The Entrepreneurship Lab at King's College Cambridge runs SPARK, a residential incubator that takes people from an idea to an incorporated company, a first round, or first revenue. This was its second year, and the first open to all 31 Cambridge colleges and to Anglia Ruskin University.
We joined as a venture and mentor partner.
King's has form here. Keynes was a fellow. Turing was an undergraduate and then a fellow. So was Geoffrey Hinton, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The reason we said yes was more prosaic than the lineage. SPARK does not take current students, with the exception of PhD candidates, so it never competes with anyone's degree. The effect is that the room fills with people who have already left and have life experience to call on for their ideas. Of this cohort, 60% graduated from Cambridge five or more years ago.
Over five weeks we mentored the cohort, with our team spending time in Cambridge rather than on calls.
Daniel Lanyon ran a session with Francesca Hodgson, the programme director, on venture building and the current UK fundraising landscape. It was opened to founders outside the programme as well.
Demo day was on 23 September at Balderton Capital's offices in King's Cross, who hosted and supported the programme. Two rounds of pitches, a break, and a prize giving.
We awarded £15k, non-dilutive, to Habitus. Habitus is a proactive AI tool that upskills workers in real time, rather than waiting to be prompted. The core argument: companies waste money on AI adoption because passive tools create trial-and-error behavior, not genuine skill-building.
We chose on what was not just a great business idea but on coachability and on progress across the five weeks, judged from real contact rather than from one rehearsed pitch. Our team had been in the room with these founders since the start.
AI is the multiplier. Domain expertise is what you multiply.
That is straightforward to put in a deck and harder to source. Most accelerators optimise for the opposite: the youngest, fastest, least encumbered founder, on the theory that speed beats knowledge. We think the knowledge is the part that cannot be shortcut.
SPARK's structure, without setting out to, selects for the thing we look for. The people in that room had spent years inside industries before they started building anything.
Two of the SPARK cohort join our MVB Sprint Day on Saturday 10 October in Farringdon. Nine hours to take what you already know and turn it into a minimum viable business. The winner leaves with a route to pitch us for £250k.
We are keeping an eye on several others from the cohort.
Thanks to Francesca Hodgson and the E-Lab team for bringing us in, and to Balderton Capital for hosting.