Interviews with some candidates by lead forensic sponsor Mills & Reeve are continuing to be held on a confidential basis and considerations on the many different categories and contenders will be up for discussion between sponsors up to a week ahead of the presentation dinner.
The initial shortlist published here today reflects the strength of the Cambridge Cluster’s life sciences companies and mirrors the power of all manner of technologies that are thriving in the region, not least the many that have spun out of university environments.
Shortlisted Technology companies: 1956 Individuals, Barocal, Blighter, Common AI, CorrosionRADAR, Egoist Machines, FactTrace, FlexEnable, Kigen, Luminance, Monumo, Pragmatic Semiconductor, Redtail Telematics, Secondmind, Shuffle Energy, Signaloid.
Shortlisted Life Sciences companies: Abselion, Alchemab, Arecor, Astex, Auryx, Bicycle Therapeutics, bit.bio, Broken String Biosciences, Cambridge Cognition, CellCentric, CN Bio, Cyclana Bio, Epitopea, Healx, Metrion Biosciences, Microbiotica, Novogene Europe, Nuclera, NRG Therapeutics, OtoImmune, OutSee, Owlstone Medical, Qureight, RxCelerate, Sortera Bio, SPT LabTech, Syndex Bio, TRIMTECH Therapeutics.
A panel of judges from the award sponsors will meet in August to choose the winners. The sponsors are Mills & Reeve, Arm, AstraZeneca, Barclays, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Network, Cambridge Science Park, Cambridge Spark, Chesterford Research Park, Howard Group, MAG: London Stansted Airport, Marshall of Cambridge, PwC, Quantinuum, Railpen, Savills, St John’s Innovation Centre, the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, and the Wellcome Genome Campus.
So is there another Abcam out there? Another Arm? Time will tell. One indisputable fact recurs - the quality that runs through the entire shortlist and which will be reflected when the crystal obelisks are handed out on September 16.
Torchbearer
We’re also delighted to include the companies who will be judged for the inaugural Cambridge Science & Technology Torchbearer Award, delivered by Innovate Cambridge in collaboration with Cambridge Innovation Capital. The award recognises a new generation of science and technology businesses redefining what successful innovation looks like, where commercial success is inseparable from measurable societal value.
The final shortlist for the Cambridge Science & Technology Torchbearer Award will be unveiled in the next digital edition of Business Weekly.
Guest speaker
Tim Minshall, Dr John C. Taylor Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge and head of the Institute for Manufacturing, has pretty much seen it all in terms of turnkey manufacturing processes, from inspiration to implementation. His research, teaching and outreach are focused on the links between manufacturing and innovation.
One of the displays along the wall of the Institute shows the many and varied products that the organisation has taken from concept to commercialisation over a great many years. It’s a great idea, potentially, but how do we make it - that is the near-constant challenge for IfM.
Prof. Minshall will share some of his insights with guests at the Business Weekly Awards dinner where he will be guest speaker and also hand out the glittering obelisk to winning companies.
Legacy
The Business Weekly Awards has been running for 36 years with past winners including Abcam, Arm, AVEVA, Bicycle Therapeutics, British Sugar, Cambridge Antibody Technology (acquired by AstraZeneca), CSR (acquired by Qualcomm), CuspAI, Darktrace, Domino, Frontier Developments, Horizon Discovery (now Revvity Inc), IQGeo, Paragraf, Quantinuum, Ryanair, Sepura, Treatt and Xaar.
THE SHORTLIST
1956 Individuals
1956 Individuals is a conversational AI platform built by the team at SKC Studios. It features interactive, multilingual AI avatars designed for real-world environments which are now live with Leeds Castle, NHS (Modality) and in pilot phase with a number of major retailers.
The platform enables organisations to turn approved content into live interaction and meaningful action, enhancing engagement while supporting operational efficiency. It is used across experiences, attractions, and public-facing spaces to provide conversational access to information and consistent outcomes at scale.
Abselion
Abselion develops practical measurement tools that deliver fast, reliable biological data without the complexity of traditional systems. Earlier this year, former Mirus Bio CEO Dale Gordon became Chair at Abselion in March 2026, shortly after the company announced it had opened a facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts to support its next stage of development as interest in its Amperia™ protein quantification system extends beyond the UK and Europe.
