In 2021, Joshua Blight sat at a whiteboard with Adrian Signell and investor Jamie Macfarlane, trying to work out where the final £10,000 would come from. Baseimmune was closing its pre-seed round. The problem had become wonderfully specific: a company with a complicated scientific ambition needed one more piece of a very ordinary financial puzzle.
Three years later, Baseimmune announced a £9 million Series A. The larger number is the one that travels. The whiteboard is the detail that stays. It gives the enterprise a human scale, with names around a table and a gap that still needed filling. Even a company built around computation can reach a point where the pressing question is who else to call.
Blight’s career has moved between university research, company leadership and public conversation about science. He previously led Baseimmune as CEO; today he is its co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. The recurring subject is collaboration. His founding team brought together an Oxford colleague and a friend he had known since secondary school. Before the company had institutional investors, it had those relationships.
A friendship with a very long runway
Phillip Kemlo entered Blight’s life when they were 14. Years later, he would enter the company as its technical co-founder. Kemlo was a self-taught computer scientist; Blight had followed the university route into experimental research. Their shared history preceded the business proposition, the job titles and the funding announcements.
The other founding relationship began at Oxford’s Jenner Institute. Blight met Ariane Gomes there during their doctoral work. Both continued into postdoctoral research before the company took shape. That sequence matters. They had experience of research as daily work, with its demands on time and attention, before asking how to organise it inside a business.
The founding trio joined different kinds of expertise. Gomes and Blight brought scientific training. Kemlo brought software skills. Nobody needed to acquire a second doctorate to make the combination useful. The point was to put the disciplines in the same enterprise, where a question could move between them without becoming somebody else’s problem.
There is an appealing lack of ceremony in this origin. One relationship came from school; another came from the lab. A co-founder search can sound like an exercise in matching credentials. Here, the story also involves accumulated familiarity. A company was formed from people whose lives had already crossed, through routes that a hiring process could never quite reproduce.
Oxford taught him the work. A company changed its scope.
Blight studied at Imperial College London before taking his doctorate at Oxford between 2012 and 2017. His subsequent research career brought him back to Imperial. These institutions supplied more than names for a biography. They were places where he studied, worked and met people who would become part of the next chapter.
His account of leaving the academic path is affectionate toward research. He has spoken about enjoying its freedom to explore. The attraction of entrepreneurship was the opportunity to work across a broader range of projects. The decision grew from an appetite for scope, rather than a declaration that the university years had been wasted.
That makes the transition more interesting than the familiar dramatic exit. Blight did not need to disown the habits he had developed. A company gave those habits another organisational setting. Research questions could sit alongside decisions about recruitment, resources and partnerships. The job expanded to include the conditions under which the work could continue.
Baseimmune was founded in 2019, and Blight became a director when the company was incorporated on 30 October that year. Incorporation supplies an exact date for something whose beginnings were less tidy: conversations, doctoral work, a school friendship, later research. The registry records the moment the business became a legal entity. The relationships had been developing for years.
The whiteboard before the big number
The early financing became public in April 2021: a £685,000 investment led by Creator Fund, with Maki.vc and Rockmount Seed Investments participating. By November that year, Baseimmune had raised a $4.8 million seed round. The company was moving from its founding stage into a different scale of operation.
Macfarlane’s recollection of the last £10,000 belongs to that earlier period. It is a useful counterweight to the polished language of funding announcements. A round is presented as a completed amount. While it is being assembled, it can still be a collection of unresolved conversations. The whiteboard captures a moment before the neat total existed.
In February 2024, the company announced its £9 million Series A, equivalent to $11.3 million at the time of the announcement. IQ Capital and MSD’s investment fund co-led the round. Existing investors also participated. The sums describe company financing, and the progression shows how its investor relationships developed.
A funding total invites a fast verdict. A closer reading asks what kind of organisation will use it. Baseimmune’s next tasks included building the team and continuing its research. Raising money changes the resources available; the work of allocating them remains. The people responsible for that work still have to decide what happens on Monday.
