Show Notes 211: Five Startups. One Stage. Who Takes the Crown at Cambridge Tech Week 2026?

Cambridge Tech Week's pitch competition is back — and this year's shortlist might be the strongest yet. James and Faye sit down with all five finalists ahead of their head-to-head on the main stage of the Cambridge Corn Exchange on 16 September 2026.

It's a special episode, a reunion of sorts: four of the five companies have featured on the podcast before, many as #21toWatch winners. The fifth — an Edinburgh-based AI company — proves that Cambridge Tech Week's reach now stretches well beyond the Fens.

Three minutes each. Two prizes on offer. Here's who's in the running:

🏆 Meet the Five Finalists

• HotHouse Therapeutics (Norwich) — Spun out of Professor Anne Osbourn's lab at the John Innes Centre, HotHouse is engineering plants to produce entirely new-to-nature vaccine adjuvants. Their target? Replacing QS-21 — currently extracted from a slow-growing Chilean tree at over $100,000 per gram — with a scalable, less toxic, bioengineered alternative of similar efficacy. First IP filed. Commercial conversations underway with partners in both human and animal health. Backed by £2.9 million in pre-seed funding from SynBioVen, Start Codon, UKI2S, Twin Path Ventures, Wren Capital, and an Innovate UK grant.

  "Watch out for it" — Phil, Co-Founder, HotHouse Therapeutics

• Lambda agri (Cambridge) — Dr Monica Saavedra's agritech company has developed GloGro, an additive embedded into greenhouse paint and polytunnel sheeting that converts damaging UV light into red light, boosting photosynthesis and delivering up to 20% more yield per crop. Originally a solar company, Lambda agri pivoted three and a half years ago and hasn't looked back — now in conversations with multinational partners across agriculture, and fielding inbound interest from other industries too.

• Polytecks (Cambridge) — Ruben Ruiz-Mateos Serrano and his team are making "the skin a window into the body". Built on 15 years of University of Cambridge research, Polytecks has developed a novel conducting polymer woven into e-textile electrode arrays that map the body's electrical activity in high-density detail — no gel, no wires. Their first product, SwiftStage, stages the most common cardiac disease in dogs. A 500-dog veterinary trial is now under way, and a pre-seed round is currently open.

  "Every cell, every organ in your body runs on electricity — and it can be grasped from the skin." — Ruben Ruiz-Mateos Serrano, Co-Founder & CEO, Polytecks

• Xplore Intelligence (Edinburgh) — The only non-Cambridge finalist — and a signal that the competition's gravity is extending nationally. Xplore Intelligence is building the infrastructure to make agentic AI trustworthy. Their Forge platform simulates real operational environments to train and benchmark entire AI agent systems — catching hallucinations and errors before they reach users in regulated sectors like MedTech and logistics. They've secured their first £1 million+ enterprise contract and are raising a £1.5 million pre-seed round.

  
  

  "This is what makes AI actually usable — where you can't afford to get wrong results." — George, CTO & Co-Founder, Xplore Intelligence

🎯 Why Are They Competing?

The answer is consistent across all five: it's not just about the prize money.

• Fundraising momentum — multiple founders are mid-round and treating the stage as a high-quality investor touchpoint

• Ecosystem reach — Cambridge Tech Week draws a global audience; for Xplore Intelligence, it's a deliberate bridge from Edinburgh into the Cambridge and broader UK deep tech community

• Connections from unexpected places — as Monica put it: "Sometimes you find capital from the most unlikely places"

👨‍⚖️ The Judges

The live final is sponsored by Mills & Reeve, PwC, and Julius & Clark. Judging on the day: Zickie Lim (Partner & Head of VC & Investments, Mills & Reeve), Maralina Ayani-Odo (British Business Bank), Richard Lewis (Foresight Group), and Emmy Nickel (Cambridge Angels).

Two prizes are up for grabs: Judges' Award and People's Choice Award.

📍 Be there in person: Wednesday 16 September, Cambridge Corn Exchange. Tickets at cambridgetechweek.co.uk

Subscribe on all major podcast platforms or visit cambridgetechpodcast.com. 🎧

Hosted by James Parton and Faye Holland. Produced by Carl Homer of Cambridge TV. Supported by media partner Business Weekly.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Cambridge Tech Podcast. Talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Fay Holland and James Parton.

Hi, I'm James. And I'm Fay. So this week's episode is dedicated to the five finalists that are going head to head at the Cambridge Tech Week Pitch Competition next month. So we'll start with a little bit of history.

Sam and Ruben were both on the podcast in March this year as winners of 21 to Watch. Monica was featured in March 2025 also as a 21 to Watch winner. And then we had Phil, who was also on with Dave Shepard in January this year in their own episode.