The Amperia™ benchtop instrument allows scientists to easily quantify antibodies, AAVs, and other proteins directly from crude samples in as little as one minute, providing critical data on the spot, enhancing efficiency and accuracy in life science research and bioprocessing.
Alchemab
Alchemab Therapeutics is a clinical stage drug discovery company pioneering a new approach to medicine, resiliomics, grounded in the biology of human resilience. Rather than focusing on what makes us sick, Alchemab asks why some people unexpectedly stay healthy, turning those insights into novel therapies that conventional drug discovery misses or could never find. At the heart of this work is the Resiliome – a unique dataset of more than half a billion human antibodies collected from resilient individuals. Alchemab’s first asset entered clinical trials in 2025 through a significant licensing deal with Lilly, going from discovery to clinical candidate in less than three years, demonstrating the power of their approach.
The company recently secured £25 million ($34m) additional Series A funding from the British Business Bank to build its clinical pipeline and grow its unique proprietary antibody dataset to more than a billion sequences.
Arecor
Clinical-stage biotech Arecor is developing therapeutics that can reduce the treatment burden and improve outcomes for people living with diabetes, obesity and other cardiometabolic diseases. AIM-quoted Arecor says its lead product AT278 has progressed in both product development and commercial partnering, most notably with the US FDA clinical and regulatory pathway and through partnering with commercial insulin pump device companies as its preferred route to market.
Last year the Chesterford Research Park business unveiled an $11m funding deal with Florida based Ligand Pharmaceuticals and also revealed a co-development agreement with Sequel Med Tech LLC, which is anchored in New Hampshire.
Astex
Astex Pharmaceuticals on Cambridge Science Park has tapped into a gold mine through a mega-deal with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, in the field of breast cancer. The payback could be worth in excess of $490 million plus tiered royalties on net sales of medicines arising from the collaboration (July 2026).
Astex is dedicated to the discovery and development of novel small molecule therapeutics for oncology and diseases of the central nervous system – has entered into an exclusive, worldwide research collaboration and license agreement with Genentech to identify small molecule drug candidates with selective inhibitory activity as potential treatments for the disease. Astex is developing a proprietary pipeline of novel therapies and has a number of partnered products being developed under collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies.
Auryx
Auryx is leveraging University of Cambridge research on sound for wellness monitoring as an alternative to other sensing wearables. The company – founded by an all-female team of scientists and engineers – has developed a platform that extracts health insights from sound, enabling everyday devices, like earbuds, to capture a broader range of physiological signals than any optical wearable on the market. The technology is built on a decade of research conducted at the University at the intersection of machine learning and audio diagnostics.
By analysing acoustic signals from the heart, lungs, and blood flow, the company enables existing microphones in consumer hardware to capture physiological data in real time – without requiring additional sensors or changes in user behaviour.
Barocal
Cambridge University spin-out Barocal is commercialising efficient, refrigerant-gas-free cooling and heating technology. At scale, it is said that Barocal’s technology will significantly reduce heating and cooling sector emissions through efficiency gains and avoiding gas refrigerants.
The company is initially targeting fast-growing applications, including data centre cooling and commercial refrigeration, tapping into a $450 billion global HVAC market expected to swell to $577bn by 2033. Barocal has already won major accolades, including the $1 million 2025 TERA-Award.
Bicycle Therapeutics
NASDAQ-quoted Pharma company, Bicycle Therapeutics is developing a novel class of medicines, referred to as Bicycle® molecules, for diseases that are underserved by existing therapeutics.
Part of the portfolio involves nuking cancer. To that end, Bicycle accesses reprocessed uranium (RepU for the process. The company was recently praised for its approach by a visiting government delegation touring the company’s Granta Park HQ in the UK..
bit.bio
bit.bio is a synthetic biology company focused on coding cells for research, drug discovery, and next-generation cures. Spun out of the University of Cambridge in 2016, the company reprogrammes human stem cells into specific, mature cell types using a proprietary technology called opti-ox.™
bit.bio’s cells are used by academic researchers as well as corporate scientific teams across Big Pharma and the life science industry generally plus CRO networks, to help unlock the secrets of a vast range of maladies affecting global populations. Headquartered at Babraham Research Campus, bit.bio’s Board is chaired by Lord David Prior, former chairman of NHS England.
Blighter
Blighter’s patented electronic scanning array radars identify small and covert targets in complex environments, supporting mission‑critical operations across defence, homeland security, critical national infrastructure, and energy sectors worldwide.
