Open Coffee Cambridge, July 2026

My business genesis is building engineering hubs for overseas businesses, and my ask today is whether there is anyone in the room who wants to talk about opportunities to work with me in the HR, legal, compliance and finance space. That would be in a fractional capacity, so let's have a talk.

And what I can offer the room is this: any time, just approach me and we can talk about building good software organisations. Come and run your problems past me. I'm happy to talk. Thank you.

Good morning everyone. I'm Jonathan Betts. I spent my career in science and commercialisation, and guess what? I'm starting all over again, so I'm back in founder mode. I started Blue River Foundry, and that is looking at an area which I think is underestimated, which is that great science doesn't necessarily make great markets. So we work as a venture builder with founders to map the commercial model, design the market, and find and build a pathway to adoption.

I'm going from ground zero, so I'm sure there are lots of people in the room doing that as well. I'm always happy to have a conversation so we can swap notes and build great things better together. Thank you.

Morning everyone. My name is Zac. I'm an account executive over at Pvotal Technologies. Essentially what we do, with our flagship product Infrastream, is serve mostly Series A to C scale-ups at the moment, to allow them to standardise and automate their cloud infrastructure. We're also going on to serve individual devs, as next week we are launching our SaaS platform as well.

We've also worked with e-commerce and betting, we've worked with a variety of different industries, but predominantly ones that are tech first, ones that are looking to scale lean with budget in mind and to be able to get ahead in the market as well.

So really I'm just here today to have conversations, to network, keep it super friendly, very informal, as I really enjoy this event. So thanks to Jeremy and the team for putting it on.

Hi everyone, I'm Gemma. I'm a chief technology officer and I work as a consultant for PE and VC firms, generally in the scale-up space. On the VC side that would be sort of Series A, B plus. On the PE side that would be very much established businesses.

In terms of my sector focus, I'm focused very much on the B2B space, particularly software as a service companies, but also companies that are developing their own intellectual property with AI, building and training their own models. I've had a focus for about a year and a half, two years on deep tech in particular, and I'm very excited about all things reinforcement learning right now. If anyone wants to talk to me about that, that's very interesting.

I'm here today really just to expand my network, share my knowledge with all of you, make new connections and hopefully be helpful to someone. So yeah, please reach out if you think I can be of use to anyone.

I'm here as CSO of a startup we created a year and a half ago called Auryx, and we are transforming earbuds that you wear every day into health sensors. So we can hear heartbeats and respiration.

Today I'm here not only to socialise, I've met very interesting people, but also to see if you can help us collect data. We will be in the boardroom, and if you're willing, we'll place our bud in your ear and we'll collect your blood pressure at medical grade. So if you want to know your blood pressure today, that's one way to do it. We welcome your help. Eli and I will be in there. Thank you very much.

I'm Jayesh, CEO of Zureli. We bring together experienced procurement and sustainability leaders with data scientists, including several based in Cambridge, to help organisations uncover hidden costs, improve commercial performance and achieve meaningful sustainability outcomes. Our mission is to demonstrate that procurement can be a genuine force for good.

I'm starting to think this session is quite lucky for us. The first one I went to was at the start of December, when we hit our first enterprise client. The second time I came, on the way over we landed a second Global client. And then this week we got another one, and we're hiring. So I'm glad to be here.

If you know any organisation that needs this kind of support, it would be great to collaborate. But also, if you're facing into large potential clients and you're trying to get through all those procurement hoops, I may be able to give you some pointers, both for the private and public sector.

Hello everybody. My name is Irina. I'm a technical expert in molecular imaging and tissue-based biomarkers, with a multidisciplinary background and experience across academia and pharma. I'm interested in characterising tissue architecture and cellular composition, and the changes associated with disease in the context of early translational drug development.

I believe tissue imaging is being underutilised, and building quantitative solutions around this can help improve drug development, through better patient stratification, a deeper understanding of treatment response, and better-designed clinical trials.

Happy to connect and learn about your journey, and I'd appreciate any feedback.

Good morning everyone. For the past 25 years in industry, in Japan, the UK, the US and the Netherlands, I've turned cutting edge molecular biology into products that actually work in the real world. I've discovered a tumour suppressor gene, I've developed two diagnostics that are gold standards, and I've invented a sample prep that was acquired by Roche.

More importantly, I can spot the scientific and technical risks that derail promising technologies before they become expensive failures. For those building or interested in investing in life sciences, who value someone who combines deep science with commercial execution, let's talk.

Hi everyone, I'm Yizhou and I'm CEO and co-founder of a company called OneCarbon. We started by looking at Alzheimer's. We've been doing that for five, six years, looking at the cellular mechanism, and then we stumbled upon a pathway that we can upregulate using a supplement, which is a probiotic that we've now manufactured.

So what we are looking for is people who would like to try it out, test out our companion app and give us some feedback. And if you have any questions about life sciences and brain health, I'm very happy to chat. Thank you very much.

Hello everyone, I'm Craig. As of this week I've just exited Pellis AI, which was my third exit in my somewhat twenty years, and which was a med tech company.

