turn to when the answer matters more than the framing.

Chris Gregory

Co-Founder

Chris co-founded Hatch Oxford and leads its engineering work. He is a hands-on engineer and a builder of teams that work equally at home solving the technical problem himself or pulling specialists, sub-contractors, and in-house engineers into a programme that delivers. Quietly rigorous, he is the partner clients come to when engineering depth and delivery both have to hold.

MESSAGE FROM FOUNDERS

We started Hatch because we love this work. We love entrepreneurs, the restlessness, the conviction, the willingness to take a technical idea and make it somebody's problem to buy. Between us we have more than thirty years in engineering across clean energy, advanced materials, robotics in the nuclear industry, motorsport, and industrial manufacturing delivered inside startups, scale-ups, and established industrials on both sides of the Atlantic.

lesley BLaine & chris gregory

Interested in our latest thinking?

Our team dives into the intersection of research, technology, and real-world application. Explore insights on how great ideas evolve — and what it takes to bridge the gap between inspiration, engineering, and impact.

How to win under Innovate UK’s new strategy

Innovate UK has changed direction. Chasing a grant with a strong technical story is no longer enough. Under the new strategy, the best applications start long before the form is opened — and read like business cases, not project briefs.

Engineering and commercial decisions are the same decision

In most deeptech ventures, engineering and commercial decisions are made by different people, at different times, in different rooms. That split is where value leaks — and the ventures that reach Series A in defensible shape are the ones that never let it open in the first place.

Why most university spinouts are structurally doomed

Most university spinouts do not fail because the underlying science is weak. They fail because the systems surrounding them are designed to generate ideas, not to sustain industrial businesses. The "valley of death" is, in practice, a gap in ownership — and closing it requires more than better advice.

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