#21toWatch Alumni praise Awards for providing “pivotal kickstart” as nomination window opens for 2025

By Tech East 6 minute read

As the nomination window opens for #21toWatch 2025, former winners have applauded the Innovation Awards for the invaluable kickstart it provides to our entrepreneurs and startups.

One of the first ever Top21 winners in the Company category was quantum error correction technology company, Riverlane. COO Bek Simmons, told us: “Riverlane was thrilled to be named as a #21toWatch Top21 company in 2020. And while our mission – to make quantum computing useful far sooner than previously imaginable – remains unchanged, the company has scaled rapidly from that moment. The following year, we secured $20 million in Series A funding, and then raised a further £15 million in Series B funding in 2022. And, in 2024, we’ve been celebrating further after raising $75 million in a landmark Series C equity funding round, Europe’s first Series C in quantum computing. Along the way we’ve recruited over 100 people and now have offices on both sides of the pond – in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US, as well as in our founding city, Cambridge, UK.”

Bek continued: “The #21toWatch Awards are a great and much-needed facilitator for our start-ups and are more than just a well-earned pat on the back. They give validity, credibility and visibility to the groundbreaking work you are doing – but also spotlight your company name and integrity to all-important investors, media outlets and potential collaborators. But, perhaps most importantly, they build morale and make the team proud, getting everyone excited about the journey ahead.”

Last year, HutanBio was another Top21 winner with its low-cost, carbon-negative biofuel, HBx, a one-in-a-trillion discovery which is now set to disrupt and transform an entire transportation industry, and crucially decarbonise long-distance transport.

Winning the award kicked off a pivotal year for the biotech company according to CEO, Paul Beastall. He told us: “We were delighted to be selected as one of the #21toWatch companies in 2023, and to be associated with an award alongside so many very successful alumni.

“The award has helped us to raise our profile in the Cambridge ecosystem and, since winning, we have gone on to raise over £3million in seed funding, opened our UK offices at St John’s Innovation Centre and built our engineering team in Cambridge. We will be deploying our first-generation engineering into the field in Malaysia by the end of this year.”

Other companies closing the largest tech funding rounds in Cambridge this year [2024] according to a report by Dealrom.co included Sano Genetics (2022 winner), who are accelerating precision medicine research by connecting patients living with rare and chronic conditions directly with biotech/pharma companies leading personalised medicine research, who raised $11.4 million in January. And Xampla (2021 winner), who are eliminating the need for polluting plastics with their sustainable, fully biodegradable, next-generation, plant-based materials for commercial applications, who raised $7million in February. Since then Echion Technologies (2021 winner) have raised £29 million in investment capital, and 2024 winner, Expression Edits have raised $13 million.

Submissions for the 7th annual #21toWatch Innovation Awards next March [2025] have already started arriving.

An early contender in the People category is University of Cambridge PhD student, Georgina Leadley who is focused on tackling real world problems with medical technology. She is currently conducting highly specialised research into non-invasive brain imaging using NIRS and DOT for applications in newborns with brain injuries and people with Alzheimer’s.

Earlier this year, Georgina was the winner of the inaugural Female Founder’s Prize, part of The Lucy Cavendish College Enterprise Challenge 2024, for another startup venture, SLICE, which aims to develop a portable, automated device relying on ultrasound technology to create sterile crushed ice for organ transplant procedures.

Biotryp Therapeutics is another standout submission in the Company category. The innovative biotech startup aims to develop the first antibiofilm therapy for bacterial infections, with an initial focus on UTIs. Biofilms are associated with treatment failure and recurrent infections (as commonly seen in UTIs), and currently there are no antibiofilm oral therapies in clinical use. Instead, current therapies have to rely exclusively on antibiotics which struggle to penetrate biofilms. To remedy this, Biotryp has developed a class of small molecules which inhibit biofilm formation, breaking down these protective layers of a bacteria’s defences, and nipping the infection in the bud.

Another hopeful in the Innovation (Things) category is VyperCore with an exciting submission centring on its ground-breaking processor technology. VyperCore significantly accelerates existing high-performance compute-intensive workloads by a factor of up to 10x, whilst blocking out the highest risk technical cyber-attack vectors at gate-level within the processor, and all without having to change a line of the original code.

In April 2023, the processor startup raised £4million in seed funding (at the time the largest pre-seed round for a UK chip startup in a decade), which has been used to open design centres here in Cambridge and in Bristol, and to develop VyperCore’s first generation of accelerated compute silicon.

To date, there have been 1736 contenders for a #21toWatch title over the last six years, raising, between them, a total of £525million in investments and funding. This figure does not include companies, private acquisitions, private equity or undisclosed amounts – and also excludes 2019 #21toWatch winner, CMR Surgical, the Cambridge-based surgical robotics company, whose investment alone would push the total to over $1bn in funding.

#21toWatch creator, Faye Holland said: “The true value of #21toWatch lies in its ability to recognize and amplify groundbreaking ideas, as so many of our winners have already discovered.

“Our Awards validate the risks taken by inventive minds, celebrate the boldness of those able to turn challenges into opportunities, and fuel the drive for continuous advancement in every field. By recognizing groundbreaking ideas and those who dare to think differently, we aim to inspire the innovators of tomorrow and encourage a future where innovation is not just rewarded but expected, fostering a cycle of progress that benefits us all.”

Closing date for submissions noon on Friday 10th January 2025 and the shortlist will be announced in Wednesday 5th February 2025. A panel of independent judges will determine the Top21 who will be unveiled at the annual awards event held at the Innovate Cambridge Hub on Thursday 6th March 2025.

You can make your nomination or submission for #21toWatch and find out more about the programme at 21toWatch.com and by following #21toWatch on social media.

 

The #21toWatch Top21.2024 were: Ahmed Waraky (K-Stem); Alicia Showering (BugBiome); Mark Golab (Cambridge Surgical Models); Bakul Gupta (Deliver Biosciences); Jack Chengzhi Guo (Protonera); Nadia Radzman; Paolo Bombelli; BeyondMath; Cambridge Vision Technology; Cellexcel; ExpressionEdits; Kuano; Remedium Energy; Vector Bioscience; EPIHERD (Antler Bio); Gus, the automated asparagus picker (Autopickr); Heartfelt Technologies; Molyon; Tenyks; Verinnogen; William Oak Diagnostics