I'm now leading the Cambridge Stock Exchange Project, which some of you may or may not be familiar with. It is a secondary market for trading existing shares, and we are working toward PISCES approval. CSEP is not a FCA regulated entity, we work in strategic partnership with JP Jenkins who are. If you are a Series B company that is interested in releasing liquidity for existing shares, then please come and chat with me about the Cambridge Stock Exchange Project.

I'm also offering fractional services for commercial, marketing and also investment support. So if you want to talk to somebody that's built five businesses, three of which successfully, then come chat. Thanks.

So I worked with a charity this year and they were really struggling to engage young people online. I facilitated a brainstorming session with about twenty of their young carers, and what they realised was that they were finding social media really boring, that despite their situation they wanted to be taking the mickey out of it, essentially, and that they didn't associate with the word carer. Which is crazy, because 25% of their partners are called something carer in the UK.

So what we did was come up with a creative strategy. I gave them a social media audit, and basically I said you need to, one, figure out how to not use the word carer, because they don't associate with that, and stop calling them a hero as well, because this is their life and they don't necessarily sit with the word hero either.

So I help people scrunch up their social media and help bring their brand values to the forefront of their online presence. If you need creative strategy, social media, or a freelance brainstorm facilitator, please message me or talk to me today.

Neil Barbour. I'm a business coach, so my job is to help business owners and business founders develop and grow their businesses, particularly in the innovation space and the scale-up space. What that really means is that I can help optimise the business management stuff in the background, while the actual founders go on and scale and innovate and do all the stuff that they find exciting.

One of the things I do for a select group, which includes everyone here, is that I'm prepared to offer two weeks free coaching, so you can understand how the coaching process works and what it's like to work with me. Neil Barbour Business Coaching.

Hello, I'm Fang. I'm now a software engineer working at Arm. I'm on holiday today. I work on software for language models, to make them run faster.

I'm here to find an opportunity for my partner, who has a similar background to me in compilers and software hardware integration, and she has done a lot of open source contribution. If anyone is interested, please let me know. Thank you.

Good morning everyone. Until recently I was working as a software engineer at Malted AI, optimising their AI pipelines and building some other pipelines for customer service, compliance and banking. I've also been doing AI research at the University of Glasgow, compressing and optimising AI retrieval models.

I moved here recently, so I'm so happy to have an event like this to meet everybody and get introduced to people in Cambridge. So if anybody is looking for people in AI, or a partner for an interesting project, or just wants to talk ideas, I'm here. My name is Majd, and I'm so happy to meet everybody here. Thank you.

Good morning everybody. My name is Rebecca Bulmer. It's the first time here, so thank you all for being really friendly and kind and speaking to me this morning.

I am a fractional commercial director, so I have spent 30 odd years in sales, right from plodding the streets up to board level, working with strategies and go to market. Over the last few years I've worked with founders looking at their sales structure, where they're hitting revenue ceilings and seeing what's not working, so helping them build their sales structure and their sales teams.

About a month ago I decided to start working fractionally. I'd love to speak to anybody that might need some assistance with their organisation. That's me. Thank you.

So I'm Neil. I am a client relationship consultant.

So what that means is I help companies that have got some clients and have started to build their business commercially. You get to a point though where you're like, what do I do with these clients? How do I continue to grow them? How do I get them to evangelise the cool stuff that we're doing? That's where I can come in and help build those scalable processes, build out ways that you can continue to grow. And that may not just be from a revenue perspective, it may be a relationship perspective, because while money is great, it's not everything in an account sometimes.

I'm looking to start to put on some workshops, so if you want to reach out to me, I'm willing to do just sort of an hour with you on a particular client project, and then we can have a chat, see how we work together and go from there. So that's me.

Good morning everyone. Sorry, it's my first time here, so bear with me. My name is Pearl and I am a product specialist. I work with tech companies and startups, helping them build software that actually serves their users. What this means is basically working on the product itself, by building or designing the user experience that maximises retention and adoption.

I've spent over 22 years shipping software. I started off as a junior tester and spent a huge chunk of my career testing software, and then I spent nine years at Meta shipping software as well, from ideation stage down to design, development, testing, shipping and maintenance. So I do know a couple of things about how not to build software.

I'm here to connect with people. If you have questions about your product, I would love to help you examine it, do a product walkthrough if you wish. So just come and give me a shout.

Hello, good morning everyone. I'm Tania. I run a marketing agency and specialise in storytelling, photography and videography. So I am happy to talk to you and to help you make your products and services visible and recognisable, and to increase your sales that way.

As you can see, I'm also a wine expert. I worked in the wine industry for a long time, so if you need any corporate wine tastings, wine dinners, wine tours or wine events, please do come to me.

And finally, recently my blind father invented a toy constructor for blind people, and we're trying to develop this idea. So I'd be happy to talk to anyone who could help me with ideas, manufacturing, funding or some other things, because I think it's a very good startup that will help other blind people to be mentally satisfied. Thank you.

