GBx Gala 2026 & Best in British Tech Award Winners

This October, the British tech ecosystem gathered at the iconic Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco for the GBx Gala, celebrating ten years of GBx, our community of 450+ British founders, operators and investors in the US.

 

Many unicorn founders and c-suite were in the room, hailing from ClassDojo, Slack, Stripe, PsiQuantum, Tekion, Alphabet, Netflix, and Fastly.

We opened the evening with remarks from Sir Christian Turner, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States, and our Executive Director Mark Charkin, before Priya Guha MBE, Venture Partner at Merian Ventures and former British Consul General to San Francisco, and Pete Flint OBE, General Partner at NFX and unicorn founder, took us through Ten Years of GBx.

Chiara Benn, GBx Head of Community, opened the Fireside Chat by introducing Reid Hoffman CBE and GBx Board Member Joe White MBE.

Reid Hoffman CBE co-founded LinkedIn and Inflection AI, is a Partner at Greylock and was a founding board member of PayPal. He was also an early backer of Facebook, Airbnb and OpenAI. Joe White MBE is CEO of Radical Tempo, co-founder of Moonfruit and was formerly His Majesty’s Technology Envoy to the US.

Together they talked about where AI goes next, and Reid made the case that it’s already saving lives.

The Best in British Tech Awards were presented by Serena Dayal (GBx Board and Venture Partner at Athena Capital, formerly SoftBank Vision Fund) and James da Costa (GBx Board and Partner at Andreessen Horowitz). Congratulations to our winners…

 

🏆Disruptor Award: James Lo, Co-Founder & CEO, and Daniel Mankowitz, Co-Founder & CTO, Ethos

Kindly supported by the Henderson Family Foundation.

 

🏆Trailblazer Award: Philip Johnston, Co-Founder & CEO, and Dr Ezra Feilden, Co-Founder & CTO, Starcloud

Kindly supported by Odgers.

 

🏆Tech for Humanity: Simone Korsgaard Jensen and Bryan Wei Zhi Tan, Co-Founders, Radical Health

Kindly supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

 

With Philip and Ezra unable to attend, Pete Flint OBE, General Partner at NFX and an investor in Starcloud since seed, collected the Trailblazer Award on their behalf.

 

Our former Best in British Tech Award winners include unicorns such as Calm and ClassDojo, and Oxford Ionics, which has since been acquired for over a billion dollars. Another past winner, Flow Engineering, announced a $50M Series B round, with participation from Sequoia, the week before this year’s gala!

 

To echo His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States Sir Christian Turner and GBx Co-chair Joe White MBE’s words, we are so grateful to our partners, members, and the GBx board for making our tenth anniversary Gala unforgettable.

The King’s Trust was our charitable partner as it marks 50 years of changing young lives, and this year’s sweepstake raised just shy of $10,000. Thank you to the British Consulate-General San Francisco, The Londoner, Knights Bridge, Harrods Corporate Service, Virgin Atlantic and Sazerac, who generously provided prizes, wine and spirits.

 

Thank you to our supporters: a16z, Alex Schultz, CBRE, CLA, Ellis Porter, Frontline, Geoff Seely, The Henderson Family Foundation, Imperial College London, Intrinsic, McKinsey & Company, Merrill (Bank of America), NFX, Odgers, Oxford Seed Fund, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering, Silicon Valley Bank, Wilson Sonsini and Winston Taylor.

 

To Sazerac for keeping the cheer going with their generously donated whisky tasting lounge and bar, and to Greyfriars for the magnums of British bubbles presented to our fireside speakers.

 

And to our wonderful event producer Callie Crowe 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.

 

Here’s to the next ten years of GBx!