So it feels, James, a little bit like a reunion of 21 to Watch and Cambridge Tech podcast greats, doesn't it? It's great to have some familiar faces back on and we're doing a pretty good job of picking the right companies early, aren't we? We certainly are. And we're absolutely thrilled that one of the finalists is a non-Cambridge company who are also going to be joining those pitching companies. And we're going to hear from George at Explore Intelligence shortly.

Okay, so this might be the most ambitious podcast that we've ever attempted in terms of the number of people around this table. So let's start with some intros. Let us know who you are, your company, and one word to describe how you feel about being selected for this year's pitch competition.

Phil, let's start with you. I'm Phil, one of the co-founders of Hot House Therapeutics. We're based in Norwich, and my word is excited.

Hello, Dr. Monica Saavedra, founder and CEO of Lambda Agri, based in Cambridge. And my one word would be, ooh, anticipating. I'm Ruben, and I'm co-founder and CEO of Polytex. We're based in Cambridge, and my word was also excited. Grateful.

I'm George, CTO and co-founder of Explore Intelligence, and I feel amazed. Brilliant. Well, you've passed the first test of coming up with a word to describe how you feel. So thank you, everyone. Right. So let's move on to what the pitch is going to be like. So during the pitch, you're given exactly three minutes to pitch, which, quite frankly, is two minutes over what I gave you to pitch when you were 21 to watch finalists. So that should be a walk in the park for all of you. So in the style of the pitch competition, what we want to do now is give you each opportunity just to say a few words about your company and what you're doing. So this is not your polished pitch. This is just us having a little bit of a chat. So we're going to go in exactly the same order as we've just been. And we're going to start with you, Phil. Great. So at Hothouse Therapeutics, we are building humanity's defence against infectious disease, and we are doing that by developing novel and new-to-nature vaccine adjuvants. So adjuvants are something that stimulates the immune system when you have a vaccine, and it brings it up to an efficacy that means you can get onto the market and it actually works. So what we have done at Hothouse is We've engineered our biological systems to produce new-to-nature and novel vaccine adjuvants. We have just filed some of our first IP, and we have some vaccine adjuvants that are similar efficacy to the gold standard, which is a compound known as QS21. And we have less toxicity, a new mode of action, and it's more scalable. And at the moment, we have... We're in conversations with some vaccine players, several vaccine players in both human and animal health who want to test our compounds for exactly the reasons that I just said. And so, yeah, we're making great commercial progress. Can't go into too much detail about that because it's all under negotiation. But watch out for it. So we like to know what's happening. So you'll have to come back and tell us afterwards. Definitely. OK, thank you, Phil. Monica. Yeah, so we have a little bit of a history, a nice history, I may say. We were a solar company and at the time we were developing something that converts ultraviolet light from the sun that is underutilised by solar panels, in fact, damages them and converting to red light. For the purpose of increasing the power output of said solar cells. However, three and a half years ago, we had this epiphany that it would be much, much better and more economically feasible to look into agri. We looked into the agri sector for three and a half years now. And effectively, what we are doing is we are using this additive we call Glow-Gro, because we make your greenhouses glow with it. We introduce it within greenhouse paint or coatings. It gets spray coated on the outside of your greenhouse, typically commercial greenhouses, mind you. And also it can be embedded within polytunnel sheeting and your plants in there will see less of the UV light that it can be damaging. And you'll see more of the red light that is very, very good. We've recently found out for humans, but also for plants, because they have more instances of photosynthesis. They're generally much better at absorbing this light and converting it into sugars. So you get sweeter crops, more crops and faster turnaround. And you can also lengthen the growing season. So growers love it. We... Currently into various conversations with industrial partners, some multinationals, some fast movers. Many of them are in the agri sector, but we will admit we had a lot of inbound from solar and some other industries as well. So we've been effectively focusing on agri, but if there's somebody from other industries that can simply take it to post materials transfer agreement, agreed and turned it into something useful for another application, we can only be happy to be selling more. That is us.

Thank you, Monica. It's good to hear some progress as well from last time.

Ruben. So yeah, at Polytechs, we are making the skin a window into the body. Every cell, every organ in your body runs on electricity. And this ability of the body to communicate and to transfer all this information means that we have one of the richest and most powerful sources of information in the body, and it can be grasped from the skin. And that's essentially what we are doing at Polytex. We have developed a novel high-density electrophysiology platform that allows us to map the electrical activity of the body in density, in high-density detail, comfortably and non-embracably from the skin. And we have achieved this from 15 years of research at the university, which we have developed a new type of conducting polymer that allows us to have this high resolution without any gels or creams. Also integrating them into textiles would make them very easy to set up and with machine learning algorithms that make them interpretable and easy to use for clinicians and individuals. Our first product is Swift Stage, which is in veterinary cardiology specifically. So we are staging the most common cardiac disease in dogs. And we've just started our largest veterinary trial with 500 dogs. And at the moment, in the middle of our first three-seat round, yeah, we're very excited. That's great. Great to hear you're in trial as well. Well done. And George, over to you.

