The challenge for the UK is going from adopting innovation to creating it. This mission was centre stage at London’s Grow Summit, which brought together leading innovators, investors, and policymakers gathered to back scientific founders building at the frontier of technology. The event marked London’s evolution from a hub for capital into a lab for deep-tech development.
The Future Horizons event, held at the Royal Academy of Arts and hosted by Oli Barrett MBE, was the culmination of the Frontier Innovation Fellowship, a programme by London & Partners and the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT). The atmosphere echoed the vision of keynote speaker Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who reflected that “the web was imagined as a coffee area for the world – a place where anyone could interact.” It was an ethos that defined the event.
A summit for scaling frontier innovation
Building on last year’s event, The Grow Summit is designed as a peer-led, impartial forum for the UK’s most promising scale-ups. Summit sessions are intended to be both personal and inclusive, allowing deep-tech founders to connect with investors, advisors, and each other. The agenda featured sessions on AI, climate tech, and the future of work, providing a strategic backdrop for the founders’ demonstrations.
The day unfolded through a dynamic series of talks and panels led by some of the UK’s foremost voices in technology and policy. The morning featured keynotes from Laura Citron OBE and Dex Hunter-Torricke, alongside lightning talks from Delta.g, SAIF Autonomy, and KnitRegen, spotlighting early-stage innovation in AI and life sciences.
Panels explored the full innovation spectrum, from “Lab to Launch” and “The State of Innovation” to “From VC to IPO,” examining whether the UK’s capital stack truly supports frontier founders. A highlight was the fireside chat on The Future of the Internet, delving into AI, data sovereignty, and ethical growth.
Following a networking break with tech showcases, the summit continued with sessions on AI regulation, next-generation infrastructure, and open innovation, capped by discussions on quantum technology and fusion energy– themes that underscored the UK’s ambition to lead in deep tech. Keynotes from Conrad Shawcross and Nigel Toon provided creative and strategic perspectives before closing remarks from Laura Citron, Richard Murphy, and Oli Barrett wrapped up a day dedicated to scaling science-led innovation.
“For many early-stage founders, hardware can seem like a daunting challenge at first,” said Tobias Halloran, Director of Europe, Startups at NVIDIA. “Through our Inception program, we bring in our solution architects, engineers, and technical experts to help startups get hands-on with AI infrastructure and optimise their products quickly and effectively. We also support them with cloud credits to make it easier and more cost-efficient to build and scale. Beyond the technical side, we help founders find their first customers and design partners by connecting them with our extensive enterprise network – accelerating their path from prototype to market.”
Founders demonstrating the future
The Frontier Innovation Fellowship fellows were core to the event. The programme, which offers more than £500,000 in resources and mentorship, helps founders transform cutting-edge research into market-ready businesses. From AI and quantum computing to healthtech, the cohort represents the breadth of London’s specialist tech strength. The summit provided a platform for these nine companies to step out of the lab and into the spotlight, engaging with the partners and investors needed to propel them onto a global stage.
The fellows showcased technologies aimed at solving complex, global problems across heavy industry, creative markets, and personal wellbeing.
For Osas Omoigiade, Chief Executive Officer of DeepMeta, the challenge is optimising heavy industry. His company uses AI to make manufacturing processes, starting with steel production, more efficient. “I saw firsthand there was an opportunity to be able to leverage the existing data in these plants to help them be more efficient,” Omoigiade told TFN
The acute need is particularly clear in the UK and Europe. “We have very high energy costs, very high carbon costs, and so we need to do all that we can to be more competitive in the global market.” DeepMeta’s AI applications include scheduling optimisation to reduce material waste and predicting product conditions in furnaces to cut energy consumption, directly addressing both cost and sustainability pressures.
Xuehan Jiang, Chief Executive Officer of Primordial, is applying quantitative trading principles to the music industry. “We see music as one of the most powerful market non-correlated assets, but currently it’s locked behind a closed door because the market is opaque, data fragmented, and the valuation method outdated,” Jiang explained.
Primordial is building the data infrastructure for music to be traded as an investable asset, “bringing transparency, scalability, and confidence for investors to come in and back the artists that they believe in.” Jiang, who comes from a quant trading background, aims to bridge finance and creativity, ensuring artists are not excluded from opportunities. The platform’s ability to deliver accurate, scalable valuations could unlock new capital flows for the creative industries.
Meanwhile, Dr. Emanuela Maggioni, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Hynt, is targeting personal wellbeing with clinically proven technology. Her company aims to improve everyone’s sleep by synchronising data from wearables to a cloud system that triggers real-time compounds to improve sleep.
“Everything is a loop, meaning that you learn from you, your environment,” Maggioni explained. At the summit, Hynt demonstrated its precise, AI-driven technology, which uses natural language processing to allow users to create personalised scent compounds for relaxation. This focus on closed-loop, adaptive systems represents a growing trend in health tech, moving from generic solutions to personalised interventions.
A platform for global growth
The summit provided a platform for these founders to articulate their vision to a global audience. The value of the fellowship, as noted by several founders, was in the access to a tailored network and the dedicated space to refine their approach away from day-to-day operational pressures. Maggioni noted the program gave her “the time to redefine your storytelling,” a critical benefit when explaining complex science to potential partners and customers.
The collaborative and diverse ecosystem was a key theme. The fellowship cohort itself was notably international, a strength that Jiang highlighted. “We have a very diverse cohort,” she said. “We have nine people, and we have four female founders, five male founders, and we’re quite international… we cherish each other’s culture.” This diversity of thought and experience strengthens the network, providing founders with a wider range of perspectives and potential connections.
The support comes at a critical time for the participants. DeepMeta, for example, is preparing for its next equity round to accelerate commercial deployment, while Primordial is finalising its first funding round. The programme has helped them all to prepare for investment.
Focused, supported, and ready for scale
For the founders, the Grow Summit solidified that London’s strength lies not just in investment capital, but in its concentrated, supportive ecosystem for deep technology. As Omoigiade, Jiang, and Maggioni demonstrate, the next wave of innovation is being driven by founders who are experts in their domains, building specialised solutions for fundamental challenges.
With their stories refined and their networks expanded, the fellows are now poised to take their companies to the next level. As Jiang told us, “This is one of the best ecosystems I’ve ever been in… London & Partners is basically bridging all the possible networks that we would ever imagine.”
For more details on the Frontier Innovation Fellowship and Grow Summit, visit grow.london.
