The UK’s youngest self-made billionaire has urged the country to consider more innovative ways to fund scientific research after making one of the largest single donations to a non-Oxbridge research institution in history. 

Ben Delo’s £20 million pledge to the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences (LIMS) will see the Mayfair-based centre receive £10 million upfront and a further £10 million once it raises the same amount itself.

Aside from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, only five UK higher education institutions (King’s College London, Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, London Business School and the University of Strathclyde) have ever received private gifts larger than £20 million.

Founded in 2011 by the American physicist Thomas Fink, LIMS is based in the Royal Institution, occupying the rooms that housed chemist Michael Faraday. In recent years it has been one of the largest sponsors of exiled Russian and Ukrainian physicists and now is home to several leading US researchers.

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The gift from Delo, who co-founded the Hong Kong-based BitMEX cryptocurrency trading platform in 2014, kicks off a fundraising drive that seeks to raise £60 million for an endowment.

Speaking to ����Vlog, Delo said he chose the institute because he wanted to see funds used directly to support world-class researchers.

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“I would like to see LIMS winning Fields Medals and Nobel Prizes – they are already doing some world-class things and I want to help,” said Delo.

Asked why he was pledging such a large amount to a relatively small institute rather than a more established university, Delo said LIMS’ research-only model appealed, adding: “They are attracting top researchers but not subjecting them to teaching and administrative duties.

“They are also approaching research in an innovative way – even offering coaching on research. In the same way that far-sighted coaches have changed sport, LIMS can revolutionise academia,” he said, criticising what he called the UK’s “lacklustre and inconsistent approach to scientific funding”.

Delo, who graduated with a double first in mathematics and computer science from the University of Oxford, has previously given £5 million to Worcester College, Oxford. He has made significant contributions to the Free Speech Union and the Committee for Academic Freedom, as well as £25 million to a charity he founded in 2020 to support young people with autism.

In 2019, he signed the Giving Pledge created by Bill Gates, his then-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett, which has seen hundreds of the world’s wealthiest people promise to give away at least half of their fortune during their lifetime.

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In 2022, he and his BitMEX co-founders pleaded guilty to US banking violations, and each agreed to pay a $10 million (£7.5 million) fine, with Delo sentenced to 30 months’ probation. In March 2025, he was pardoned by US president Donald Trump.

Delo became involved with LIMS a year ago after agreeing to sponsor a fellowship shortly after the Trump administration announced plans to radically reduce scientific funding, which were later blocked by Congress.

That uncertainty about how fundamental science would be supported had prompted Delo and other tech moguls to consider how they could intervene with targeted philanthropy, said LIMS’ director Thomas Fink, who was previously based at Caltech.

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“We’ve seen a lot of interest in what we do from technology founders and billionaires who understand the transformative power of basic research. They’re looking for appropriate ways to fund basic science,” said Fink, whose institute funds three-year fellowships, mostly in theoretical physics but also pure maths and artificial intelligence.

Although technology billionaires have generously supported universities, many have expressed some dissatisfaction with the generalist teaching-and-research model established by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 19th-century Germany and popularised by US universities in the 20th century, said Fink.

“We are stuck, almost frozen, in an accident due to the German model,” he explained, adding that “technologists see that we need new models of how we organise and fund science”.

“We are focused on researchers working full-time on research – a model which hasn’t been seen in the UK for some time, with almost all research done by universities. Tech founders are very interested in our case for a more innovative model for supporting research,” he said.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com