The radars use ultra‑reliable, low‑power electronic scanning array antennas and advanced AI‑driven processing to detect, classify, and track people, vehicles, and near‑ground airborne threats at ranges of up to 32 km. Since launching the world’s first non‑rotating, solid‑state electronic scanning array micro‑Doppler ground radar in 2003, Blighter has remained at the forefront of radar innovation.
Broken String Biosciences
Broken String Biosciences is a genomics company that develops next-generation cell and gene therapies through its proprietary DNA break-mapping platform, INDUCE-seq™. Its platform overcomes the limitation of ‘off-target’ edits (i.e., unintended changes) that can occur in the genome during the editing process with renowned gene editing tools such as the pioneering CRISPR-Cas9 platform.
The INDUCE-seq™ technology novelly allows drug developers to evaluate any changes and assess a gene-editing tool’s specificity. Tthe process is said to facilitate novel therapeutic development by allowing the developer to unlock new targets within the genome. The company says that INDUCE-seq® accelerates early-stage gene editing therapeutic development by cutting candidate screening timelines from months to days.
Cambridge Cognition
AIM-quoted Cambridge Cognition is a neuroscience technology company whose digital cognitive assessments drive scientific discovery, accelerate drug development and improve patient care. It recently unveiled a collaboration with Finland company OURA – maker of the world’s leading smart ring – on a new institutional review board (IRB)-approved brain health study.
Conducted through Oura Labs, an experimental innovation platform within the Oura App, the study pairs Cambridge Cognition’s scientifically validated digital cognitive assessments with Oura’s continuous physiological data. Cambridge Cognition’s scientifically validated digital cognitive assessments from CANTAB Pathway™ have been integrated into the Oura platform as short in-app tasks, specifically CANTAB One and CANTAB Insight.
CellCentric
Transatlantic biotech CellCentric has now raised over a third of a $billion in 12 months following completion of an oversubscribed $220 million Series D round backed by global heavyweights (May 2026). The money will finance the advance of pivotal trials of Inobrodib in Multiple Myeloma, a potentially fatal form of blood cancer, and fund the expansion of inobrodib into additional combination and maintenance treatment settings.
This latest financing was led by Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, with participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sofinnova Partners and HBM Healthcare, alongside existing investors RA Capital Management, Forbion, Pfizer, Avego Bioscience Capital and American Cancer Society BrightEdge.
CN Bio
CN Bio provides Organ-on-a-chip (OOC) systems and solutions that accelerate drug discovery and development workflows. Its benchtop PhysioMimix OOC range accurately mimics human physiology in the lab. Using advanced in vitro human organ models, these systems enable more accurate predictions of human drug responses to support the development of novel therapeutics with increased efficiency, whilst relieving the dependence on animal studies.
These models provide insights into crucial aspects of preclinical drug development, including drug bioavailability, toxicology and disease modelling, providing information on how drugs will perform in patients and reduce the risk of costly late-stage failures in the clinic.
CommonAI
Founded by Anthemis and Cambridge AI Venture Partners, CommonAI brings together startups, enterprises, engineers and academics to develop, test and deploy AI systems at scale through its collaborative engineering and compute platform. Serial University-connected entrepreneur, Sir Andy Hopper, chairs the CommonAI board. Through CommonAI membership, AI-enabled start-ups and enterprises will gain access to world-class IP including models, weights, framework software, training data and hardware designs, while also gaining affordable access to critical GPU resources. Together, these capabilities will allow UK and European businesses to develop AI-enabled propositions that can successfully compete at global scale.
CommonAI’s founders are some of those behind Cambridge successes that include lowRISC CIC (stewards of the OpenTitan project), CHERI Alliance and Raspberry Pi.
CorrosionRADAR
CorrosionRADAR is a leading global provider of smart corrosion monitoring and analytics solutions for critical industrial asset integrity issues such as corrosion under insulation (CUI). The monitoring data is delivered through the CLARITY dashboard, enabling clear visualisation and analysis and helping operators better understand corrosion risks and make more informed decisions about maintaining critical infrastructure.
Shareholders in the company include Saudi Aramco Ventures, Dow, Kanoo Ventures and Mercia Ventures. Its technology has established an impressive foothold in the Middle East and the technology provides a platform for significant global growth. CorrosionRADAR is both a software and hardware tech company and the next stage of its ambitious growth plans is to target and expand its customer footprint in the North American market.
