Data analytics company Qureight has entered into a multi-year collaboration with Big Biotech AstraZeneca in an all-Cambridge success story. No financial details are being disclosed.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has announced the winning tech companies and AI firms who will receive funding to bring to life their innovative ideas to support Londoners struggling with the cost of living crisis.
Experts in translational oncology and targeted protein degradation join Dr Simon Cook, Dr Lorenz Mayr and Dr Catherine Beech to provide scientific and strategic oversight
Featurespace continues to maintain a leading position as a provider of enterprise fraud and financial crime prevention software on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world.
Qkine, a manufacturer of animal-free, highly bioactive, and innovative proteins, is delighted to announce its collaboration with Sartorius, a global life science group, to supply growth factors and cytokines for stem cell and organoid research, as part of a comprehensive workflow solution.
Undo, a long time player in the debugging tools space, offering its program execution capture and replay technology to help others diagnose software failures, has closed a $14 million Series B round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital, the Cambridge, UK-based builder of tech and healthcare companies.
Two companies each from Cambridge and London and one from Cardiff shared £100k and a raft of bolt-on benefits after winning the inaugural Accelerate@Babraham Startup Competition.
Cambridge had the fastest-growing city economy in the UK across the third quarter of 2017, according to a new report which also revealed that both of the country's most famous university cities are expected to thrive in the next 12 months.
These findings are a huge boost for Cambridge and highlight how the city is benefitting from industrial parks which are leading the way in fields such as wireless technology, display technology, and mobile telecommunications.
The UK Powerhouse study is produced by Irwin Mitchell and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) and provides an estimate of GVA* growth and job creation within 45 of the UK’s largest cities 12 months ahead of the Government’s official figures.
Published this month, the research revealed that Cambridge’s GVA growth rate of 2.2% made it the top-performing city economy in the UK, with forecasts suggesting that the city’s predicted year-on-year growth rate of 2.19% in 2018 will also be the best of any major location.
Neighbouring Oxford is also set to have a strong 2018, with the city expected to be second on the table of top-performing economies with a growth rate of 1.99%. It also took sixth place in terms of Q3 2017 GVA performance with a growth rate of 1.9%.
Victoria Brackett, chief executive of Business Legal Services at Irwin Mitchell, said: “These findings are a huge boost for Cambridge and highlight how the city is benefitting from industrial parks which are leading the way in fields such as wireless technology, display technology, and mobile telecommunications.
“The city is also of course close to London which is hugely beneficial with the capital remaining a key economic hub.”
This latest edition of UK Powerhouse examines the impact that the education has on city economies across the UK, with Oxford being behind only London in terms of the GVA generated by its education sector. The city’s education sector grew by 4% between 2012 and 2015 to reach a value of £500 million.
In comparison, Cambridge’s education sector GVA stood at £319 million after achieving zero growth during the three-year period analysed.
The report notes the education sector makes a major contribution to economic growth within many areas surrounding universities and also offers recommendations on how it can continue to do so. These include:
Image: Top and bottom five cities by annual GVA growth, Q3 2017
Source: Office for National Statistics, Cebr analysis
*GVA = Gross Value Added
To read more information, click here.
Featurespace, the leading machine learning company for fraud prevention, has raised £16.5 million ($21.6 million) from a funding round led by Highland Europe, the venture capital firm that invests in growth businesses.
Worldpay Group plc, a leading global payment processing company, and Invoke Capital also participated in the round as new investors.
Myrtle Software has secured seed funding from the Cambridge Angels Group led by technology investor Robert Sansom. A number of well known business angels participated in the round including serial entrepreneur Robert Swann, artificial intelligence entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe, IQ Capital and Dr. Adrian Weller of the Machine Learning group at Cambridge University.
Myrtle has been working on efficient hardware based deep learning technologies for a global auto maker, and has recently won contracts to further their research with the MoD as well as under the UK government’s autonomous systems program. The funding round will enable Myrtle to expand its core development team and launch a number of new technologies in the year ahead.
Lead Investor Robert Sansom, said “We are very impressed by the achievements of Myrtle’s team – by their unique blend of hardware, software and mathematical skills – and by the results they have demonstrated under existing contracts. Deep learning is having a big impact on data owners, so we’re excited to be participating in this round of company growth for Myrtle and to help them release their solution at-scale within data centers.”
Myrtle’s team of PhD mathematicians, computer scientists and hardware engineers have developed software to automatically realize deep learning algorithms as efficient silicon designs, capable of very high performance and low power usage. Demand for power efficient deep learning algorithms is well established and the market is expected to be worth more than $10B by 2024 (Tractica).
Myrtle’s technology constructs efficient neural network circuit designs automatically, without the need for FPGA hardware expertise. Christiaan Baaij, Lead Architect explains “It’s a unique approach that produces bespoke designs for each specific network and avoids the inefficiencies of existing methods that use intermediate languages such as OpenCL.” The approach is also highly scalable in terms of the resources that can be targeted on the FPGA: an important factor in commercial applications where running multiple neural networks together is becoming common.
Peter Baldwin, Myrtle’s CEO says “We have a fantastic team of talented engineers who have developed some unique capabilities here in Cambridge. Myrtle can provide a key component of the future cloud infrastructure that will radically improving speed and minimize costs. We are delighted to secure this investment round and anticipate rapid adoption of Myrtle’s technology”.
The advisors on the deal were Greenwoods and Taylor Vinters.
