December Demo Night Mash up with City Ventures, Canopy and CamEntrepreneurs

December’s Demo Night in London was designed for people exactly like you: smart, ambitious, often post‑grad or master’s‑level talent taking their first serious steps into entrepreneurship. The energy in the room was less “Shark Tank theatre” and more “studio for founders” – a place to test ideas in front of peers, investors and operators who understand that everything is a work in progress. At the centre of the evening was the people’s choice winner, ResLink, alongside a strong cohort working on climate, food systems, and the future of work.

What Demo Night is for

Hosted at Bayes Business School with City Ventures and this month in partnership with CAM Entrepreneurs, Demo Night is a recurring lab for early-stage ventures rather than a one‑off competition. You are not expected to have a flawless pitch or Series A metrics. What matters is clarity of problem, honesty about where you are, and willingness to engage with feedback.

The format is simple and effective: each startup has a short slot to demo the product, followed by questions from a panel and the audience. Everyone in the room joins via Mentimeter on their phone, scoring each demo on understanding, usability and investability, and leaving written comments. Founders walk away with qualitative and quantitative data they can use to refine their product and narrative.

The December line‑up and founders

December’s cohort showed the breadth of problems a first‑time founder can choose to tackle. On stage were:

• ResLink – Roxanne (Roxy) and Joanna (Tech Talk co‑founders)

• Cellcraft (Cell Craft LTD) – Clarisse Beurrier and Yash Mishra

• 17 Energy (Energy 17) – Daniel Perdomo

• Skills Assess AI – Robin Adda

• Search Smartly – founder showcased in the audience favourites

For a master’s‑level first‑time founder, this variety is valuable. You see peers applying similar skills – research, modelling, stakeholder analysis – to problems that range from offshore wind to hiring. You also see different funding paths in action: some are deep tech and capital intensive, others are software‑led and bootstrapped.

ResLink (Roxanne and Joanna): humanising the hiring funnel

ResLink, led by Roxanne and Joanna, emerged as the people’s choice winner. Their starting point was Tech Talk, a large career community they built to help people break into tech roles. Through that lens, they watched the hiring market change: AI tools made it trivial to spam hundreds of applications, which in turn pushed employers to rely on automated filters that never see the person behind the CV.

ResLink reframes the screening step. Candidates create a structured, 90‑second video pitch where they address a specific role. The platform ingests their CV and the job description, generates a tailored script, and displays it via a teleprompter so even camera‑shy candidates can perform confidently. For employers, the value is a smaller pool of applicants with much higher signal: you can assess motivation, communication and role fit before investing in interviews. For you as a founder, it is a neat example of combining community, workflow and AI into a focused wedge into a huge market.

Cellcraft (Clarisse Beurrier and Yash Mishra): infrastructure for cultivated meat

Cellcraft, co‑founded by Clarisse Beurrier and Yash Mishra, sits at the deep‑tech end of the spectrum. Rather than launching a single cultivated meat brand, they are building tools for the whole sector: software, data and process intelligence that help producers understand techno‑economics, scale‑up options and risk.

Their demo walked through a TEA (techno‑economic analysis) suite where a user can configure parameters across bioreactors, media, scaffolds and more, then see outputs like projected cost per kilo, ROI and payback periods. For a technically trained founder, it is a good case study in turning domain expertise into a scalable product: they are effectively encoding years of lab and process knowledge into a tool food producers can use to make billion‑pound decisions.

17 Energy (Daniel Perdomo): venture‑scale climate infrastructure

17 Energy’s demo, led by co‑founder and director Daniel Perdomo, made it clear that “startup” can also mean “new way to deliver massive infrastructure.” Their Viento Azul Biobío project aims to place Chile at the heart of floating offshore wind in Latin America, with a strong focus on community engagement and just transition.

Daniel walked through a multi‑phase roadmap: from concept development and maritime concessions, through pre‑FEED and consenting, to eventual construction and operation. For first‑time founders with policy, engineering or finance backgrounds, this is a powerful reminder that your skillset is highly relevant in climate and infrastructure ventures – and that building a venture may involve orchestrating governments, communities, and global supply chains, not just writing code.

Skills Assess AI (Robin Adda) and Search Smartly: work and life, upgraded

Skills Assess AI, founded by Robin Adda, focuses on the skills gap inside organisations. Many employers cannot clearly see where their workforce is strong or weak, which impacts productivity and progression. The product is an adaptive assessment and learning platform: it measures current skills, identifies gaps, and then builds personalised learning paths to close them.

The demo showcased dashboards that HR and team leaders can use to track assessment completion and progress over time. For a data‑literate first‑time founder, it is a concrete example of how to turn a broad macro problem (“skills crisis”) into a focused product that fits into existing workflows and can be trialled with early enterprise customers.

Search Smartly, highlighted in the “favourite demo” voting, addresses the pain of finding the right home in a complex city. While less centre‑stage on the night, including it in the line‑up underlined a useful truth: you can build meaningful ventures around highly personal, everyday friction points like housing searches, not just frontier science.

Why you should come

If you are coming out of a master’s programme or early career role, Demo Night gives you:

• A live lab in how other smart, analytical people translate complex problems into crisp narratives

• Exposure to different funding and go‑to‑market strategies, from grants and pilots to community‑driven growth

• A low‑risk way to test your own idea: first as an observer, later as a demo‑stage founder

You are used to critical thinking and structured argument. Demo Night lets you apply those skills in a room where critique is offered as “critical friendship” – direct, but in service of your progress, not your ego.

Join us on the second Wednesday

Demo Night runs on the second Wednesday of every month in London. Each month brings a fresh cohort of founders and sectors, but the same core promise: this is a place to experiment in public, connect with peers, and accelerate your learning curve as a first‑time founder.

If you are ready to move from “I have an idea” to “I am building something,” block the second Wednesday in your calendar. Come first as a audience member if you like. Then, when you are ready, bring your own demo and step into the circle with the next wave of founders.

Read more about CAMEntrepreneurs https://www.camentrepreneurs.com/

Read more about City Ventures - https://www.cityventures.co.uk/