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Three Old Elizabethan entrepreneurs in San Francisco have linked up and are now connecting with other alumni working in the world’s leading centre for technology companies.

Pavir Patel sent Headmaster Neil Enright the above photo of himself, Akshat Sharma and Richard Ou together in San Francisco. The three only discovered that they had the same alma mater through chance conversations, but, since then, they have created a group chat and have been expanding it to include more OEs in and around the Bay Area.

Mr Enright said: “Our alumni network has been growing rapidly in recent years, with leavers supporting each other, sharing professional opportunities and socialising together. Especially for alumni far from home, like Richard, Akshat and Pavir, it can be good to spend time with others who share a similar background. As a School, we are doing all we can to support such connections through our QE Connect social and business network.”

Richard (OE 2010–2015) said: “All three of us are founders looking to build billion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley. Quite a few QE boys that I’ve met in the US have been entrepreneurs, too, all having raised not so insignificant amounts of capital. It feels like we’re following in the footsteps of Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, maybe a few years or a decade behind.” (Demis [OE 1988–1990] and Mustafa [1995–2002] were among the three co-founders of leading AI company DeepMind, formed in 2010.)

“What I am really excited about is more people from QE coming to the US. I think this is the place to be,” Richard added.

Pavir (OE 2003–2010) and Akshat (2012–2019) are part of the long-established international Entrepreneur First accelerator, which runs one of its four programmes in San Francisco. “However, they’d not met until after Pavir’s encounter with me,” says Richard. “I met Pavir at a FinTech AI hackathon hosted at the Digital Garage office in San Francisco. The conversation went something like this:”

Richard: “Where in the UK are you from?”

Pavir: “London, what about you?”

Richard: “I’m from London as well. Whereabouts?”

Pavir: “Stratford, and you?”

Richard: “Highgate”

Pavir: “I used to go to school up north of Highgate!”

Richard: “Really, where?”

Pavir: “QE Boys”

Richard: “Holy sh*t, I went to QE as well!”

Richard later met Akshat at the Entrepreneur First office.

As for Pavir and Akshat, they knew each other through being in the same accelerator, but did not realise the full extent of their connection until a conversation in a Waymo (self-driving car) turned to their backgrounds. “It was surreal,” said Akshat. “We were mates already and were speaking about our homes in the UK and school experiences…and there was a moment of realisation of ‘Wait a second – that sounds very familiar’ when we realised we both went to QE!”

Richard said he realised even before going to university where he needed to be to pursue his goal of founding and growing a startup. “I knew that if I wanted to do it, the only place I could was the US. The problem was that education in the US was so expensive – four years of a degree course can easily be $250,000.”

The solution he arrived at was to go to King’s College London, majoring in Physics (“my passion”) for his first degree and then come to the US for a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania – “only two years!” He worked out some further ways to reduce the financial burden, including becoming a Resident Advisor (RA) – a peer mentor for other students – which comes with the major plus that free housing and food are provided.

The idea for his business came about when he graduated from ‘Penn.’ last year and was looking for a graduation photographer. “I realised it was really hard – there is not really any infrastructure for freelancing.”

With time on his hands, he worked out a plan for a business to put that right, checking that he had a Minimum Viable Business (MVB). He shared the plan with the photographer he had eventually found, Jerry Cai. “As soon as I pitched it to him, he said: ‘I want in.’”

The two became co-founders of Agorum, described on its website as “a freelancer marketplace connecting clients with skilled creatives”. They have started initially by focusing on freelancers who require a physical presence for their work – photographers, DJs and private chefs.

The process has not always been easy. “Funding was difficult at first. We tried raising funds last year when the economy was not doing very well.”

Since then, however, they have been scaling rapidly, and Richard is focused on taking the business global. Agorum was recently valued at $10m.

“I think what changed things was moving to the Bay area: I don’t think there is an eco-system like the Bay’s that exists anywhere else in the world.”

He acknowledged the help provided by his accelerator – VIP-X (different from Pavir’s and Akshat’s). VIP-X is run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and caters primarily for people associated with Penn. and Wharton. It takes no equity and offers what are essentially grants, not loans.

“I think one of the hardest parts of doing a startup is the loneliness and distance that comes with it,” said Richard. “Few people can relate.” In particular, he has found the constant need for absolute discretion about his plans for the business hard.  “As the CEO, there is only so much you can ever say.”

