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Enterprises honoured

7 October 2021

The article at a glance

The annual Business Weekly Awards include several recipients with ties to Cambridge Judge Business School, including Cambridge Quantum Computing as Business of the Year.

The annual Business Weekly Awards include several recipients with ties to Cambridge Judge Business School, including Cambridge Quantum Computing as Business of the Year.

Ilyas Khan.
Ilyas Khan

Several companies with connections to Cambridge Judge Business School were named winners in the annual Business Weekly Awards 2021 by the Cambridge-based business publication.

Cambridge Quantum Computing, a global leader in quantum software and algorithms founded by Ilyas Khan, Leader in Residence and a Fellow in Management Practice at Cambridge Judge, was named Business of the Year. The company, which has offices in the UK, US and Japan, announced in June that it was combining with Honeywell Quantum Solutions, a unit of US-based Honeywell, which has been an investor in Cambridge Quantum since 2019.

Ilyas was the inaugural Chairman of the Stephen Hawking Foundation, is a fellow commoner of St Edmund’s College, and was closely involved in the foundation of the Accelerate Cambridge programme run by the Business School’s Entrepreneurship Centre. Cambridge Quantum “has scaled phenomenally quickly to take a world lead in the space. We anticipate CQ soaring further and faster as its quantum computing innovation transforms an impressive array of life science, technology and industrial processes,” Business Weekly said.

Eagle Genomics, a smart data firm for the life sciences that was supported by the Entrepreneurship Centre of Cambridge Judge, was named AI Champion in the Business Weekly competition. The Eagle Genomics platform utilises AI to analyse complex genomic and microbiomic data at scale to enable enterprise brands to assess the viability, efficacy and safety of products.

SATAVIA, an aviation analytics and visualisation company that was supported by Accelerate Cambridge, was named Sustainability Champion in the awards. The firm “is regarded as the only solution delivering actionable insight in aviation which is able to combine and validate multiple environmental, weather, aircraft and maintenance datasets,” Business Weekly said.

The Cambridge Enterprise Lifetime Achievement Award went to Steve Young, who played a leading role at the speech recognition firm VocalIQ; the company, which was supported by Accelerate Cambridge, was sold to Apple in 2015. Business Weekly referred to him as a Cambridge ‘dontrepreneur’.

The CJBS Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award, sponsored by Cambridge Judge Business School, was won by Giorgia Longobardi, founder and CEO of Cambridge GaN Devices. Giorgia, who holds a PhD in power devices from the University of Cambridge, “has years of experience in managing and budgeting multi-partner projects and prior to that has led the GaN power devices team at the engineering department at Cambridge University”, Business Weekly said.

The awards will be presented at a 15 October ceremony at St John’s Innovation Centre in Cambridge.