The #21toWatch list will be divided into innovative and trailblazing people, companies and ‘things’ that are en route to being industry game-changers locally, nationally and globally.

This list represents the companies across Cambridge and the East of England that meet a defined set of criteria.

The list is updated on a rolling basis throughout the year, with the official nomination window open until 12th January. The shortlist will be announced in February, with the Top.21 unveiled on the first Thursday in March.

Always the longest list, here is the #21toWatch Companies list (in alphabetical order):

Longlist Shortlist Top.21 Name Synopsis
Company ACellZ ACellZ is an early stage strat-up developing novel grown in the lab-human eye tissue models to screen chemical substances for new eye medicines and products
Company AetoSense AetoSense are on a mission to revolutionize the way buildings breathe. It's commitment lies in enhancing air quality for occupants, all while optimizing energy consumption. It recognises the critical impact of airborne particles on health and energy efficiency, and it's innovative solutions are designed to address these challenges head-on
Company AgeCurve Unleashing the predictive power of somatic mutations with evolutionary cell lineage trees in biomedicine and biotech. Combining genomics and transcriptomics information from same cells to counteract accelerated aging, cancer and other chronic diseases.
Company Aila Biotech Ltd Aila Biotech is focused on a unique gene-delivery therapy targeting neurological inflammation. Our patented platform allows for brain-specific production of anti-inflammatory biologics to prevent tissue neurological damage across multiple indications
Company Alevin Therapeutics Alevin Therapeutics is a Biotechnology company focussed on integrin inhibitors as novel treatments for fibrotic diseases in particular Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis
Company Animal Alternative Technologies Animal Alternative Technologies is a recently founded biotechnology B2B spin out of the University of Cambridge. We are engineering a scalable, end-to-end ecosystem for Cultured Meat production, including specialist processes, enabling technologies, software, hardware and raw materials to democratize access to sustainable food and tackle some of the world's biggest sustainability and food security challenges
Company Artiosense ArtioSense is a med-tech spin-out from the University of Cambridge, with a multi-disciplinary founding team that is developing novel force-sensing technology for applications in joint replacement surgery
Company BeyondMath BeyondMath is using AI to solve the complex simulation of physics in engineering design orders of magnitude faster, providing reductions in time, cost and environmental impact when taking designs to production
Company BravelyCultured Redesigning precision fermentation for sustainable and cost-effective food production. Our methods utilize seawater, seaweed and novel marine yeast bringing cost of protein production down and increasing sustainability
Company Biophonics Biophonics is a spin-out from the University of Cambridge that is combining world-leading acoustics and AI to design a novel, easy-to-use screening device for valvular heart disease
Company Cambridge Electric Cement The world's first zero-emissions cement has been invented in Cambridge. The new cement is made in a virtuous recycling loop that eliminates the emissions of cement production, saves raw materials, and reduces the emissions needed to make lime-flux
Company Cambridge Vision Technology Early, accurate detection. It is Cambridge Vision Technology’s mission to make the timely and accurate detection of Alzheimer's Disease available to everyone
Company Cellexcel Cellexcel provides the key to unlock the use of biomaterials and radically change industry's carbon footprint. It does this through molecular modification of biomaterials to enhance their essential performance properties
Company clock.bio clock.bio aims to extend and improve quality of life by reversing the harmful effects of time in our cells, harnessing the regenerative capabilities of human pluripotent stem cells
Company Cocoon Leveraging industrial waste to capture atmospheric CO2
Company CodiKoat CodiKoat has developed the fastest ISO certified antimicrobial and antiviral coating technology in the world. It uses surface functionalised nanostructures to inactivate viruses, bacteria and fungi within seconds of contact
Company Cosysense Cosysense boosts comfort while reducing electricity costs and emissions using cutting-edge AI with sensors. We are making heating and cooling smart through a subscription service priced at a fraction of energy savings
Company DeepMirror DeepMirror is on a mission to make AI powered drug design as simple as using a spreadsheet to empower Biopharma companies to develop better drugs 2 times faster
Company Ethicronics The company’s main activity is hardware-enabled cybersecurity fighting against counterfeit and compromised electronics. Its SaaS solution provides hardware integrity certificates for market segments such as defence, security, transport, communication, finance and IoT
Company ExpressionEdits ExpressionEdits’ proprietary intronization platform recodes transgenes to better resemble natural genes, leading to significant improvement in protein production – a key challenge for recombinant proteins and DNA medicines