“As my role has changed from managing a team of 1.5 people to now a team of ten, the problems are constantly evolving.”

“The thing is persistence,” Richard said, stressing the importance of listening to clients, who sometimes provide the only clue as to a way forward.  “There is something about this gut instinct – and it usually comes from your customer. It becomes your driving force.”

Richard has no doubt as to the source of his strength. “When I look back at my time at QE, it was hard. A lot of homework and pressure. Retrospectively, that is what helped, giving me the resilience I am drawing on now. A lot of people have shared that with me, too. Things were always hard, but that raised your tolerance for a lot of things.”

For his part, Akshat is currently building a company called Orbit. The sad truth about the current digital age is that “we have never been historically unhappier,” he said. “Orbit will empower people by making mental health as transparent and actionable as physical health through a non-invasive brain wearable. Orbit is unlocking cognition by building the first foundation model of the brain!”

In addition to his work with Entrepreneur First, Akshat is part of the first cohort of Founders – the University of Cambridge’s own accelerator programme. He graduated from Cambridge in Biomedical Engineering last year, launching Orbit at the start of 2024.

“At the Neuro Optics Lab [in Cambridge], I developed the first, and only, brain computer interface using HD DOT, a novel imaging approach to track human brain function at comparable resolutions to an fMRI. This modality, being cheap, portable and high resolution, is uniquely positioned to create the foundation model of our brains!”

Akshat has won multiple awards at international conferences and is writing a first-author paper on the subject.

By leveraging the novel wearable technology, Orbit is focussing on making brain-tracking as simple and accessible as Fitbit made fitness-tracking – “all in the comfort of your favourite baseball cap or beanie!” as he put it.

“With each version, Orbit builds the largest, real-world brain data-sets to unlock new secrets about the way we perceive the world around us – our cognition. It starts by understanding mental workload and aims to progress to complex mental states, including anxiety, stress and depression. Each version helps us regain control of a new emotion, at each step regaining happiness through giving us a deeper understanding and control of our brain.”

Finally, Pavir Patel’s business is Outerop. Like Akshat’s start-up, it launched at the beginning of this year. Outerop helps grow businesses online using AI, making it easier for them to build high-quality, reliable Large Language Model (LLM) products and to start creating self-optimising LLM pipelines (a series of steps where the output of one is the input of the other). Its slogan is: “Build GenAI products your customers love.”

Since reading Economics at Nottingham, Pavir has, he said, “done all sorts – from incubating J P Morgan’s first AI startup doing NLP; setting up their FinTech team in Asia (Hong Kong was awesome!) and scaling Europe’s leading broker/crypto exchange, Bitpanda Pro, to spinning off a company with a Series A raise [a company’s first significant round of venture-capital financing] to launching an e-commerce business with my wife”.

QE parents and staff have reduced the number of low-occupancy car journeys on the school run after signing up in numbers for a new app aimed at reducing local traffic and cutting CO₂ emissions.

It is only six months since the School partnered with HomeRun and launched its app with parents and staff, but already the single-family car usage rate has been cut by 9%, thanks mainly to a 22% increase in journeys shared.

HomeRun’s impact report states that QE families have thus saved some 10 tonnes of CO₂ and 22,633 school run miles – equivalent to 481 mature trees or 0.9 trips around the equator.

The high level of participation – the families of 526 pupils have signed up – has unlocked a £1,000 grant to the School from HomeRun. The money is being invested into QE’s Greenpower team, which builds electric racing cars.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My thanks go to all parents and colleagues who have signed up: this is a real environmental success and a great start to our involvement with HomeRun. As a School, we seek to be good neighbours, and these figures are a ‘win’ both for us and for residents on nearby streets, where there is a reduction in both pollution and vehicle movements.

“Many of our boys already travel to QE on School coaches or on public transport, which we encourage. This app helps people with logistics and can result in reduced fuel costs for car-users, as well, of course, as improving the environment more generally.”

“I know that there is much enthusiasm about the scheme among the families of our new Year 7 intake joining us in September, so there is scope to make even greater savings in the future. I hope that even more parents from other year groups will get involved.”

