The era of speculative funding is over. Capital is now concentrating around companies that can move from breakthrough to real-world deployment.

This session brings together global investors deploying capital across AI, climate and deep tech to explore how investment strategy is shifting as technologies move from discovery to execution.

The focus is not just on what is being funded, but where real conviction is forming — across infrastructure, platforms and industrial-scale applications — and what that signals for the next generation of category-defining companies.

Panellists will unpack what now separates companies that secure growth capital: technical depth, commercial traction, capital efficiency, and the ability to scale globally from the outset.

The discussion will also examine the macro forces shaping investor behaviour, including longer time horizons, higher technical and geopolitical risk, and the continued importance of proximity to leading research and innovation ecosystems such as Cambridge.

For founders and ecosystem leaders, this is a direct view of how capital is being allocated today — and what it now takes to build companies that can attract it.