Company FabFreq Filter design practises have not substantially changed in 50+ years."FabFreq" applies modern AI-enhanced methodology automating the design process from specification to additive manufacturing. This enables hybrid organically-shaped filters with radically improved performance & form-factor characteristics
Company Gigabiome We leverage the advances in next-generation sequencing, microbiome science and AI to build technology for diagnosing antimicrobial resistance
Company Grounded AI Grounded AI specialises in AI-Enablement with a human touch. We apply AI to deliver transformative productivity improvements, empowering people and businesses to reach their full potential
Company HotHouse Therapeutics HotHouse Therapeutics harness plants to develop next-generation drugs by identifying pathways from source plants and creating synthetic ‘production crops’ for both existing and new molecules
Company ikarovec Ikarovec stands out as the foremost ocular gene therapy start-up in the East of England. In the upcoming year, Ikarovec is poised to secure substantial funding, bolstering collaborations nationwide and attracting investments to advance its cutting-edge pipeline towards clinical trials
Company ImmuONE ImmuONE specialises in human alveolar macrophage responses, epithelial cell culture platforms and testing services. Our respiratory tissue models closely resemble lung physiology to provide relevant, reliable, and reproducible results
Company Kuano Kuano combines state-of-the-art simulation and AI to add quantum detail to structure based drug discovery, helping to enable the design of next generation medicines
Company Macomics Macomics is an immuno-oncology company with world-leading expertise in macrophage biology, developing precision medicines to modulate macrophages for the treatment of cancer
Company Materials Nexus Materials Nexus is a deep-tech start-up on a mission to discover new materials that significantly reduce the environment, economical and social cost of items critical to our lives. Our ground-breaking AI-enabled software transforms the way new materials are discovered and designed. Using rapid automated processes and advanced quantum calculations we work with partners to reduce global CO2e emissions and accelerate the discovery of next-gen materials from decades to months
Company Mimicrete Mimicrete is an advanced materials science startup, founded in 2021, developing novel self-healing concrete. The technology was developed via a doctorate within the University of Cambridge’s Geotechnical and Environmental Research Group in the Department of Engineering
Company MovExplore MovExplore utilises the latest technologies to provide scans to the public focusing specifically on the way they move. These assessments can aid in diagnosing conditions, creating effective treatment plans, and monitoring general health
Company Natural Building Systems Natural Building Systems offers a prefabricated, sustainable construction solution. Using digital tools, demountable panels are combined with an advanced hemp bio-composite, to make rapid assembly, adaptable, breathable, and healthy buildings
Company Neutreeno Neutreeno is a B2B SaaS climate-tech start-up engineering the world’s first GHG instrument to simultaneously reduce both companies’ emissions and costs
Company Opto Biosystems Opto Biosystems are developing a new generation of neurological interfaces that can read electrical information from inside the body. The team are making very small interfaces, well-tolerated in the body, and applying it to one of humankind’s most significant health issues – cancer. Having recently appeared on an episode of Cambridge Tech Podcast we believe that this is the year for Opto and founders Elise Jenkins and Ben Woodington
Company Outsee OutSee is a deep TechBio company exploiting our innovative computational approach to genomics for drug target discovery and precision medicine, extracting value from genomics datasets beyond the state-of-the-art
Company Oxonium Energy Oxonium Energy's technology, based on initial work out of the Grey and Scherman groups (Chemistry), leverages a set of design principles to permit stable battery operation in air, even under potentials that reduce oxygen. This breakthrough not only enables greater system robustness, but aqueous cell voltages above 1.5 V permitting substantially lower projected energy costs relative to other existing RFB technologies.
Company PartitionBio Exploiting a novel proprietary technology platform to develop biomolecular tools for the use in therapeutic and synthetic biology applications
Company PfBIO PfBIO provides precision biocontrol solutions to protect crops from major agricultural diseases
Company Phantom Tech Phantom Tech is a software start-up founded by a group of game engineers, code wizards and alien researchers who believe in exploring and connecting with nature. Our vision is to build technologies that reconnect us with our physical world in new, playful and exciting ways
Company Planarific Imagine a world where home renovations are not only hassle-free but also faster, more affordable, and incredibly energy-efficient. Planarific, a University of Cambridge spin-out, is proud to unveil a groundbreaking AI design tool that's set to change the game for homeowners and designers alike
