How Sheffield’s steel heritage can inspire the city when it comes to frontier technologies - David Richards

Like many before him, Eli left his home in search of fortune and headed to Sheffield, then the steel capital of the world, thanks to the efforts of entrepreneurs such as Sir Henry Bessemer whose eponymous invention enabled mass production to meet rocketing demand for new railways across the modern world. The Bessemer converter established Sheffield as a leading global city and served as the microchip of the industrial revolution.

Like Eli, I left my home in search of fortune and headed to Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the digital revolution, where I founded, ran and exited a series of software companies. After a quarter of a century in California, I returned to Sheffield, the city of my birth, at the turn of the decade and the dawn of a new industrial revolution powered by artificial intelligence that can inspire the next generation of innovators, risk takers and wealth creators.

Bessemer is an inspiration to me, his framed caricature hanging in the boardroom at the offices of our venture capital firm Yorkshire AI Labs above Paradise Square. He is also the inspiration behind the Bessemer Society, a forum for serial entrepreneurs committed to creating new companies based on innovation in the fields of science and technology which staged a homecoming dinner in Sheffield last month.

Society founder Alex Stewart is the great-great grandson of the great Victorian and a well-connected technology writer and investment analyst. He convened an unrivalled collection of CEOs, inventors, investors and fund managers to launch a regional chapter in the city transformed by his ancestor. Fittingly, it was hosted at The Mowbray, a former steel merchants hall in the historic industrial neighbourhood of Neepsend.

In the candlelit room, we heard from the entrepreneurs behind cutting-edge Sheffield companies in quantum computing, robotics technology, clean-power generators and infrared sensors. Society chairman Stephen Bennington, a distinguished scientist turned CEO, told guests about the massive growth opportunity for UK manufacturing as global conflict, pandemics and trade tensions forces countries to rethink their supply chains and bring facilities closer to home.

AI has the potential to transform entire industries but first the UK must raise its game in providing growth capital. Just eight per cent of our venture capitalists know what it’s like to work at a start-up. They are much more likely to have worked in consulting, finance and investment banking. Compare this to the US where 60 per cent of investors have hands-on experience. We launched Yorkshire AI Labs to help fill this gap in knowhow.

Addressing the society, special guest Mayor Oliver Coppard said “the modern world was created here in South Yorkshire” and South Yorkshire has the expertise, knowledge, capacity, skills and people to build the world of the future. I am sure our forebears, Eli, Lily, Henry and many, many more who put Sheffield on the map, would be looking on, encouraging us to go for it.

David Richards is chairman of Yorkshire AI Labs.