“I remember the energy in the room being electric. The startups involved were in disbelief that we were offering this kind of investment and asking for zero equity in return.” This is not TV’s Dragon’s Den – it’s Joshua Lim’s (Wolfson 2022) overriding memory of his first experience of hosting the Oxbridge AI Challenge, Cambridge University Entrepreneurs’ (CUE) flagship competition for students hoping to launch businesses in the tech sector – with up to £60,000 in prize money.

Lim joined CUE in 2023, having just finished an internship at a venture capital fund in Singapore, where he had been thrust into the world of AI-based investments. He was inspired by the group’s success as a launchpad for budding entrepreneurs, but also by its community spirit. “Projects come and go, but people stay,” he says.

“That’s why it’s not just about providing resources – our job is also to help potential co-founders to find each other, and ensure leaders can hire talent from trusted circles.” With that in mind, he has focused on strengthening CUE’s network of mentors from entrepreneurial and established businesses, as well as making connections between CUE’s 600-plus members – from first year undergraduates to PhD students – and funds and angel investors.

Technical expertise is important, too; hence Lim’s decision to launch the Build House project. It gives novice founders access to experienced developers from companies such as Google and Microsoft who can train them in new skills and help future-proof their business ideas. “It might be that a student is working on a build as a pet project in their spare time – we’ll encourage them and get the right people around them so they can take it to the next level,” says Lim.

The AI Challenge is the society’s most visible success story, involving more than 300 fledgling businesses from across Cambridge and Oxford, many of which go on to attract investment (a recent highlight was securing funding for a business piloting endometriosis scans). Yet Lim is equally proud of the day-to-day work his team does, introducing students to business partners, helping them to secure relevant internships or just organising informal get-togethers. “We try hard to listen to what our community wants,” he says. “If they ask for a pitch night at the pub, we’ll bring in some venture capitalists to listen to them present. If they’d like a formal hall, we can do that too.”

As a group, CUE’s strength lies in its grassroots-level activity. “You hear a lot about early-stage startups, but you’ll never get earlier than one of us hanging out in a friend’s room, cooking cheeseburgers while watching them sketch out their plan – and then, a few months later, seeing it take off,” he says, smiling. “That’s what makes us so authentic.”