Cambridge Future Tech welcomes guests at annual Founders Day and barbecue
The Bradfield Centre was buzzing on Thursday with the annual Cambridge Future Tech Founders Day, specifically designed for deep tech founders, being followed by the company’s annual summer barbecue.
The Founders Day event brought 100 guests to the technology-first venture builder’s Bradfield Centre base. The attendees were mainly deeptech founders and early stage companies, including across the Cambridge Future Tech portfolio of 10 companies.
The 18 speakers and panelists included exited founders, experts in scaling companies, investors, corporates and product specialists.
Cambridge Future Tech (CFT) co-founder and COO Xavier Parkhouse-Parker described the day as “a really awesome event, the general theme [being] around scaling, especially from pre-seed to seed, as well as from prototype to product”.
Speakers included Prof Chris Coleridge, lecturer at CJBS and co-founder of Carbon13, plus Michael Beer, CFO at Energy Vault, and John West, a previous CEO of Solexa.
Afterwards, 200 people attended the barbecue – a regular Cambridge summer high spot – and were entertained by the band Up The Ante.
Sarah James of Innovo HR said: “We had a fantastic evening, it’s just amazing to see this group of people get together and really having a great time, learning from each other, having fun and making some great connections.”
Sanjeev Gordhan, general partner of Type One Ventures, said: “It’s been a brilliant day of content, helping a lot of these early-stage founders develop the types of skill sets and the experience that they’re going to need as they go from seed up to Series A levels of investment. CFT has done a brilliant job in bringing these stakeholders together.”
Xavier added: “At our Founders Day we’re supporting our founders in our portfolio, to give them some insights and knowledge about scaling their businesses, overcoming challenges, and identifying how they can really make the most of the opportunities that the programme offers.
“We’ve had a panel on people and HR and how to really scale up an operation inside a company, we’ve heard from Ewan Kirk, founder of Cantab Capital, we’ve got fantastic speakers of exited businesses, built businesses, scaled businesses as well as a panel later of investors from across the entire spectrum of deep tech.”
Noel Hurley, CEO of Literal Labs, said: “It’s a great event for catching up with all the founders, and also to have conversations with leaders in the industry to explore all the challenges that come with founding deeptech businesses.”
Owen Thompson, co-founder and CEO of CFT, said: “This event brings together not only founders from across our portfolio but also investors, advisers and friends from our wider network as far afield as San Francisco and Saudi Arabia. We’re grateful to all of our guests for attending and in particular our speakers and our panellists.”
In partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs, Cambridge Future Tech hosted the Premier League trophy and the Women’s Super League trophy outside The Bradfield Centre.
The annual event raised money for The Red Hen Project, a small local charity working with five primary schools in North Cambridge.
