Cambridge Tech Week 2026: three takeaways for UK deep tech

This week I was at Cambridge Tech Week again, but from a different perspective this year. Instead of just walking the floor, I was on stage as part of the Deep Tech Playbook (2026–2030) panel, talking through what it’ll take to scale UK deep tech over the next five years.

There’s plenty here for early-stage founders to take from it. Here’s what stood out.

The story we don’t tell: UK deep tech’s visibility problem

On the panel with me were Innovate UK’s Tom Adeyoola, Northern Gritstone’s Joanne Hosker, Dr Christina Yan Zhang of the Metaverse Institute, and Owen Thompson of Cambridge Future Tech, a group who’ve each seen a different side of what makes UK deep tech businesses succeed or stall. Cambridge Tech Week is always a useful gauge of where UK deep tech actually stands, rather than where we’d like it to stand.

On the panel, someone asked why the UK doesn’t produce more household name success stories in deep tech. Put on the spot, and rather tongue in cheek, I said what we need is a Netflix documentary following UK deep tech founders, in the same way Drive to Survive turned me, someone with zero prior interest in Formula One, into a person who now watches qualifying on a Saturday morning. If a documentary can do that for motorsport, there’s no reason the same trick couldn’t work for a founder building something extraordinary in a lab!

It got some laughs, but there’s a serious point underneath it. Estonia has built an entire founder culture around one company. Skype’s exit gave the country a single, undeniable proof point, and a generation of Estonian founders grew up believing they could be next. The UK has several equivalents sitting right under its nose. DeepMind. Oxford Ionics, which sold to IonQ in the US for $1 billion. [1] Wayve, the Cambridge spinout building AI for self-driving cars. OQC, which just closed a £260 million round. [2] None of these are small stories, yet most people outside the industry couldn’t name a single one.

It isn’t that the UK lacks proof points, it’s that we don’t do enough with the ones we already have. A PhD student sat on a promising idea, or someone tinkering on something at home in the evenings, needs to see that this path leads somewhere. Right now, that story mostly stays within the industry rather than reaching the people who’d be inspired by it.

A changing crowd: pre-seed and seed step forward

Away from the panel, the make-up of the event itself told its own story. Last year, Innovation Alley was dominated by later-stage companies, mostly Series B and beyond, further along than you’d expect from an event built to showcase what’s coming next. This year, the balance had shifted noticeably towards pre-seed and seed-stage teams.

That shift suggests the pipeline behind the next DeepMind or OQC is genuinely refilling, and that the enthusiasm on stage is translating into people actually starting companies, not just talking about wanting to.

The bigger number: what the Mansion House Accord could unlock

The other thread running through the panel was funding, and specifically the Mansion House Accord, the agreement that aims to get more UK pension capital flowing into private markets.

Here’s my take on how the numbers stack up:

Innovate UK: just over £1 billion a year in grant funding [3]
New scale-up fund: another £1 billion earmarked for deep tech [4]
Combined: £2 billion flowing into a UK venture ecosystem estimated to be worth around £10 billion (according to the British Business Bank)
Mansion House Accord potential: an estimated £25 billion of pension capital unlocked into private markets [5]

That’s more than 10 times the combined weight of the grant funding and the scale-up fund, and it’s capital that already exists rather than capital someone still has to go and raise. Progress against those commitments has been slower than hoped, which is exactly why it came up on the panel. [6]

France offers a working example of what happens when a country actually pulls that lever. Its Tibi scheme has unlocked €6.3 billion of private capital so far, with a €13 billion target set for this year alone. [7] It’s not a coincidence that France is also home to Mistral, one of the most closely watched AI companies anywhere right now. If the UK wants to keep pace in fields like AI, progress on pension reform needs to move considerably faster than it currently is.

Timely proof of the point: only last week, Mistral raised €3 billion in a Samsung-led round - Europe’s largest ever tech funding round. [8]

Two problems, one fix

We tend to treat storytelling and funding as separate conversations, but on the evidence of this panel, they’re the same one. Founders need to see, concretely, that building something ambitious here gets recognised and rewarded, and they need the capital already sat on the sidelines to actually start moving. Better stories about DeepMind, Oxford Ionics, Wayve and OQC won’t close a £23 billion funding gap on their own. Unlocking pension capital won’t fix a culture that doesn’t celebrate its own successes either.

Final thoughts

Cambridge Tech Week made it clear that solving one without the other only gets the UK deep tech scene halfway there. The talent and the ambition are both already in the room. What’s missing is the push, on both fronts, to match them.