The scheme seeks to promote more sustainable travel methods, in particular by helping people car-share where they feel that using public transport is not a viable option.

HomeRun collects anonymised data on school run journeys, showing how far pupils travel, what type of transport they use, and how much carbon the journey emits. The app then promotes alternatives to low-occupancy car usage for the school run such as:

• Journey-sharing
• Travel buddies
• Cycling initiatives
• Park & stride (where families living far from a school are asked to park a ten-minute walk away and then complete their journey on foot, bringing health benefits as well as reducing emissions and local congestion).

Finally, the HomeRun app creates a secure, dedicated space for people to share travel information. Those who opt in can connect with other families in their locality, since the app shows people how far away other users live, without revealing their actual address. It allows the School to update parents when boys will be ready to leave Queen’s Road outside the normal School day – after clubs and activities, for example, or when returning from a School trip.

Mr Enright welcomed the grant, which has gone to QE’s Greenpower racing team: “It is an exciting initiative, which is developing skills in the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as well as nurturing enthusiasm for sustainable technologies among our boys.”

• The photo of the boys in a car was taken during a trip last term to the Warner Bros studios in Leavesden, when they tried for size the Ford Anglia made to fly by Arthur Weasley in one of the Harry Potter books.

QE’s Paarth Aggarwal spent three days at a European Space Agency base in Italy after being named the UK winner in an international competition.

Paarth, of Year 10, triumphed in the ESA’s Climate Detectives challenge after impressing judges with his AI-driven study into tackling electronic waste in Barnet.

His three days at the ESA Centre for Earth Observation at Frascati, near Rome, included a tour of the facility – “the main highlight for me personally” – and an awards ceremony where he received his prize “with bigger audiences than I had possibly imagined”.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My sincere congratulations go to Paarth on this great achievement: he showed initiative in applying for the competition, perseverance in pulling the project together, and great ability in completing it to such a high standard. And what an opportunity it was to spend time at one of Europe’s leading space research facilities!”

The competition brief allowed entrants not only to focus on climate change, but also on all aspects of caring for the planet. Paarth’s Next Gen Ninja entry was among winning submissions from 18 European countries; all the winners were invited to Frascati as their prize.

“My inspiration to enter stemmed from my deep concern for the environment and my passion for leveraging technology to combat climate change,” said Paarth. “The competition presented a unique opportunity to contribute to a cause that I care deeply about, using technology to address one of the most pressing issues of our generation.”

His study focused on the disposal and recycling of electronic devices, taking into account the significant environmental and health risks if improperly handled. More specifically, he explored the design and implementation of initiatives aimed at empowering Barnet residents to address e-waste. “By understanding how such initiatives can effectively raise awareness, educate residents, and promote sustainable practices, the study sought to identify strategies that foster meaningful engagement and action…ultimately, the goal is to promote a more sustainable future for Barnet.”

Paarth sent out a survey to residents: the results, he said, were “shocking”, with only a small percentage aware of the hazards of e-waste. Problems he identified included limited access to relevant information on a community website. “Moreover, the waste facilities lack specialised equipment and trained personnel to safely process and recycle e-waste.

“These findings highlight the necessity for a dedicated information centre and for a focus on developing and implementing more accessible e-waste collection and efficient processing systems.

“Throughout the competition, I honed several key skills, including data analysis, and enhanced my knowledge of the development of AI-powered chatbots. Working with satellite and local data gave me valuable experience in interpreting data effectively.”

The facility in Italy has over the past three decades collected EO (earth observation) data from ESA satellites looking at factors such as water content in lakes and algae concentrations to understand Earth’s changing geology. Available free to anyone, the data is used by research organisations and government institutions in areas such as: the prediction and analysis of climate-related disasters; rural urban management; agriculture; forestry management; the study of glaciers;  and mining.

“In a workshop, I learned the use of EO data gathered from satellites such as Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3. ESA taught us how they are using the data to save numerous human lives across the globe by predicting climate-related disasters, such as wildfires,” said Parth.

“Being named a winner was an overwhelming and humbling experience. The acknowledgment from ESA, a leading space organisation, was particularly rewarding.”

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Use of AI: the technical details

Paarth is an enthusiastic advocate of AI. Here he sets out the important role the technology played in his competition entry.

“Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI cloud environment, I deployed a GenAI-powered chatbot to provide residents with easy and 24/7 access to information when they ask questions in natural language regarding e-waste, helping them make informed decisions.

“I also developed a PoC (Proof of Concept) for an AI-powered app which can: help to detect the waste type through an ML model; incentivise residents for responsible disposal; and allow councils to proactively plan for the e-waste collection, enabling them to be economical and efficient in the waste collection process.”

Year 12’s Nikhil Banerjee took first prize in a national competition with his five-minute presentation on the ethics of using genome editing to eradicate genetic diseases.

He beat more than 400 entrants – and 11 other finalists – to triumph in the Gresham Oracy Competition run by Gresham College, London’s oldest higher education institute.

The chair of the judging panel, Professor Sarah Hart, said: “Nikhil’s presentation in particular demonstrated a thorough grasp of a complex issue, one of the most challenging ethical debates of our time. His argument was reasoned and powerful.”

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My heartfelt congratulations go to Nikhil on this achievement. The aims of this competition correspond closely with QE’s emphases on nurturing free-thinking scholarship alongside speaking and presentation skills. Our current major building project, The Robert Dudley Studio, a dedicated space for drama and the spoken word, will further increase opportunities for our pupils to develop their proficiency in oracy.”

Nikhil entered the competition after reading about it in the new QE Futures Opportunities Bulletin prepared by Assistant Head (Pupil Destinations) James Kane.

Following his success in the final held at the college’s Barnard’s Inn Hall in Holborn, Nikhil wins £9,250 towards his university tuition and £1,000 for a laptop. QE receives £1,000 to develop its “academic programmes and curricular activities”.

The competition’s questions were set by leading UK lecturers connected to Gresham College and covered subjects ranging from the exploration of space to the role of music in helping ameliorate mental health issues in young people.

The question Nikhil answered was: Could genome editing consign genetic diseases to history and would that be ethical?

He began his presentation with the poetic account of human origins in the book of Genesis – “And so God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them,” continuing “And yet science endeavours to go one step further, to defy imperfection, to alleviate prodigious amounts of suffering, and to alter the very make-up of you and me.”

He pointed out that, in one sense, humans had been interfering with DNA for thousands of years, from “domesticating wild animals to selectively breeding plants with better taste”.

What made the new technology different was the huge possibilities it opened up for treating disease. Nikhil outlined the unpredictable effects of editing genes – including death – and the pharmacological causes of those failures. But he was sanguine about the prospects for successfully overcoming such problems.

We should, however, be afraid of the use of the technology beyond the need to treat disease, he said. “What’s to stop us editing our traits – how we look, how strong we are, even how smart we are. What’s to stop the wealthy from buying a perfect genetic make-up?…We would be losing core human values such as unconditional love – loving a person despite their imperfections.”

In his conclusion, Nikhil stated: “The opportunities afforded to us by gene-editing are exciting, but in order for us to harness these, stringent legislation is required, which can only be achieved through a collaborative effort by scientists and ethicists around the world. After all, who are we to decide what way of life is worth living?”

He then immediately responded to questions from the judges.

Modest in his success, Nikhil himself said afterwards: “It was such an honour to make it to the final and I can’t believe that I’ve won against such a competitive field.

“The prize will make a big difference in supporting my further education, and it’s great that my school benefits too as they have supported me throughout this journey.”

Nikhil is pictured with Professor Martin Elliott, Provost at the college, who said: “Through our competition, students were not only able to showcase their oracy skills but also engage with significant academic research that will open them up to new areas of learning.”

Gresham College, the first institute of Higher Education in London, has been providing free public education across the arts and sciences since 1597 and is a registered charity. Through the competition, it aims to showcase the importance of oracy competence and the art of communicating.

The judging panel comprised:

• Professor Sarah Hart – Professor of Geometry at Gresham College
• Deputy Nighat Qureishi – Gresham College Council Member
• Nav Ahmed – Principal Lecturer, Arden University
• Mary-Clare Davies – Director of Global Education, Mulberry School for Girls
• AJ Haseley – Co-Founder & CEO of AYM Media Group

QE boys are now counting down to the VEX Robotics World Championships after three of the School’s teams qualified for the trip to Texas.