Hiring across the divide
In March 2024, Blight shared two vacancies at Baseimmune: a principal scientist and a software developer. Put beside each other, the roles make a compact description of the company’s founding logic. It needed people who could work experimentally and people who could build the computational tools. Both belonged in the same organisation.
His recruitment post also mentioned new team photographs. It is a small, cheerful detail in a message about specialist jobs. A young company needs to explain its work, but it also needs to show the people doing it. Potential colleagues are considering a workplace as well as a technical challenge. A team photograph gives that workplace faces.
Blight has appeared on the other side of the recruitment conversation, too: speaking with researchers who might start companies of their own. At an Imperial “Code to Company” event, he joined Devang Agrawal, co-founder of Glyphic AI, and Aaron Rosenberg, whose career had included DeepMind and venture capital.
The event brought together more than 100 doctoral researchers working in AI research and applications. The setting makes sense for Blight’s career. He could bring experience of taking research into a company back to an audience still working within the university. The route out of academia became material for a conversation inside it.
A toolkit with people attached
At an Imperial industry event in 2024, Blight offered a concise description of artificial intelligence: “AI is a toolkit.” It is a phrase with room for ambition and a limit built in. A toolkit can extend what a person is able to do. It still leaves someone responsible for choosing the task and judging the result.
He spoke on a panel with Imperial’s Aldo Faisal and Simon Daniel, and Moderna’s Wade Davis. Their discussion included the importance of structured data and the relationship between computational methods and scientific knowledge. It also raised a problem that sophisticated software cannot automatically tidy away: people from different disciplines need to understand one another.
The phrase suits the founding team. Blight, Gomes and Kemlo did not all bring the same training to Baseimmune. Their combination depended on different expertise having something useful to say to the others. A computer scientist and an experimental researcher can share an ambition while asking different questions about how to pursue it.
That is also why the toolkit formulation is more revealing than a sweeping prediction. It places the technology within a working practice. There are choices about data, design and interpretation. Somebody has to decide what deserves further attention. Blight’s public language keeps the researcher in the picture, with responsibilities that grow alongside the available computational power.
“AI is a toolkit.”Joshua Blight · Imperial industry event, 2024
The scientist who lets visitors look
There is another view of Blight at Imperial, away from investor meetings and specialist panels. In 2018 he took part in the university’s public festival, where visitors could use microscopes and talk with researchers. He described the intention as giving people a sense of work in the lab and in the field.
The format was participatory. Visitors encountered activities and demonstrations, with researchers available to answer questions. It offered a different entrance into scientific work from a lecture or a finished result. Someone could look, ask and try. The festival put conversation beside equipment, making the researcher part of the encounter.
His professional profile also lists a volunteer role as Creative Director for the Great Exhibition Road Festival. That detail belongs beside the scientific and business roles because it concerns how ideas meet an audience. Public engagement asks for a kind of translation: preserving what matters while finding an accessible way to present it.
The audiences in his career vary considerably. Festival visitors, doctoral researchers, potential recruits and investors arrive with different questions. The same explanation will rarely serve all of them. Blight’s appearances across those settings show a career with a public dimension, as well as the work conducted inside a laboratory or a company.
A new title, the same founding thread
By March 2026, Baseimmune identified Blight as co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, with Kevin Walton as CEO. Blight also remained on the board. The roles had changed since the period in which he was the company’s chief executive. The business now had a different arrangement of scientific and executive leadership.
That change gives the story a further chapter beyond its financing milestones. Founding a company creates an identity that persists through changes in responsibility. A founder can occupy different jobs as the organisation develops. In Blight’s case, the current title places his scientific work at the centre of his formal remit.
The record so far contains several different kinds of continuity: a school friend who became a co-founder, a university colleague who helped start the business, and institutional relationships that continued after the move into entrepreneurship. There is no single departure scene that explains all of it. The company grew through connections built at different times.
The whiteboard remains a fitting image for that history. It holds an unfinished question in public view, where other people can help answer it. Blight’s career has repeatedly involved assembling those people, whether in a founding team, a research setting or a room of future entrepreneurs. The story began well before the company name. It continues with a team doing the work.