Four Startups. One Room. Endless Possibility: Demo Night Cornwall, March 2026
Mar 26, 2026
Something shifted in the air at Tech Cornwall on the evening of 18 March 2026. Four founders walked to the front of the room, each with five minutes to show the audience what they had been building — and five minutes to answer whatever the room threw at them. It was a Demo Night, not a networking event. There were no pitches, no polished investor decks designed to dazzle. Just founders doing the thing that matters most: showing their work.
Canopy's Cornwall Demo Night brought together a room of early-stage founders, technologists, and local builders at FibreHub — Pool's high-profile tech and digital hub adjacent to Cornwall College Campus, just off the A30 — united by curiosity and community spirit. The audience wasn't passive — they rated every demo live via Mentimeter, asked questions, and voted on their favourite at the end of the evening. What emerged was a snapshot of real innovation, rooted in Cornwall but reaching far beyond it.
This article celebrates each of the four startups who took the stage, shares what the audience made of them, and crowns the People's Choice winner for March. Whether you were in the room or couldn't make it, here is what you missed.
🏆 People's Choice Winner: Tom Ring, HyperionWave
A huge congratulations to Tom Ring, whose demo for HyperionWave captured the imagination of the room and took home the People's Choice award for Demo Night Cornwall. The audience voted Tom's demo as their clear favourite of the evening, with HyperionWave finishing first in the final poll. You'll find the full story of what Tom is building below — but first, a warm round of applause for a deserving winner.
OpenB2C
Bespoke digital products without one-size-fits-all constraints.
Louis opened the evening with a provocation: most B2C digital tools are built on the assumption that every business and every customer is roughly the same. OpenB2C rejects that premise entirely. Built by Dutton Digital, the platform approaches each client's interface as something that should evolve — because cultures expire, UX paradigms expire, and what worked in 2020 won't necessarily work in 2026. The underlying philosophy is that interfaces should be built for tomorrow's world using APIs, not locked into today's UI. Louis's demo leaned into the discomfort of that argument, presenting a vision where products are curated for relevance rather than assembled from off-the-shelf components.
The audience found the concept interesting if not yet immediately clear — the Mentimeter scores showed an "I get it" average of 3.0 and a "I'd use it" of 2.0, suggesting the idea is provocative enough to spark conversation but may benefit from a sharper articulation of the target customer. With 0 questions submitted via the live Q&A, it was the kind of demo that left people thinking rather than immediately reaching for their phones — which, in its own way, is a success.
Keenu
AI-powered exam prep and feedback for educators.
Charlotte and her co-founders Francis and Niall stepped up with a product that addresses one of the most persistent headaches in language education: the IELTS exam. Teachers who work with IELTS students face an almost impossible volume of feedback requests — mock tests, speaking practice, error correction — all on top of their regular teaching load. Keenu changes the dynamic by giving students unlimited personalised IELTS exam practice with human-level AI feedback, while giving teachers the insights they actually need: individual student trends, class-wide data, and freed-up time to focus on what only a human teacher can do.
The team behind Keenu is genuinely impressive. Francis brings 14 years in English Language Teaching and has already scaled one platform — Last Minute English — to 180,000 students across 191 countries. Niall was previously Tech Lead for an EU-funded training platform at Manchester University. Charlotte, as Head of Design and Product, is a bilingual French and English speaker with a background at Marla Blue. The audience responded warmly: scores of 4.0 for clarity and usability indicate a product that is both understood and wanted. The investment score of 1.0 likely reflects the niche market perception — but anyone who has ever tried to teach IELTS at scale knows this problem is enormous.
HyperionWave
AI-first operating system for compounding business execution.
Tom Ring's demo did something rare: it made a genuinely complex AI infrastructure argument feel immediate and tangible. HyperionWave is positioned as the AI-first operating system for UK and UAE scale-up SMEs — businesses that are lean and agile but losing time and money to manual workflows, fragmented tools, and AI pilots that never quite deliver. The Hyperion promise is stark: instead of spending weeks or months navigating five-plus platforms and multiple team handoffs, you describe a goal in one conversation and Hyperion's specialist AI agents work in parallel to deliver results in minutes.
