As we celebrate CyNam’s 10th anniversary, I’d like to share the role that this very special community has played for me and the town and will continue to do so in the future.
Who am I?
Bruce Gregory, Director of CyNam and Founder and MD of Hub8 by Plexal.
Without CyNam, Hub8 wouldn’t exist. To understand how special CyNam is, I think it’s important to understand more about the community which CyNam came from; here’s my very brief explanation.
GCHQ (gov) has been in Cheltenham for 73 years and over this time an industry supply chain has developed to support its Mission – to keep the UK safe.
This combination of gov and industry capability has resulted in the creation of some pretty remarkable startups and SMEs, mainly in the last 15 years.
So, we have gov, a significant industry supply chain, and growing SME and startup community that are linked culturally by the Mission and by the place where they’re located, Cheltenham.
From Cheltenham, and out of this Misson led community, CyNam was born, about 10 years ago in 2015, in the form of a tech meet up group to share thoughts and ideas.
Back in 2015 I had no link to CyNam, or its burgeoning community of Mission driven technologists. At the time I was working on a new concept for the town centre – a coworking hub for the creative sector. Although there were lots of creative businesses in the town, they were generally small and few had the ambition to scale and grow. Things were moving slowly. But that changed when I attended my first CyNam event in 2018 where I made connections with some incredible people from gov, industry, SMEs and startups that were passionate about Cheltenham and had a growth mindset. In the space of a few hours, I’d made more progress than I had in the previous 12 months, thanks to this community.
These connections led to a visit to meet the team behind the NCSC Cyber Accelerator Programme (thank you Reid) and a day at Plexal in Stratford where the LORCA programme had just been launched (thank you Paul and Surevine).
Inspired by these visits and with the confidence that I understood this burgeoning tech community thanks to regular catch ups with key members (thank you Rich, Reid, Mads, Dave and Neil), in late 2018 the concept of a creative hub pivoted to a hub for the ‘Cyber Tech Community’. In 2019 Hub8 was launched. This wouldn’t have been possible without the CyNam community.
Since launching Hub8 I’ve been fortunate to spend nearly all my working time with this community, and when I compare it to the different sectors that I’ve worked in, it stands out as being very special thanks to this Mission culture.
It’s a culture that attracts companies to the town. A couple of examples include Aquilai; after completing the NCSC Accelerator Programme, they decided to establish Cheltenham their home (they were one of Hub8’s first members), in 2021 they were acquired by Egress and have continued to grow in the town, and Obsidian; a West Coast scale up that chose Cheltenham as its base in 2022 due to our world-class talent pool.
We’ve also seen the growth of home-grown talent. From Gemba Advantage that formed in 2019 (another one of Hub8’s first members – they were acquired by Actica last year), to Savient, North Tower and Hamilton Dynamics. Combined these SMEs alone have provided well over 100 jobs in the community.
As this community has grown, so too has Hub8 and CyNam. From my initial visit to Plexal’s Innovation Centre in Stratford in 2018, it was the CyNam community that introduced me to Andrew and Saj from Plexal in 2019. Our relationship developed into a partnership when we formed a consortium in 2021 (including CyNam) to deliver the NCSC for Startups Programme. In 2023 Hub8 become part of the Plexal family, and we work in partnership (again inspired by the ways in which this community works) with Cheltenham Borough Council, Gloucestershire College, and the NCSC in the delivery and operation of innovation space in the town. CyNam has evolved from a group of like-minded directors working evenings and weekends to deliver 3 headline events each year, to employing a team of 5 responsible for a number of events each month to bring the community together, and programmes in partnership with Barclays, CyberFirst and University of Gloucestershire and many more to support the growth of our community.
Looking back 10 years, I can say with confidence that, thanks to this community and its Mission culture, Cheltenham has developed and grown too; from 2015 and a town that seemed to be dominated by retirement ghettos and municipal planting to a place in 2025 that has a challenger city mentality thanks to a thriving and influential tech community.
Looking forward 10 years, I can see huge opportunity for us all as our Mission Culture will continue to bring together gov, industry, SMEs and startups together to work in partnership to not only solve some pretty big problems to keep the country and people safe but also enable economic growth for the town and the UK.
