Winners of the Cambridge Independent Business Awards 2026 revealed. Published: 23:31, 24 September 2026 | Updated: 01:13, 25 September 2026 The winners of the Cambridge Independent Business Awards 2026 have been revealed at a glittering ceremony held at King's College. From Start-up of the Year to Business of the Year categories, the best of the Cambridge region was celebrated at the third annual ceremony in the spectacular Great Hall on Thursday (24 September). With headline sponsorship from Barr Ellison Law for the third year running, the black-tie event was hosted by editor Paul Brackley. The winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, a special category sponsored by Weatherbys Business Bank, was the first to be revealed. It went to Martina King, who helped to take real-time fraud detection company Featurespace from Cambridge start-up to a global success story, acquired by Visa for a reported $1 billion. Martina, now chair of another Cambridge AI success story, Luminance, began her career as a display ad manager at Guardian News and Media, before roles as MD of London Stations for Capital Radio in the 1990s, MD for Europe at Yahoo, and MD of Aurasma, the world's first visual browser. As CEO of Featurespace, formed by the University of Cambridge machine learning expert Professor Bill Fitzgerald and his PhD student, Dave Excell, she enjoyed her greatest success, transforming it into a global powerhouse with offices around the world. Deployed at some of the largest banks, payment processors, merchant acquirers, insurance companies and gaming organisations, its technology protects more than 500 million consumers. Martina spoke to the audience, delivering an acceptance speech about her stellar career. It was an inspiring start to the ceremony, and was appropriately followed by Start-up of the Year, a category sponsored by Buckles Law. It went to Elle-Events Management, founded in 2024 by Elle Roberts-Nissen to offer bespoke, relationship-driven events planning. Business of the Year was divided into three categories, Small, Medium and Large, based on the number of employees. Business of the Year - Small, sponsored by The Crown Estate, went to Conscious Communications, the Cambridge-based public relations and marketing agency that was founded with an ambition to prove that a business with a conscience can thrive commercially. Business of the Year - Medium, sponsored by Barr Ellison Law, was won by the Grand Arcade after a storming year in which turnover was up and footfall rose to more than 12.3 million people, powered by impactful events and collaborations, like its Grand Discoveries exhibition, which made the shortlist in the Award for Collaboration category. Top stories on Cambridge Independent. Business of the Year - Large, sponsored by BDO, went to Gearset, the B2B software as a service company provides a leading enterprise DevOps and agentic change platform to companies around the world. It was an outstanding evening for Gearset, which also earned Employer of the Year, sponsored by iQ business magazine, in recognition of its values-led approach to looking after its employees, which has led to an exceptionally high retention rate. Alchemie Technology was another company to emerge with two awards. It won The Green Award, sponsored by Conscious Communications, for taking precision engineering from Cambridge to heavy textile manufacturing hubs like Taiwan and Portugal to reduce water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and stop industrial water pollution. It was Highly Commended in the Innovation of the Year category, sponsored by Mantle Space and won by HutanBio for developing Sphaerica, a new genus of marine microalgae capable of producing oil at 25 times the rate of previously studied algae and around 10 times that of conventional oil crops. It can be processed into sustainable aviation fuel, renewable marine fuel and low-carbon diesel, with the first commercial site due to be completed in 2029. Social Enterprise of the Year, sponsored by Velvet magazine, was won by MathsFit, which offers an active learning programme at after-school clubs that combines National Curriculum maths with more than 45 sports and games. Retailer of the Year, sponsored by Cambridge BID, was earned by Plumbs' Dairy, a third-generation family business that has delivered fresh milk and local produce to doorsteps across Cambridgeshire since 1952. The Award for Collaboration, sponsored by AstraZeneca, went to Owlstone Medical and Welbeck Health Partners, which teamed up to bring small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) testing to patients in their own homes, helping them to get the right treatment for gut health issues. The Mayor's Award for Scale-up of the Year, sponsored by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority and mayor Paul Bristow, was won by Jumptech, which has created software that has supported more than 500,000 low carbon technology installations - from EV chargers to solar panels - across 22 countries, with customers and partners including British Gas, EDF and ScottishPower. Hospitality Business of the Year, sponsored by Kale & Damson, was served up to The Oak Bistro, the restaurant in Cambridge's Lensfield Road at which owner Philip Newman still leads from the front, more than 17 years after he opened it. Business Person of the Year, sponsored by The Cambridge Building Society, was won by Alex Tunbridge, CEO of Cambridge United Football Club, which is attracting record attendances, has earned an EFL Gold Family Excellence Award for its matchday experience and has developed strong partnerships in the community. Look out for a souvenir awards special in the Cambridge Independent, out from 30 September, 2026. Winners of the Cambridge Independent Business Awards 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award Sponsored by Weatherbys Business Bank Martina King Start-up of the Year Sponsored by Buckles Law Winner: Elle-Events Management Highly Commended: CompliMind Business of the Year - Small Sponsored by The Crown Estate Winner: Conscious Communications Highly Commended: 4Cambridge Innovation of the Year Sponsored by Mantle Space Winner: HutanBio Highly Commended: Alchemie Technology Social Enterprise of the Year Sponsored by Velvet magazine Winner: MathsFit Highly Commended: Cambridge Science Centre Retailer of the Year Sponsored by Cambridge BID Winner: Plumbs' Dairy Highly Commended: Campkins Cameras The Green Award Sponsored by Conscious Communications Winner: Alchemie Technology Highly Commended: The Cambridge Building Society Employer of the Year Sponsored by iQ business magazine Winner: Gearset Highly Commended: Cambridge Vacuum Engineering The Award for Collaboration Sponsored by AstraZeneca Winner: Owlstone Medical & Welbeck Health Partners Highly Commended: Marshall Aerospace & Horizon Aircraft The Mayor's Award for Scale-up of the Year Sponsored by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority Winner: Jumptech Highly Commended: Midsummer Energy Business of the Year - Medium Sponsored by Barr Ellison Law Winner: Grand Arcade Highly Commended: Hot Numbers Hospitality Business of the Year Sponsored by Kale & Damson Winner: The Oak Bistro Highly Commended: University Arms Business Person of the Year Sponsored by The Cambridge Building Society Winner: Alex Tunbridge, Cambridge United Football Club Highly Commended: James Tweed, Coracle Business of the Year - Large Sponsored by BDO Winner: Gearset Highly Commended: Frontier Developments Paul said: "It was a special night, and I would like to congratulate all of our winners, highly commended finalists and nominees on their outstanding achievements, which we recognised tonight. I would also like to thank our sponsors for their support in helping us celebrate the best in the business across the Cambridge region. "We've heard inspiring stories at these awards, which are proof that Cambridge's business community continues to innovate and excel in so many ways." A silent auction at the awards raised money for Addenbrooke's Charitable Trust to put towards the new Cambridge Children's Hospital and Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital. The Cambridge Independent is also supporting the charity's Panda Meander sculpture trail next year, which will raise money for the children's hospital and children's services, and one of the smaller pandas from the initiative was on show for the audience. Entry to the 2027 awards will open in June.

