Winners of 2026 Entrepreneurship Prize announced
Congratulations to medical tech startup Polytecks, healthcare AI platform Quality Health, and diagnostic software OpthaDetect - the winners of the 2026 King’s Entrepreneurship Prize.
We are delighted to announce the 12th year of awards under the College’s annual entrepreneurship competition, intended to encourage King’s members (past and present) to develop their entrepreneurial ideas and convert their creativity and knowhow for sustainable commercial and social benefit.
This year’s top prize, with a value of £20,000, has been awarded to Polytecks, a £10,000 second prize goes to Quality Health, and OpthaDetect receives the third prize of £5,000.
With Phil Clements (KC 2025), Polytecks is a medical technology start-up making the skin a window into the body with first-of-their-kind flexible sensors that capture the body's electrical signatures in unprecedented resolution. Built on new conducting materials, engineering techniques, and machine learning, Polytecks' next-generation arrays make advanced diagnostics as easy to use as a stethoscope, with the clear aim of establishing bioelectrical mapping as a mainstream diagnostic category. The company is entering the market through veterinary cardiology to accurately stage cardiovascular disease at the point of care, while scaling its platform to map the brain, muscles, nervous system, gut, and ultimately anything electrically active in the body.
Dr Chris Williams (KC 2014) founded Quality Health alongside Dr Brenda Miao to automate healthcare quality reporting and close the care gap for healthcare organisations. The company acts as an enterprise AI platform, integrating across electronic medical record systems to extract metrics from live records with over 98% accuracy. By doing so, it delivers real-time insights for quality improvement and streamlines operations for clinical providers.
OpthaDetect is the B2B2C start-up led by Muhammed Alakitan (KC 2020) offering a deep learning-powered software designed for rapid testing of diabetic retinopathy in low-resource settings. This innovative software platform utilises large visual models to provide ophthalmologists and clinicians with a much-needed tool to assess the severity and presence of eye disorders.
***
The Entrepreneurship Prize competition was established in 2014 with a gift from Stuart Lyons CBE (KC 1962) and culminates each year in the ‘Lyons Den’, where finalists present their full business plans to an expert panel.
If you would like to find out more about the King's Entrepreneurship Prize and how to enter the competition, please email enterprise@kings.cam.ac.uk