#21toWatch winners for 2024 are revealed at ceremony celebrating innovation
The Top21 have been revealed at the sixth annual #21toWatch awards, highlighting standout individuals, game-changing companies and world-leading innovations from across Cambridge and the East of England.
A go-to guide to the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators in the region, the awards are organised by cofinitive and supported by the Cambridge Independent.
The ceremony, at The Bradfield Centre on Cambridge Science Park, featured 60-second elevator pitch style speeches from each of the 21 winners before an audience of business leaders and figures from the world of science and technology.
Since its beginnings in 2018, #21toWatch alumni have included start-ups that have grown into world-leading companies such as CMR Surgical, Riverlane, Paragraf, Flusso, Colorifix, Unitary, VividQ, Broken String Biosciences, Xampla, Sano Genetics, SATAVIA, Porotech and Cambridge Gan Devices.
The total amount of investment in #21toWatch alumni has surpassed 1.036 billion - and that figure excludes undisclosed sums and private equity but does include the incredible £621,383,288 invested in 2019 winner, CMR Surgical, the surgical robotics unicorn..
Medical innovations, sustainability, agritech and AI were all represented strongly in the Top21. Early disease detection and surgical advancements were high on the agenda, while cleantech innovations included exciting battery developments.
Entrepreneur Faye Holland, who created #21toWatch, said: “The #21toWatch alumni list reads like the Who’s Who of successful British entrepreneurship with previous winners already huge contributors to a better future.
“With every new awards, I think it’s going to be impossible to trump the previous year – but it always happens as the level of ingenuity never decreases. And with the work of our partners and judges we are consistently picking the right businesses to watch - in last year alone, which was a particularly difficult year for investment, our alumni raised over £110m in investments and funding which is simply incredible.
“It is a genuine thrill to see the companies and the people behind them progress. We are honoured to be there at the start of each journey.”
#21toWatch has celebrated and promoted more than 1,700 game-changing start-ups, ground-breaking innovations and standout individuals in the last five years.
And after being named in the #21toWatch Top21, more than 42 per cent have received much-needed seed and Series A funding.
Nominations to #21toWatch can come from anywhere and are open all year. They are then pored over and scrutinised before a longlist is drawn up and eventually a shortlist.
The final Top21 were selected from a shortlist of 40 out of 301 applications - and across a range of sub-sectors spanning aerospace, insurtech, augmented reality, AI and biotechnology.
The judges change each year and for 2024 included:
- Jon Bradford, managing partner at Dynamo Ventures, an experienced early-stage investor, founder of multiple accelerators globally, including the first outside of the US;
- Fiona Nielsen, CEO of Neurolentech GmbH, and a serial entrepreneur in life sciences, mentor and advisor to science and technology start-ups in Cambridge; and
- Nitin Patel, CEO and founder of Impact Management Consultancy and a mentor at Cambridge Judge Business School.
People
Ahmed Waraky, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and co-founder of K-Stem, who is directing research that focuses on machine learning and single-cell omics to advance stem cell transplantation and personalised medicine.
Alicia Showering, CEO of BugBiome, who is dedicated to developing natural and durable microbiome-based insect repellents.
Mark Golab, co-founder of Cambridge Surgical Models (CSM), a start-up focusing on manufacturing a new generation of artificial anatomical models for surgical training.
Bakul Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Deliver Biosciences, developing nanoparticle delivery vectors for targeted and specific delivery of payloads to reprogramme cells in vivo, curing fatal diseases in a fraction of the time and cost compared to existing curative therapies.
Jack Chengzhi Guo, cofounder of Protonera with Prof Erwin Reisner, which promises a new way to treat waste plastics. Based on interdisciplinary research at the University of Cambridge, their technology turns waste plastics into green hydrogen and valuable organics.
Nadia Radzman, a plant biologist working on rehabilitating forgotten legumes such as the African yam bean back into the food system, having discovered that they can greatly reduce our nitrogen use and increase sustainable food sources, since legumes work with microbes in the soil to take nitrogen from the air and create their own fertiliser. Nadia is a co-founder of a start-up that accelerates genetic improvements in challenging legume crops.
Paolo Bombelli who has pioneered the development with colleagues of a novel technology capable of generating electricity from the photosynthesis of algae. This novel technology can substitute portable batteries for powering billions of small electronic devices.
Companies
BeyondMath is using AI to solve the complex simulation of physics in engineering design orders of magnitude faster, providing reductions in time, cost and environmental impact when taking designs to production. Its founders were part of the team at Evi Technologies that built the AI that was acquired by Amazon and turned into Alexa.
Cambridge Vision Technology is a start-up working on technology to enable the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease using retinal scanning. Its hardware device and integrated software platform paves the way for cost-effective non-invasive mass screenings.
Cellexcel has created a novel process to manufacture water-resistant bio-composite materials. These will replace conventional composites such as fibreglass and carbon fibre, as well as plastics and possibly metal.
ExpressionEdits’ proprietary intronization platform recodes transgenes to better resemble natural genes, leading to significant improvement in protein production – a key challenge for recombinant proteins and DNA medicines
Kuano combines state-of-the-art simulation and AI to add quantum detail to structure-based drug discovery, helping to enable the design of next generation medicines.
Remedium Energy is developing a new carbon capture technology - the first of its kind to make the process of capturing carbon dioxide profitable. The novel battery operates by capturing carbon dioxide from the air or from high emitting cement/steel plants to store as electricity. The technology provides up to $50 per tonne of carbon dioxide captures and provides a solution for the renewable energy storage problem.
Vector Bioscience has a platform technology tailoring nanomaterials for drug delivery applications. These nanomaterials are MOFs (metal organic frameworks) that can store 10 times more molecules than other encapsulation methods and are designed and tailored for effective and targeted delivery.
Things (Innovations)
EPIHERD, from Antler Bio, is a platform harnessing gene expression data and AI to evaluate the status of livestock and prescribe targeted husbandry interventions to increase performance, efficiency, welfare and sustainability.
Gus, from Autopickr, is an automated asparagus picker incorporating cutting-edge AI and navigation technologies, robust robotics and new cutting technology to optimise the harvesting process.
Heartfelt Technologies is an automatic, AI supported, non-contact telemonitoring solution for heart failure patients. It can help identify patients who are deteriorating long before they would need hospitalisation, meaning effective drugs can be delivered at home.
Molyon has developed a new cathode material to enable high energy-density and long-life lithium-sulfur batteries. This opens up fundamentally new modes of transport and facilitates the net-zero transition.
Tenyks, a University of Cambridge spin-out, has created an ‘AI doctor’ resolving issues for machine learning engineers working with computer vision data, helping them to build reliable models faster. The most advanced MLOps monitoring and validation platform, it is focused on the way humanity interacts with AI - with a mission to protect the world from the misuse of AI.
Verinnogen is building hand-held, innovative tools to directly profile physical properties of 3D surfaces with direct applications in pre-clinical oncology research.
William Oak Diagnostics has an innovative point-of-care test which simplifies the identification of various micronutrient deficiencies at the push of a button, making maternal, child, and infant testing more accessible.
Look out for more coverage and pictures in the next edition of the Cambridge Independent, out from Wednesday, 13 March.