What gave Tom's demo real credibility was proof of production. HyperionWave is already live with Promova, a $500 million EdTech platform, turning what is often a theoretical AI conversation into something the room could see and believe. Tom's background as a two-time tech co-founder, former British Army officer, and BG/Shell consultant brought a level of directional certainty that was hard to argue with. The audience agreed — HyperionWave scored highest across the evening, with averages of 4.0 for clarity, 3.0 for usability and investment, and 4.0 for recommendation. And when it came to the final vote, the room made their view unmistakable: Tom and HyperionWave took the People's Choice in a clear first-place finish.
People of Cornwall
One searchable platform for Cornwall's community life.
Ben closed the evening with something quietly radical. People of Cornwall is a community platform built around a personal frustration: he moved to Cornwall three years ago and discovered that the social fabric of the county — its events, stories, photos, histories — was scattered across 100-plus Facebook groups, parish council PDFs, and notice boards no newcomer would ever find. So he built an alternative. One searchable, AI-powered platform covering 757 events, 85-plus villages, free to use and community-owned.
The proposition is deceptively simple, and the audience got it immediately — a perfect 5.0 on "I get it," making People of Cornwall the clearest, most instantly understood demo of the night. Scores of 4.0 across usability, investment interest and recommendation rounded out the strongest individual rating set of the evening. Ben is looking for beta testers based in Cornwall and is particularly eager to speak with anyone who organises local events. His ask was refreshingly direct: "Talk to me. Get feedback." In a room full of founders, that honesty landed.
The Energy in the Room
What struck observers across all four demos was the range of the problems being tackled — from international English language education to hyperlocal community memory, from AI enterprise automation to the fundamental architecture of digital products. These are not incremental ideas. Each founder was wrestling with something broken at a structural level.
The Mentimeter audience Q&A across the evening was quiet — no written questions came in for any demo — but the voting data told its own story. The range of scores across the four startups reflected genuine engagement, not politeness. And the closing prompt — "What would you say to someone about demo night and why they should come?" — produced two responses that said everything: "Wow. You've no idea what's happened out there." And simply: "Come and be amazed."
That is what Demo Night Cornwall is. A room of people building things the rest of the world hasn't caught up with yet.
What Comes Next
Cornwall's startup ecosystem is quieter than London or Lisbon in terms of volume, but it is far from inactive. The founders who took the stage on 18 March are proof that world-class ambition doesn't require a postcode in Shoreditch or a seat at a table in Mayfair. They are here, they are building, and they are getting sharper every time they share their work with a room of peers.
The next Cornwall Demo Night is already in the calendar. If you are building something — at any stage, in any sector — the best thing you can do is show up and take the stage.
Want to demo at the next Canopy Demo Night in Cornwall? Register your interest at lu.ma/canopy and join the wider Canopy community at canopy.community.
Ready to take the stage yourself? Come and join us at our next Demo Night — sign up at lu.ma/canopy.
A huge thank you to the wonderful team at FibreHub for their generosity, warmth, and brilliant hosting. FibreHub is Cornwall's home for tech, digital and software businesses — a community built on the sum of its parts, with event spaces for up to 100 people, flexible offices, and an on-site café that makes it the perfect place to bring founders together. Cornwall's startup community is lucky to have you. Find out more at fibrehub.uk.
About the Author
This article was written by Matthew Ville, CTO in Residence at Canopy Community. Matt is the Founder & CEO of Hiyield, a B Corp digital agency based in Cornwall, with over 20 years of experience in tech and product development. He believes passionately that great startups can emerge from anywhere — and Cornwall is proving it. Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.
A Huge Thank You to Tonight's Community
A special thank you to everyone who made this Demo Night possible. If you'd like to connect with our founders on LinkedIn, we'd love you to reach out and show them some support.
Tonight's Founders:
- Louis Dutton, OpenB2C — dutton.digital
- Francis Carlisle, Keenu — linkedin.com/in/francis-carlisle
- Tom Ring, HyperionWave — linkedin.com/in/tomring75
- Ben, People of Cornwall — peopleofcornwall.com
Your Host:
- Matthew Ville, CTO in Residence, Canopy Community — linkedin.com/in/matthew-ville
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