The city of Cambridge, north of London, famous for its prestigious university and scientific discoveries, wants to strengthen its position as a technology center and compete with its counterpart San Francisco in the American state of California.
The goal is for the city to become “the world’s next Silicon Valley,” according to British Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt.
The British executive authority does not hesitate to allocate the necessary funds to make Cambridge the new “European scientific capital.” steps One of the most prominent steps in this area is London’s announcement of allocating three million pounds sterling in the fall budget to finance new projects to enhance the city’s infrastructure, including transportation and housing.
Cambridge is one of the most expensive British cities in terms of property prices, just like San Francisco, which is considered the “actual” Silicon Valley, and the concentration of highly skilled jobs there translates into a high cost of living.
Start-ups The “Innovate Cambridge” project, which is a cooperation between the famous university and major companies, including the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Microsoft Technology, aims to double the number of startup companies known as “unicorns” in the city by 2035.
According to recent data from its university, twenty-three of these startups were born in the small English city, whose value is estimated at more than a billion dollars, which is approximately equivalent to the number of startups of this category in Berlin, but less than the number of “unicorn” companies in the country.
These local success stories include technology giant Arm, whose semiconductor designs are used in most smartphones around the world, IT security company Darktrace, and Abcam. ) specializes in the production of antibodies for research purposes.
The United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization noted that Cambridge is the city that witnesses the largest scientific and technological activity in the world relative to its population density. In the United Kingdom as a whole, startups raised more than $21 billion last year, which represented a decline after two exceptional years, but Britain is still the third largest technology incubator environment in the world after the United States and China, according to a study published in early January by the company “Dell Rome.” (Dealroom) and HSBC Bank.
CMR Surgical co-founder Mark Slack said one of the reasons his life sciences company became a “unicorn” in 2019 was its presence in Cambridge. “There are probably not many places in the world where we could have achieved this,” said the head of the company, which was founded in 2014 and produces small robots that perform “minimally invasive” surgeries (which do not require a large opening in the body).