Cyclana Bio
Cyclana Bio is addressing a need to better serve millions of women by developing physiologically relevant models and utilising AI-driven multi-scale data integration to enable the discovery of druggable targets to improve treatment outcomes. The business has demonstrated the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in endometriosis, where dysregulation of the ECM causes inflammation and loss of tissue function.
Until now, drug development strategies to treat endometriosis have focused on intracellular mechanisms, failing to target the interaction between cells and the ECM, and have resulted in sub-optimal treatment efficacy. The company is focused on building whole tissue models of disease. Dr. Léa Wenger, CEO and Co-Founder of Cyclana Bio, says: “Our ultimate goal is to address a need to better serve millions of women suffering with a debilitating condition and develop life-changing therapies.
Egoist Machines
Egoist Machines was founded by Erin McGurk and David Khachaturov at the University of Cambridge. The founders invented ‘AI Passport’ as a way for people to bring what an app needs to know about them into new apps, websites and AI tools in one click - instead of filling out another onboarding flow or teaching another chatbot from scratch.
AI assistants store large amounts of personal context, but users often do not know what those systems know about them or how that data moves. AI Passport gives users a single place to review and control that context. Once users activate AI Passport, they can establish connections to preferred AI assistants and other apps that rely on personal data, including email, calendar, work productivity apps, and wearable devices.
When a connected app receives or creates new information, such as details for a trip or a new writing preference, that information can appear in the user’s AI Passport inbox. The user can decide whether it can be shared with other apps, kept only in the original app, or deleted entirely.
Epitopea
Epitopea is developing accessible off-the-shelf RNA-based immunotherapies for use in hard-to-treat cancers by targeting a new class of untapped tumour-specific antigens, known as Cryptigen™ TSAs, that are broadly shared across multiple patients with the same tumour type. Cryptigen™ TSAs are shared, non-mutated, aberrantly expressed antigens derived from what were thought to be non-coding regions of the genome or ‘junk DNA’.
Epitopea is backed by a leading transatlantic life science investor syndicate that includes Advent Life Sciences, CTI Life Sciences, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Le Fonds de Solidarité FTQ, Investissement Québec, adMare BioInnovations, serial biotech entrepreneur Jonathan Milner, IRICoR, the Harrington Discovery Institute and Novateur Ventures.
FactTrace
Loubna Bouarfa, who built and sold OKRA.ai, earlier this year unveiled FactTrace at the Maxwell Centre at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. FactTrace is an infrastructure that makes important facts recognisable wherever they are published. It generates a small digital fingerprint for each fact that matters — like a barcode. That fingerprint makes it possible to check whether something written by a person or generated by AI still matches the original fact, even if the wording has changed. FactTrace is currently self-funded through Bouarfa’s incubator, Cervox.ai.
FlexEnable
Originating in the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, FlexEnable develops ultra-thin and lightweight active liquid crystal optics and organic transistor technologies on plastic, with applications for flexible optics in AI and AR glasses, as well as flexible displays.
The organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) backplane process developed by FlexEnable, allows transistors to be manufactured at less than 100°C – by far the lowest temperature process for transistor manufacturing in the world. This allows, for the first time, commonly available and optically ideal flexible bio-degradable substrates such as TAC film to be used instead of glass. FlexEnable’s technology is used to make active-matrix flexible displays and flexible active liquid crystal (LC) optical films which are thin, light and conformable to almost any surface. The company says that its OTFT display technology is already on the market today and is incorporated into a consumer product.
Healx
Healx is toasted worldwide as the first AI-native rare disease pharma company, advancing breakthrough therapies from discovery through clinical development and commercial launch. With 95 per cent of rare diseases still lacking an approved treatment, Healx’s mission is to use AI to change this. Combining its proprietary Intelligent Rare Disease Engine and agentic platform with deep drug discovery expertise, the company is advancing a growing franchise of breakthrough medicines for patients in need.
The company was founded by Tim Guilliams, PhD, from the Chemistry Department at Cambridge University, and David Brown, PhD, co-inventor of Viagra and former Global Head of Drug Discovery at Roche.
Kigen
Kigen works with manufacturers worldwide to provide secure, GSMA-certified eSIMs and management solutions across consumer, M2M, and IoT environments, with direct access to more than 200 terrestrial and satellite networks. Kigen’s platform is increasingly delivered through a SaaS model, giving customers flexible, usage-based access to OS licensing, management tools, and professional services. The company was close to clinching a prized category in last autumn’s Business Weekly Awards and recently raised £10 million to accelerate its next phase of growth in the EU and the US.
