GBx Gala 2024 & Best in British Tech Award Winners
This November, the British tech ecosystem gathered in San Francisco for the GREAT GBx Gala, celebrating the UK’s booming $1 trillion tech sector—the largest in Europe and the third largest globally.
160+ unicorns call the British isles home. Many unicorn founders and c-suite were in the room, hailing from Netflix, Google, Slack, Stripe, Monzo, GoCardless, KeepRiskAtBay, ClassDojo, Fastly, Houzz, LinkedIn, Trulia, Cerebras Systems, Lucid Motors, and Amazon.
The Best in British Tech Awards were presented by Cal Henderson (GBx Board and Co-founder of Slack), Kathryn Parsons MBE (GBx Board and Co-founder of Decoded), and Hugh Brady (President of Imperial College). Congratulations to our winners…
Upstart: Dr Claire Trant PhD FRSA, Founder, Untap Health
Deep Tech Innovation: Chris Ballance, Founder, Oxford Ionics
Trailblazer: Hasan Sukkar, Founder, 11x AI
Our former winners include unicorns such as Calm and ClassDojo
Our Fireside Chat was led by GBx Board Member and General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nicole Quinn, featuring Jeremy Liew, who famously wrote Snap’s first VC check. Liew’s impressive portfolio includes early investments in Giphy, Affirm, Blockchain, Honest, Cheddar, and Rothys—earning him multiple spots on Forbes’ Midas List.
GBx welcomed Mark Charkin as our new executive director and expressed gratitude to outgoing executive director of three years, Amber Atherton. Additionally, we were thrilled to have longtime supporter and WSGR Managing Partner Daniel Glazer join GBx’s advisory board.
To echo HM Consul General to SF Tammy Sandhu MBE and GBx Co-chair Joe White MBE‘s words, we are so grateful to our partners, members, and the GBx board for making this event unforgettable.
We were proud to partner with the GREAT Britain & Northern Ireland Campaign to spotlight the hashtagUnicornKingdom and are grateful for the support from Silicon Valley Bank and our wonderful network of GBx members and sponsors.
Thank you to our supporters: the Henderson Family Foundation, Imperial College London, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, NFX, Generation Investment Management, Intrinsic, Radical Tempo, Goldman Sachs, Odgers Berndtson, Merrill Lynch, Silicon Valley Internship Programme, Taylor Wessing, Uncork Capital.
To David Carter at Deep Planet for keeping the cheer going and award-winning British bubbles flowing, with wine from Rathfinny, Gusbourne and Chapel Down.
And to our wonderful event planner at Shift + Alt Events for bringing the evening together.
Shift + Alt Events is a global event production company, quickly became number 1 in the Bay Area for bespoke events, number 1 in London for VCs and one of the top boutique event companies globally. Today Shift + Alt Events produces around 500 events a year all around the world, (anywhere from NYC to Delhi). Headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in London, the size of the event ranges from a 5 person dinner party to a 10,000 summit.