bristol
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James Foster and the chip that could wear somebody else’s name
At XMOS, James Foster argued that a small company should be able to sell its own chip without paying to design one from scratch. His most revealing early customer was the one whose name he kept to himself.
Alex Young and the art of having another go
A snowbound weekend in New York helped Alex Young decide what to do next. The Virti founder has spent the years since building places where people can practise before the moment counts.
Cajigo knows a career can begin with a conversation
A Bristol social enterprise connects girls and women with the people already working in technology. Its wager: a clearer route and a useful mentor can make an unfamiliar career feel possible.
Accelerate Agency closed. The retainer lesson lives on.
The Bristol SaaS SEO specialist turned scattered projects into longer client relationships. Its rise and 2025 closure offer a useful lesson in what agencies sell, what clients buy, and what a traffic chart leaves out.
XMOS
XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company based in Bristol, UK, that designs the XCORE family of multicore, deterministic processors for embedded voice, audio, AI and control at the edge. Founded in 2005 by a team rooted in the University of Bristol and Inmos transputer heritage, XMOS built its name on far-field voice processing (VocalFusion, the first far-field solution qualified for Amazon Alexa) and now positions XCORE as a 'Generative System-on-Chip' (GenSoC) - silicon whose behaviour can be described in natural language while guaranteeing real-time, deterministic performance.