Luminance
Legal AI company Luminance was developed by world-leading AI experts from the University of Cambridge. Its end-to-end AI platform enhances every touchpoint a business has with its contracts, from generation to negotiation and post-execution analysis. Luminance’s technology has been used in a number of world-firsts, including becoming the first AI to completely automate the negotiation of a contract between two parties, and the first use of AI at London’s highest criminal court, the Old Bailey.
The company has expanded globally both in terms of offices and contracts. Australia’s oldest and largest family-owned dairy company, Bulla Dairy Foods, has just adopted Luminance to enhance contract negotiation, improve visibility across agreements and drive efficiency across its legal and procurement functions.
Metrion Biosciences
Metrion Biosciences is a specialist preclinical contract research organisation and a global leader in ion channel services. It was founded in 2015 through a management buyout of the research division of Xention Limited and its ion channel collaboration programmes. The Metrion team has developed a worldwide reputation for providing high quality drug discovery services on innovative and challenging ion channel targets for customers on a fee-for-service or collaboration basis. Metrion is also a leading provider of GLP and non-GLP cardiac safety profiling, cardiac translational assays and neuronal translational assays.
Microbiotica
Microbiotica was established as a spin-out of co-founder Dr Trevor Lawley’s laboratory at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the world leading genomics centre founded to deliver the Human Genome Project. Microbiotica celebrated successes in both lead clinical programmes; MB310 in ulcerative colitis and MB097 in advanced melanoma. Its disruptive science integrating genomics, bioinformatics and clinical research is translating microbiome discoveries into a novel therapeutic modality for treating disease. All primary and secondary objectives were met in its recent advanced melanoma (MELODY-1) Phase 1b trial.
Monumo
Cambridge engineering AI pioneer Monumo recently promoted former CTO Dr Jarek Rzepecki to the CEO role. Monumo says the new chief exec was the driving force behind the Anser AI Engine created by Monumo. It is a purpose-built AI platform creating complex engineering designs for production. The platform is said to be creating significant commercial advantage for leading global industrial and automotive manufacturers as well as innovative startups. Monumo is working with customers in the US, Europe and Asia. It initially focused on electric motor systems but has greatly expanded its sphere of influence.
Novogene Europe
From its Cambridge Omics Centre, supported by European laboratory capability, including Munich, Novogene Europe helps more than 1800 academic, biotech and biopharma accounts across the UK and Europe access advanced genomic and multiomics services. In H1 2026, it participated in 230+ European scientific events, reflecting strong regional engagement and cross-border reach.
Earlier this month it strengthened its position as a multiomics partner with the launch of its Untargeted Metabolomics Service through the Cambridge Omics Centre. This new capability is designed to help researchers across the UK and Europe to connect molecular data with biological function by adding metabolite-level insight to genomics, transcriptomics, microbiome and broader life science studies.
Nuclera
Nuclera enables rapid, high-quality functional protein access to accelerate drug discovery. Its eProtein Discovery™ system combines cell-free expression, digital microfluidics, and robust screening data, empowering scientists to perform multiplex protein screening, characterisation, and small-scale expression in-house.
Over the past year Nuclera has extended Series C funding to $87m, expanded its global footprint, launched an antibody triage service to advance AI-driven discovery, collaborated with leadXpro to accelerate structure-based drug design, established APAC distributor agreements and installed eProtein Discovery at leading Taiwan Universities.
NRG Therapeutics
NRG Therapeutics is on a mission to develop medicines to slow or halt the progression of diseases such as MND/ALS and Parkinson’s. Its potentially transformative treatments, based on pioneering science, are bringing new hope to people living with devastating neurodegenerative disorders. In H2 2025, NRG raised £50m in a series B and scaled its operations, attracting senior talent to head clinical and development functions. In 2026 its lead asset, NRG5051 started a First-in-Human clinical trial. A first-in-class, orally bioavailable and CNS-penetrant medicine, NRG5051 aims to restore mitochondrial health - a fundamental driver of nerve cell damage in MND/ALS.