Gearset launches Cam, the AI agent that helps Salesforce teams accelerate development without sacrificing control. Sep 03, 2026, 11:15 ET Cam is the only AI agent that Salesforce teams can trust to take tickets end to end, fully governed by the security and delivery guardrails that DevOps demands. Within a week of onboarding Cam, Gearset customers had it creating up to 44% of their team's pull requests. CAMBRIDGE, England, Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ - Gearset, the platform for agentic Salesforce development, today announces its AI agent. Cam is a virtual teammate that plans and builds Salesforce changes, delivered through the team's governed release process. It is the only AI agent that Salesforce teams can trust to take tickets end to end, fully governed by the security and delivery guardrails that DevOps demands. In pilots with a selection of Gearset customers, Cam has helped deliver up to 44% of teams' pull requests. "AI can write a change in seconds, but making sure it's right and getting it into a live business system without breaking anything is the hard part. Many development teams have quickly reached a level of AI maturity where every contributor generates code quickly with AI assistants, but the team as a whole hasn't increased throughput because the bottleneck moves to code review: validating changes, fixing what agents break, and reconciling work built in isolation" said Kevin Boyle, CEO at Gearset. Faros AI's 2025 and 2026 research across tens of thousands of developers found that AI speeds up individual coders, but review and rework swallow the gains before they reach the team. Maturing to truly agentic workflows is also a far harder challenge. To trust agents working alongside development teams, businesses need to know that every change is governed and secure by default. Now, with Cam, whole teams can accelerate together, without trading speed for control. Unlike coding copilots that generate a starting point for a developer, Cam can be assigned a ticket and carry the work right through to a pull request, taking routine work off teams' backlogs and working with every team member in a consistent way. It interprets change requests, asks for clarification where needed, then plans and builds changes the way Salesforce teams actually work - based on the context of their repository and specific org setup. Before sharing work for review, Cam ensures its Salesforce changes are valid and deployable, and makes the changes fully in line with an org's standards, documented conventions and security controls. The result is significantly increased output without causing blockages further down the release pipeline, freeing teams up to focus on strategic, architectural, and business challenges. Within a week, one customer had Cam creating 44% of their team's pull requests, with 75% of these successfully merged. Marilyn John, Sr. Revenue Systems Manager at Hudl said: "The rest of our company moves fast with general AI tools. We needed a way to move that fast inside Salesforce, without handing everyone read and write access to our production org. Cam gave us the speed with the permissions and the governance intact." Every change Cam makes is governed by exactly the same testing, review and software delivery controls as the rest of the team's work, and there's a complete audit trail of what Cam has built and why. This means teams can confidently increase the amount of work they delegate to Cam, scaling throughput without sacrificing control over quality and security. Gearset CEO Kevin Boyle added: "Salesforce teams need AI they can trust - not just capable, but governed and secure by their own standards. Cam is the only agent that delivers both. For the first time, teams can hand off real work to AI and gain genuine capacity, keeping complete control over the output." The launch of Cam marks a major expansion for Gearset, now not only helping thousands of teams manage and release changes but safely creating those changes too. As teams adopt agentic workflows to build changes, DevOps is more important than ever. Gearset's decade of experience helping enterprises build robust Salesforce workflows means teams can accelerate Salesforce development with the appropriate guardrails in place from the outset. Cam will be showcased live on Gearset's booths at Dreamforce 2026, taking place from September 15th-17th. To read more about Cam, follow this link: https://gearset.com/solutions/gearset-agent/ About Gearset: Gearset is trusted by 3500+ enterprises to accelerate Salesforce development without sacrificing quality or security. Its AI agent, Cam, works through tickets in the backlog, freeing up teams to focus on strategic projects, with all changes securely governed through the DevOps lifecycle. Gearset has over a decade of experience in the Salesforce ecosystem and is an official Salesforce partner. Media Contact SOURCE Gearset