Company Prospectral Nanotechnology, optimised by AI. Taking the power of laboratory bench-top analytics, to drone-mountable camera systems.
Company RapidX Bio RapidX Bio is pioneering a new era of healthcare. It's cutting-edge technology and intuitive app seamlessly bridge symptoms to treatment within minutes. Say goodbye to long waits and uncertainty. Welcome to personalized, instant healthcare solutions
Company Reg Genome (RGDL) The company’s vision is to transform how the world consumes regulatory information. RegGenome provides structured machine-readable regulatory content that is dynamic, granular, and interoperable, all powered by AI-based textual information extraction techniques
Company Remedium Energy Remedium Energy are developing a new carbon capture technology, carbon capture battery, that captures CO2 from cement/steel plants and monetizes the variation in electricity price to make carbon capture profitable
Company Sanome Sanome is developing novel AI technology to combine biomarkers into diagnostics, to detect early health changes. These detections will reduce hospitalisations, preventable deaths and enable early interventions
Company Signaloid Signaloid provides efficient computing hardware and software technologies to quantify, transmit, and track data uncertainty in computations on empirical data. Our technologies are used in applications including materials modeling, autonomous systems, computational finance, machine learning, and noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing
Company SkiteLight SkiteLight is enabling next-gen display with Perovskite MicroLED, which gives record-breaking (>100x) brightness, efficiency and lifetime, leading to a major leap in display performance
Company Stratosvir We passionately join cancer patients in their fight for effective, safe, non-toxic cancer treatments that increase quality of life and survival. As a weapon, we are developing viral immunotherapy which has the potential to drastically improve the clinical treatment of solid tumours and their metastases
Company Stroma Biosciences Stroma Biosciences is a Cambridge based biotech company which identifies and exploits novel cancer targets based on stromal survival signals, termed ‘Spatial Synthetic Lethality’, in both solid and haematological malignancies.
Company Sunlight.io We make running and managing applications and infrastructure at the edge as easy as “in the cloud” across 100s to 1000s of remote locations. Sunlight is the thinnest, fastest HyperConverged Edge infrastructure platform built to run applications at the edge
Company SuperSharp SuperSharp is an Earth-imaging company developing unfolding space telescopes to capture high-resolution thermal infrared images of the Earth. The company is a subsidiary of the Satlantis group
Company The Battery Recycling Company The Battery Recycling Company is building the world's first carbon-negative closed-loop battery recycling system, creating low-impact active materials for new batteries from waste streams
Company Traitseq TraitSeq leverages cutting-edge AI to accurately predict complex agricultural traits, to develop high-yielding/climate-resilient crops, animal breeds, agrochemical/biological inputs, and gene edits to improve global food security and sustainable food production
Company UrbanXR We are a new provider of cutting-edge technologies and services for smart cities; transforming them into the Metaverse. UrbanXR creates environments that are responsive, adaptive, inviting, and exciting
Company Vector Bioscience Vector is a machine-learning enabled, drug delivery platform focused on oncology, facilitating novel treatments that are currently undruggable. We increase high local concentrations, minimise side effects, and allow room temperature storage of sensible cargoes
Company Virilitas Labs Virilitas is dedicated to improving and optimising services and interventions around male reproductive health and fertility by translating cutting edge research into applications for clinical and at home use
Company Xap Therapeutics Xap Therapeutics is building a novel biological delivery platform, capable of precisely releasing diverse therapeutic payloads at target sites for the treatment of serious disease, such as cancer and autoimmunity
Company xWatts xWatts is a smart energy management software that reduces costs and emissions by over 20% in commercial buildings via predictive control and automation. We automate isolated processes such as operations, heating, cooling or storage with minimal intervention from the users
Company ZOMP Building the world's first 3D imaging cytometer and cell sorter. 3D imaging cytometry is a revolutionary new method of analysing and sorting cells. It enables the accurate measurement and sorting of single cells at high throughput based on observable characteristics
Company ZORB security ZORB’s software proactively prevents sensitive business data from being sent to untrusted recipients, to eliminate data theft in businesses whose reputation is their differentiator

Should your company be on this list? Or do you know a company that should be? Submit your nomination by completing the form, emailing 21toWatch@cofinitive.com or following @cofinitive on Twitter and using #21toWatch.

We are also looking for the people and ‘things’ who could be a #21toWatch Top21.