OtoImmune
Cambridge entrepreneurs Jason Mellad and Daniel Rooke brought OtoImmune out of stealth earlier this year and launched mOI Health – a new tech platform that brings together immune health testing, longitudinal health tracking, AI-powered insights, enterprise educational resources and clinician-ready reports in one place, giving people a clearer picture of their immune health over time.
Members access the platform through a secure digital interface that integrates health data, test results and lifestyle information while delivering personalised immune insights.
OutSee
OutSee’s Nomaly is a next-generation target discovery platform, harnessing the power of AI to uncover therapeutic targets that existing methods can’t. Rather than relying on statistical correlation, OutSee’s predictive, ‘genomics-first’ platform draws conclusions from the fundamental biology of the genome. Since closing a £2.5m seed round in January, OutSee has bolstered its in-house discovery pipeline, with projects in neurology, rare, and metabolic diseases, as well as a collaboration with o2h for OutSee’s lead target.
Owlstone Medical
Owlstone Medical is the global leader in Breath Biopsy® for applications in early disease detection and precision medicine. The company’s vision is to save 100,000 lives by realizing the enormous promise of breath-based diagnostics through the development and application of Breath Biopsy®, a unique platform capable of both biomarker discovery and use in routine clinical testing.
The platform includes ReCIVA®, a proprietary sample collection device that can take stable breath samples anywhere, the world’s only commercial-scale Breath Biopsy Laboratory located in Cambridge, and the Breath Biopsy VOC Atlas, the most extensive catalogue of identified volatile organic compounds (VOCs) commonly found on breath.
Pragmatic Semiconductor
Pragmatic is redefining how chips are designed and manufactured. Its flexible integrated circuits (FlexICs) replace rigid silicon with ultra-thin, physically flexible electronics, produced at low temperatures using fewer materials and less energy. This enables faster, more cost-effective production and a dramatically lower carbon footprint. By making chips that can bend, conform and integrate into everyday objects, Pragmatic is unlocking new applications at edge and item level – from smart packaging to connected consumer goods. This approach challenges traditional semiconductor constraints, creating a scalable, sustainable pathway for embedding intelligence everywhere, not just in high-performance devices.
Qureight
Qureight’s vision is to accelerate the time to impact of new life-saving therapies in lung and heart disease. The company’s AI-powered data and imaging curation platform enables the analysis of clinical imaging and healthcare data from patients with lung and heart disease, helping its customers bring treatments to market, faster. Following successful funding rounds and increasing revenue streams, Qureight has more than doubled headcount to 50 people in the past 12 months and has begun to penetrate new therapeutic indications, including pulmonary hypertension and bronchiectasis.
Redtail Telematics
Since 2011 Redtail’s telematics devices have been used to train young drivers to drive more safely. More than this, the company is exceptionally sustainable. Independent analysis shows that in excess of net 100m tonnes of CO2 was never released owing to the improved drivingRedtail’s devices helped to give.
Among many attributes, Redtailhas been commissioned to build a special purpose, country-wide heat mapping of interference sources in GPS and other communications bands to boost vehicle tracking and improve jamming avoidance.
RxCelerate
RxCelerate’s mission is to improve people’s lives through scientific excellence and innovation in drug discovery and development. Since 2013, RxCelerate has supported 27 programmes to clinical candidate, with 16 assets progressing to patient-dosed clinical trials globally. This year, the company launched RxPlorer, a MD/ML-powered protein metastate discovery platform, delivered its first Experimental Medicine programme enabling earlier human translational insight, and formed a strategic partnership with Constructive Bio to advance a new generation of biologics.
As the first metastate discovery service of its kind, RxPlorer transforms drug discovery by expanding the druggable genome. Its disruptive impact is proven through success against Eotaxin-1, a previously undruggable asthma target, and a challenging oncology target now advancing to hit-to-lead.
Secondmind
Cambridge AI scaleup Secondmind is proving that homegrown Engineering AI can compete – and win – in the world’s most demanding automotive markets. Its software tackles growing development complexity, cutting calibration time by over 50 per cent and reducing simulation runs by up to 80 per cent. It is trusted by global giants including Mazda – a strategic investor and partner – and other OEMs and tier 1 suppliers worldwide. Secondmind recently secured a reseller partnership with SCAE - the firm’s first-ever agreement with a non-Japanese technology company - to accelerate expansion in Japan. In the US, Secondmind landed a flagship Tier 1 customer, opened a Detroit base, and is building a growing pipeline of passenger and commercial vehicle partners.