Yeah, great. So we were exploring intelligence and we were making agentic AI safer and more explainable. So we built a data protocol that sits on AI agent and checks every output against the source data. So if a JNTKi language model invents something, hallucinates, or just provides incorrect information, this is being catched up before it reaches the user or provides for mistake. So basically that is what makes JNTKi usable.

Where you actually can't get wrong results such as regulated industries, as MedTech, logistics and other similar to this. So currently we got our first multi-year enterprise contract with a MedTech company from Europe. So we are providing them with our platform, which is basically a layer for trust for capturing agents work. Also, we are finishing our university validation where we showed about 30% increasing against state of the art methods of controlling agents. So we're releasing the report very soon. Also, we are covering our pre-seed rounds of 1.5 million pounds next few months. So, yeah. That's great. Thanks, George. Technology moves fast, and now so can you. Discover Polestar, the all-electric performance brand vehicles redefining how we drive. Precision engineering, minimalist design, and software that evolves with you. Experience it at Holden Group in Norwich and Bury St Edmunds. Or let us bring the test drive to your door.

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So let's move on to like a really important question, which is the why. Obviously, it takes time. It takes a lot of effort to apply to competitions. You're all founders. You're all really super busy people. So, Phil, why don't we start with you again? You know, why take the time out? What's the benefit from applying for these sorts of things?

Well, we're currently raising, so that is a clear kind of direct benefit, but also just getting our name out there and all the publicity that comes with it and the opportunity to kind of tell the world what we're building and the cool things that we're doing makes it really worth our time. For me, it's very much about connection. Oftentimes you meet people who you'd never meet otherwise. And that usually comes from a large audience and Cambridge Tech Week is expecting one. So I'm very happy to be meeting whomever. Sometimes you find help or support, capital from the most unlikely places.

And Ruben, you know, what kind of outcomes are you looking for from participating in the competition?

Well, we're also in the middle of a round, so effectively connections and networking is an essential part of this. But we also want it as a method of outreaching, right? Let people know what we are up to, what we're doing. And in a sense, it is very important for us to understand, to get a grasp of the ecosystem, not just the one that we know, but the adjacent one and the extended one. So I think that this is a great opportunity to achieve that.

Awesome. George, you're based in Edinburgh, so this is a really interesting kind of situation for you guys. I'm really keen to understand how you discovered Cambridge Tech Week and what are you looking to gain from it?

Yeah, so for us it's also a very interesting question because we are quite deep in the Edinburgh ecosystem and this pitch competition I think for us can stand as a bridge for other universities because our research track is very important. We are currently forming a consortium from a couple of Edinburgh-based and Scotland-based universities. So we are validating our technology, we are validating how it works in different industries. And of course, what we're looking to get from the pitch competition, not only investors, but also universities and research community connections to dive deeper into really like foundational questions of agentic AI.

And did you discover Cambridge Tech Week just through scanning opportunities or how did it come about?

Yeah, we always scan for opportunities in the public field. So that's how we catched this up. Fantastic. Yeah, it was quite an interesting shortlist this year because you would expect there's an awful lot of companies from Cambridge, but there was a lot that were coming in from international and the rest of the UK as well.

So, George, you pipped the rest of the rest of the UK and the rest of the world to the post this time around.

Well, thank you, everyone. That's a very quick introduction to each of your companies and why you're pitching at Cambridge Tech Week. Good luck to everyone. Thank you for being with us today. And thankfully, the decision is down to the judges and not James and myself. So talking about the judges, the lead judge and overall pitch competition sponsor is with Ziki Lim from Mills and Reeves. We have Maralina Ayani-Odo from British Business Bank. Richard Lewis from Foresight Group and Emmy Nickel of Cambridge Angels. So they are the judges on the day. And we should also do a quick shout out to the award co-sponsors as well, who are Julius and Clark, PwC and Bain. And out of those five shortlisted companies, there are two prizes up for grabs, the Judges Award and the People's Choice Award. Hopefully this episode has whet your appetite for the pitching final. To be there in person and see who wins, pick up your tickets from cambridgetechweek.co.uk.

Today's show was produced by Carl Homer of Cambridge TV and supported by our media partner, Business Weekly. The Cambridge Tech Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms and on cambridgetechpodcast.com. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please give it a five-star review. It'll really help others discover the show.

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