Everyone, my name is Ashwini and I run a Claude Code community in Cambridge. So basically we are looking for people in the industry who use Claude Code, and how they use it to make their workflows better and things like that.

Our next event is in September, on September 21st, and it's aimed towards early stage startups and founders like yourselves. So if you want to know more about how startups are using Claude Code to go faster, ship faster, I'd love to see some of you there. Thank you so much.

Hi, I'm Ed. I work for Canaccord Wealth. We look after particularly entrepreneurs who've made money, a successful exit. So Craig's going to speak to me later.

But we also raise money for companies, starting at about 25 million in the tech space. So yeah, please speak to us if you're interested.

Good morning everyone. My name is Mohammad and I'm a research associate in entrepreneurship at Anglia Ruskin University.

Currently, as a part of our research, we host a podcast, Builders of the Broken Bazaar, where we bring institutional leaders and migrant entrepreneurs together and have conversations with them about the broken bazaar. We've released 32 episodes so far. The last one was a couple of days ago, and it was with Jumpstart Refugee, a Canadian NGO. Thank you everyone.

My name is Vivian. I'm a student representative for international business with business analytics at ARU. Currently I'm a part of the Change Please organisation. It's a nonprofit where we're trying to raise funds for the homeless. We basically sell coffee, which is the Change Please brand, and the profits are then used to train homeless people as baristas.

I have done a lot of interesting research on sustainable business model transformation. So if you would like to hear what the research says about it, and pick my brains, please have a go.

My name is Josiane. I am the CEO and co-founder of a company called In Bloom Health, and we are building a vaginal microbiome health platform which is going to be grounded in genomic data and driven by AI. What we're trying to do with that is bring precision and accelerate discovery when it comes to vaginal health. The platform is going to be mainly targeted to clinicians, to inform better decisions, especially in the areas of fertility and post cancer care for women.

Why is it important? It is important because 70% of cancer survivors, especially genital cancer survivors, will have an induced perimenopause with all the challenges that come with it. Why is it important? Because there are 80,000 assisted fertility procedures in the UK which at the moment are still hit and miss. Why is it important? Because women make up the bulk of antibiotic prescriptions in the world and are set to be the fastest growing population when it comes to antimicrobial resistance.

So we need better solutions grounded in genomic science, driven by AI for acceleration and precision.

I'll get started, in case it doesn't come up, because that's why I'm here to speak to you. So I work for Innovate UK, under UK Research and Innovation. We're the business led organisation of the government for funding collaborative research and innovation. We also work with the research councils, which is mainly academic led, but we foster and support, as I said, the collaborative research.

You need innovative projects, you need networking, you need consortia, and then you apply to our competitive funding. I work for the engineering biology team and the emerging digital technology team, but we're across all sectors. So certainly look amongst yourselves to build those consortia and apply for the money.

I'm also a national contact point for Horizon Europe, and specifically in pillar two cluster six, which is the bioeconomy, food, marine and soil. So again, collaborative research and development, innovation and funding, higher TRL, bigger packets of money. Thank you kindly, everybody.

Good morning everybody. I'm the CEO and founder of iVestClub.

70% of the carbon emissions on this planet are caused by 6,000 public companies that are operating. So if you are thinking of investing in any of these 6,000 public companies as a retail investor, come to me. I can show you on our platform the data that can tell you: is this a good bet for making money, but also for protecting the environment? So combining profit, but also combining the best data for the public companies out there.

Just get in touch if you want to invest in any of these companies. Thank you.

Good morning everybody. My name is Paula Bekinschtein. I am the founder of CONEXEN. CONEXEN is a life science ecosystem activator. We work with organisations, public and private, as well as regions, to mobilise different areas of innovation.

We are best known for the community event that happens in Cambridge every quarter, but we also have communities in London, Oxford and Manchester. The next one in Cambridge is on the 16th of September at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, if you want to join us. Thank you.

I'm Becky. I'm the community and ecosystem manager here at Innovate Cambridge. So if you'd like to hear more, and I know lots of you are members already, lots of familiar faces, but if you'd like to hear more about becoming a member or more about Innovate Cambridge, come and have a chat to me, or give us a wave.

I was just going to say a quick thank you to everyone who filled in our member survey. We had 178 responses, which we've never had that many before, so we're really pleased with that. One of the things we heard was that you'd like more of this, and more information sessions, and more networking opportunities, more ways to learn.

So we've got a new way of collecting feedback. I have this question on the front desk at the moment with a box, and we'll rotate the question every couple of months. When you come into the Glasshouse, please have a think and give us feedback on what you'd like to see as programming here, so we can give more back. The question at the moment is: as we build collaborations with Cambridge's leading companies, what topics would help you most, whether that's scaling your company, AI, HR, finance, something else, and what format would that be best in for you? So masterclasses, workshops, office hours, drop-ins.

So have a think, come and scribble something down, or come and have a chat with me. We'd love to hear more from you so we can programme more of what you would like to see in the Glasshouse. Thank you.