Shuffle Energy
Shuffle Energy specialises in driving flexibility in heat assets such as heat pumps and hot water tanks and is closing the “spark gap” by intelligently controlling electrified heating and cooling systems to participate in energy markets, cutting electricity bills by up to 30 per cent and making low-carbon heating cost-competitive with gas. The company has been recognised globally as a top 30 energy solution by Free Electrons, ranked in the top 5 per cent of clean technologies in an Innovate UK competition, and named as a company to watch in another competition. Shuffle has secured contracts with leading OEMs including NIBE and Dimplex, alongside every UK grid operator, including NESO.
Signaloid
Signaloid has built a revolutionary computing platform that is changing the face of computing in ways potentially more impactful than GPUs today. The company has partnerships, deployments, and ongoing trials with ABB, Bosch, Boeing, and CERN in the engineering domain, as well as partnerships and deployment negotiations with large financial institutions such as MUFG in Japan.
The team’s previous industrial experience includes Apple, Bell Labs, CERN, Google X, IBM, and NEC, with team members drawn from institutions including Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Oxford. The team’s advisors include former executives and senior leaders from ARM, AWS, Intel, Morgan Stanley, and Oracle.
Sortera Bio
Sortera Bio is leveraging its ultra-high-throughput screening technology to engineer antibodies with conditional binding properties where traditional methods fail. Its Deep Screening platform pairs SPR-grade binding measurements with full-length sequence across hundreds of millions of variants in a single experiment, building in selectivity, conditional activity, and high affinity without sequential rounds of optimisation.
Sortera is actively partnering with big pharma, AI-first techbios and innovative biotech companies to develop molecules with hard-to-engineer properties. In July 2025, Sortera entered a strategic collaboration with AstraZeneca to accelerate the discovery of novel biologics, building on the MRC LMB/AstraZeneca Blue Sky initiative through which Deep Screening was originally developed. Sortera raised £5.5M in 2024 to commercialise the platform and has since secured non-dilutive funding to build its second-generation Deep Screening platform – a wholly-owned, vertically integrated system to extend the technology’s scale and resolution.
SPT Labtech
Over the past 12 months, SPT Labtech has forged vital automation partnerships with global pioneers like Illumina, Twist Bioscience, EMBL GeneCore, and 10x Genomics. By integrating itsfirefly® liquid handling platform with their advanced workflows, we have eliminated manual errors and brought walkaway automation to decentralized healthcare. This collective ecosystem enables international researchers to scale oncology discovery at pace, proving collaboration is the sole catalyst for human health innovation.
Syndex Bio
Syndex Bio is be shortlisted for pioneering mcPCR, a first-in-class platform that directly amplifies both DNA methylation and the four-base genetic code, overcoming a fundamental limitation of PCR. This breakthrough enables simpler, faster and more sensitive testing of non-invasive clinical samples, transforming early detection and monitoring of cancer and chronic disease. Our oversubscribed $15.5 million seed round led by ARCH Venture Partners and a board including Grail’s former CCO underscore strong global confidence in our Cambridge-based team and our ambition to build a globally relevant diagnostics company.
Prior to founding Syndex Bio in 2022, Geoff Smith spent over a decade at Illumina as Global Head of Technology Development, where he led the invention and development of the benchtop MiSeq platform, the world’s most popular sequencer, as well as the upfront library prep and sequencing chemistry that drove an approximately 100,000‑fold reduction in sequencing costs and the ‘$1000 genome’. Before Illumina, he played a key role at Solexa, directing enzymology efforts that delivered the first whole human genome using NGS chemistry.
TRIMTECH Therapeutics
Backed by a world-class investor syndicate, TRIMTECH is pioneering a differentiated approach to neurodegenerative and inflammatory diseases: novel CNS-penetrant small molecule degraders that selectively clear disease-causing toxic protein aggregates, while sparing healthy monomeric proteins.
TRIMTECH continues to progress, recently adding investors Johnson & Johnson Innovation (JJDC) and BGF bringing its seed round to $47 million, and expanding into space at Babraham Research Campus. Key Board appointments including Alison Lawton as Chair of the Board have strengthened the globally recognised team. This momentum positions TRIMTECH to advance its TRIMTAC® and TRIMGLUE® portfolio to deliver accessible therapies for neurodegeneration.
Image:Tim Minshall, Dr John C. Taylor Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge. Credit: Business Weekly © Phil Mynott
