> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Cambridge Tech Week's Winner Is Raising £1m - URL: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/cambridge-tech-weeks-winner-is-raising-1m/ - Published: 2026-09-29T13:30:13.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-29T13:30:12.000Z - Description: Myonerv won Cambridge Tech Week’s £5,000 pitch prize for its wearable neurotechnology, but its next challenge is raising £1m to take the technology into patient trials. - Author: Sharoni Banerjee - Tags: Ecosystem Intel --- On 16th September, five startups pitched at the venue, Cambridge’s Corn Exchange, for a £5,000 prize, and the winner was **Myonerv**, a company building a wearable band for the forearm that lets a physiotherapist trigger movement in a stroke patient’s paralysed hand from a distance. The team has already shown it working across borders, with a co-founder in Greece moving a hand in Cambridge. **Myonerv** exists because founder Sam Kamali’s cousin had a stroke at the age of eleven, and his recovery leaned on physiotherapy that was never available as often as it was needed. Kamali then went on to build a career in **neurotechnology**, and **Myonerv** has grown through **Cambridge NeuroWorks**, where he is a *Frontier Fellow*, with **ARIA funding** and an NHS trust lined up as a delivery partner for its clinical trial. The wristband is his answer to a shortage of therapist time, and we believe that kind of shortage reaches well beyond his cousin's case. The pitch behind the prize is about capacity. Group sessions over a remote link would let one therapist reach more patients in a day with the same workforce, and Kamali wants **Myonerv** to sit alongside the health service once a patient has left hospital. Clinical trials are the next test of whether that holds, and until they report, the claim remains a promise that judges found worth rewarding. --- ## The stages asked the big questions The programme around that pitch was built for scale, with five days, and more than a hundred speakers, with a theme of how deep tech changes the world. The agenda took in sovereign AI and computing, the energy that AI demands, the blurring line between civilian and defence technology, and specialist sessions on quantum and health technology. Published accounts of what those sessions concluded proved hard to find, but what exists from those sessions is agendas, curtain-raisers and a wrap-up that lists the topics without reporting any answers, and that matters because the week’s own question was a practical one. How does deep technology leave the laboratory and reach a market? A debate can raise that sort of question, and a company on the floor will have to answer it. --- ## The answers were at the Guildhall Innovation Alley put around 80 startups, scaleups and specialist firms in one room over two days, and many of them were solving narrow, unglamorous problems. **CompliMind**, a Cambridge company founded in 2024 by Carl-Magnus von Behr and Jan Blümel, builds software that helps NHS estates teams find and apply compliance guidance, with every answer traced to its source. Von Behr first met the problem as a volunteer on the medical oxygen team at **Addenbrooke’s** during Covid, watching skilled staff lose hours to scattered regulatory documents. The maintenance backlog across NHS buildings stands at £15.9bn, and the people keeping those buildings safe are the reason the software exists. **Otterlantis**, incorporated in July, is building an AI creation platform for children, it was the youngest team on the floor, led by a Cambridge graduate who travelled from Hong Kong. **Sticta Biological**, a Chilean company, wants to make biological molecules for agriculture and cell culture cheaper through precision fermentation, and came to Cambridge to look for partners in the UK. **FARx**, from Great Malvern, is developing a single security check that fuses voice and face recognition, each is a working answer to one specific gap. The floor was also far from the local affairs, the British-Serbian Chamber of Commerce brought more than 20 companies to Cambridge, eight of them exhibiting in a Serbian pavilion, and the organisers count delegates from 52 countries. The other pitch finalists show how wide the net was cast. **HotHouse Therapeutics** came out of Professor Anne Osbourn’s laboratory at the John Innes Centre and uses living plants to make new medicines through an AI-led platform. **Lambda Energy** sells a greenhouse additive that says it lifts crop yields by around 20 per cent. **Xplore Intelligence** builds a platform for training and testing whole AI agent systems before they meet real customers. **Myonerv** grew out of a fellowship, **HotHouse** out of a laboratory and **CompliMind** out of a PhD. The route from research to company is well worn in Cambridge, but what the week kept circling was the route from company to scale. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/05/a4/05a4a052-18ab-4836-8924-ec8b322c371c/content/images/2026/09/myonerv.png.png) Cambridge Tech Week showcase ## A £5,000 prize against a £176 billion ecosystem Cambridge’s tech sector describes itself as worth £176 billion. Myonerv’s funding history reads very differently, by late 2025 it had won £185,000 in grants, including £120,000 through **ARIA’s Scalable Neural Interfaces** programme and £65,000 from **Innovate UK**. It is now looking to raise £1m in pre-seed funding as it moves into patient trials. At the programme launch in July, panellists said the gap in Cambridge is growth capital, with companies often forced to look overseas to scale, but Myonerv is a long way from that stage. We think that shows where the pipeline starts, though: with prize cheques, grants and pre-seed rounds counted in hundreds of thousands, years before anyone writes a growth cheque. Myonerv just won £5,000 at Cambridge Tech Week, and now it is trying to raise £1m. Cambridge states its real shortage is growth capital, the far larger money that only arrives years later. So now who is going to fund a company in the years between those two? **Also read:** [*Can Family Office Investors Claim SEIS and EIS Relief on a Startup Fundraise?*](https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/can-family-office-investors-claim-seis-and-eis-relief-on-a-startup-fundraise/) --- **Sources:* Cambridge Independent (Tech Week wrap-up, Innovation Alley report, pitch finalist coverage; August and September 2026); BusinessCloud (pitch winner and record attendance coverage; September 2026); Cambridge Network (pitch finalist announcement; July 2026); Cambridge Wireless (launch event summary; July 2026); Lucy Cavendish College (Frontier Fellow profile; November 2025); Cambridge NeuroWorks (Frontier Fellow profile; 2025); NHS Innovation Accelerator and Business Weekly (CompliMind; July 2026). The £176 billion valuation and the growth-capital remark come from organiser and launch materials, and the £15.9bn backlog figure comes from CompliMind and its programme profile.*