Dr shai vyakarnam

Featurespace win CfEL-sponsored Graduate Business of the Year Award

22 March 2013

The article at a glance

The enterprise founded by Cambridge alumni and using technology developed at the University was awarded the honour at the annual Business Weekly …

The enterprise founded by Cambridge alumni and using technology developed at the University was awarded the honour at the annual Business Weekly Awards champagne gala dinner on 19 March at Queens’ College, where guests included the Lord Sainsbury, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge; Sir Michael Marshall, Chairman of Marshall of Cambridge (Holdings); and Professor Christoph Loch, Dean of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Dr Shai Vyakarnam, Director of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL), announced the Cambridge Graduate Business of the Year Award. Featurespace narrowly beat Cambridge Temperature Concepts to the prize.

Shai commented:

Featurespace co-founder David Excell did his PhD under the inspirational Bill Fitzgerald at Cambridge, and the company’s fraud-busting software solutions utilise behavioural change recognition algorithms developed by the University of Cambridge.

Featurespace, whose investors include Cambridge Enterprise board member Mike Lynch, is scaling up globally and adding new target sectors to its traditional ones of gaming and lottery markets.

This Award is for a company founded by a University of Cambridge alumnus, and at least three years out of academia, that has demonstrated strong commercial progress. The 2013 finalists in this category were Cambridge Temperature Concepts for DuoFertility, Cambridge CMOS Sensors and Featurespace.

In other categories, ARM was named Business of the Year and BlueGnome, co-founded by CfEL’s Ignite programme alumnus Dr Nick Haan, won the BioMedTech Company of the Year.

© Photography copyright by Alan Bennett, Media Imaging Solutions