Teams Gearsquad, Constellation and CircuitBreakers will be heading for the States at the end of this month, having maintained strong performances at the national championships in Telford.

Head of Technology Michael Noonan lauded their achievement, pointing out that the three teams had qualified even though the number of places on offer to UK teams has been halved this year. And he singled out the Year 8 CircuitBreakers team (pictured top) for a special mention: “Their success is all the more remarkable, given they are in their first season.”

The teams, all from the IQ age category (Years 8–9), will travel to the VIQRC world championships, which run from 1st–3rd May in The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Dallas. They will be hoping to follow in the footsteps of previous QE boys who have achieved success on this international stage, including the 2018 team named VEX IQ World Champions after winning the overall Excellence Award.

The three 2024 qualifiers sealed their qualification at the recent UK national championships, in which all 11 QE robotics teams took part.

In the VRC (Years 10 & 12) age group, Override was a divisional top-ranked team, while fellow Year 12 team Hybrid was a divisional finalist.

Among the younger boys, Gearsquad and CircuitBreakers returned from Telford with a trio of awards apiece, while there were single awards for Hybrix and Constellation. The accolades included: Teamwork Champion and Innovate awards for Gearsquad; Robot Skills Champion and Amaze awards for CircuitBreakers; a Think Award for Hybrix; and a Build Award for Constellation.

Earlier in the Spring Term, both Year 12 teams travelled to Calgary, Canada, for a competition involving 132 teams. (This was arranged because QE sixth-formers cannot be considered for the world championships owing to their Summer Term public examination commitments). Their fellow competitors came mostly from across North America and included former world and national champions.

“QE performed well, ranking 25th and 26th in their divisions of 60-plus teams and both successfully being selected at Alliance Selection, being unfortunate to be knocked out at the round of 16, “said Mr Noonan. “Students loved the experience, despite the cold temperatures, particularly commenting on the beauty of Calgary.”

Last term, QE was also the host for a regional robotics challenge – the VIQRC Full Volume QE Battle for Barnet – where Gearsquad were among the winners.

Three sixth-formers won a Cambridge University competition with their design project aimed at protecting construction workers’ hearing.

After being highly commended in the Homerton College Design Programme, Shivam Singh, Yash Patel and Om Patel were invited to a residential weekend, along with more than 200 other highly commended entrants of the design challenge and a parallel essay competition.

The group had spent their first day at the college creating visual aids for their presentations. They and other teams then presented their designs to a room of about 20–30 people.

It was only when they attended the programme’s awards ceremony – held as part of the residential – that they discovered they were the overall winners, with their project receiving the highest marks in the whole competition.

Head of Technology Michael Noonan said: “Huge congratulations go to Shivam, Yash and Om, who demonstrated both creativity and considerable application in developing and presenting their design.”

The design programme’s theme was Building a Sustainable and Healthy World. It was open to Year 12 state school pupils from across the UK.

The QE trio, who are now in Year 13, designed a speaker to reduce noise pollution caused by machinery in the construction industry.

Om explained: “We implemented an active noise-cancelling solution which used principles of superposition and destructive interference to isolate noise to specific areas, keeping workers in the general vicinity safe, as well as reducing overall noise levels.”

In their feedback, the competition judges stated that it was an “excellent project, highly detailed and innovative [that] shows a dedication to making the world a better place”.

Shivam said: “We are proud to have won. The competition was tough: we saw some inspiring innovative projects that the other competitors entered.”

During the weekend, the boys attended an environmental sustainability conference, which included lectures and discussions on topics such as energy generation and how the media presents the climate crisis.

The weekend also featured a formal dinner and opportunities to talk to current Homerton College students and gain insight into life at Cambridge.

After returning to QE, the three reflected on their experiences:

• Shivam said: “We were able to see other fascinating designs, meet like-minded individuals and discuss our designs and compare our thought processes.”
• Yash said: “This experience opened our eyes to the environmental impacts engineers must consider when creating products; it’s added one more rigorous step to the design process for my future projects.” It had, he added, been “a fun taster of university life at Cambridge” where it was “great to be surrounded by like-minded individuals”.
• Om said: “Sustainability is a hot topic of discussion; with our future dependent on the state of the physical world, it is essential that we, as the next-generation engineers, take the necessary steps to reduce our impact on the environment.”