Thoughts and learnings from Cambridge Tech Week 2025

This week I had the chance to spend a day at Cambridge Tech Week — walking the floor at Innovation Alley, meeting founders and investors, attending some insightful sessions, and joining the Meet the spin-outs! fringe event hosted by Innovate UK.

I left with two feelings running in parallel: huge optimism about the breakthroughs coming out of UK universities and startups, and a sharper awareness of the barriers that stop many of these businesses scaling beyond their early years.

For early-stage founders, the lessons from Cambridge are worth paying attention to. Here are my key takeaways.

The scale of innovation is staggering

The sheer variety of technology on display was inspiring. I saw companies like Wave Photonics, pushing the boundaries of next-gen computing by using photonics to speed up chips. Levidian showed how industrial emissions could be turned into clean hydrogen and graphene, helping heavy industry decarbonise. And HutanBio is pioneering carbon-negative biofuels by growing marine microalgae at scale. These are the kinds of advances that could make the UK both more productive and more carbon-efficient in the years ahead.

A few trends stood out:

• AI continues to feature heavily in UK funding — in H1 2025, AI startups raised around $2.4 billion, or 30% of all UK venture capital. But what struck me at Cambridge Tech Week is that the most exciting companies weren’t “AI companies” in the narrow sense. The true wave of LLM-driven AI investment may already be behind us. Instead, AI is now an enabler: breakthroughs in machine learning are helping founders in hardware, medtech, next-gen computing, and climate tech accelerate their plans and reach milestones faster.
• Innovation isn’t just about Cambridge or Oxford anymore. Regions like Scotland and the East of England are building real momentum, though London still captures nearly half of all deals.
• There’s still a gap in regional access. Founders outside the capital often face thinner investor networks and less tailored support, although the Cambridge-Oxford corridor does seem to buck that trend more than most places.

It’s a reminder that while our innovation pipeline is strong, access to the capital and customers needed to commercialise it is still uneven.

From lab bench to business: why support matters

One conversation stuck with me: a researcher developing new quantum sensors told me how difficult it had been to move from publishing papers to pitching investors.

This is a common theme. Being a great academic is not the same as being a founder. Commercialising an idea means raising money, building a team, managing risk, and finding customers — skills few researchers are trained in.

In 2024, only 928 UK startups raised equity for the first time, down nearly 40% from the 2021 peak. That’s a sign of how many potential spin-outs never get off the ground.

”Spin-out: A company formed to commercialise research, expertise, or intellectual property (IP) developed within a university, national lab, or parent company. University spin-outs are typically founded by researchers (or students) to turn publicly funded research into market-ready products or services.”

The good news is that I saw signs of change. Universities are getting better at providing spin-out support — from IP management to investor introductions — and many are partnering more closely with industry, and other universities, to capitalise on opportunities from their academic bases.

But we need to go further. Founders coming from academia need structured, accessible support so they can make the transition efficiently and avoid spending months navigating a fragmented system.

Moving from startup to scaleup: contracts not just cheques

The UK is rightly proud of its startup scene, but we must be honest: our record at scaling businesses is far weaker.

60% of founders rate the UK highly for starting a company, but fewer than 30% say the same about scaling. That’s a huge gap.

Why? One reason is that government support often stops at grants. Grants are useful, but they don’t replace long-term revenue. What founders consistently tell me they need is contracts, not just cheques.

Imagine if more public-sector bodies acted as early adopters of homegrown AI, healthtech, or clean energy solutions. That kind of demand-side support would give startups not just cash, but credibility, customers, and the runway to scale.

For founders, the lesson is to lean on networks and mentors who’ve already navigated the scaleup journey. Too often, capital is chased without building the right support system around it. The best investors aren’t just sources of funding — those aligned with your mission often become your most valuable mentors and advisors. That’s why it pays to be deliberate about your investment strategy, not just opportunistic.

Final thoughts

Cambridge Tech Week confirmed to me both the strengths and the weaknesses of our ecosystem. We have some of the best minds in the world and a pipeline of ideas that could transform industries. But unless we get better at turning those ideas into scaled companies, the value will leak elsewhere.

As a founder-turned-investor, my takeaway is simple: innovation is only half the battle. Access, efficiency, and support are what turn ideas into impact.

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