LTW 2025: Interview with London & Partners’ Janet Coyle CBE
Drawing more than 45,000 participants across three action-packed days, London Tech Week was abuzz with fresh government commitments, groundbreaking innovations and a flurry of announcements.
Billed as the country’s biggest tech event, London Tech Week took place from 9 to 11 June 2025 at London Olympia.
The event launched with a keynote speech by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who was soon joined on stage by Nvidia Co-Founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
London & Partners’ presence at the event, in true London style, included driving an electric BYD London bus into the showcase.
Its Managing Director for Grow London, Janet Coyle CBE, who acted as an emcee across the event, took time out for an interview with Technology Magazine.
Janet leads business growth activity for London & Partners, creating economic growth for London that is resilient, sustainable and inclusive.
“London & Partners is the growth agency for London and Grow London is all our product services, global teams supporting high-growth tech companies, helping them scale, get access to finance, to talent, to customers around the world,” she explains.
For Janet, having a very prominent place at London Tech Week is important for the agency.
She adds: “It means a lot to us. We started this 12 years ago in a little venue in Shoreditch with about 150 people. We’ve scaled it together within Informa and Founders Forum.
“I feel like the whole world's come to London.”
Here, she speaks to Technology Magazine at London Tech Week.
How important are platforms like London Tech Week in bringing together changemakers?
It’s super important.
I think we're at that pivotal stage right now where London and the UK more broadly is looking to really lean into science, frontier innovation, as well as AI and quantum robotics.
This is all about collaboration and it’s about companies here partnering with others around sharing ideas on research and innovation. It’s about collaborating across Europe, making us all stronger.
To bring everybody together in one place gives a platform to do that.
How do you feel about being part of this wider ecosystem?
To see the government actually leaning in and committing to investment in infrastructure and in skills and talent makes me feel energised, as these are the two pieces that we actually need to really develop within our ecosystem.
To hear Jensen Huang from Nvidia say this is one of the best places in the world, especially for talent and research with the top universities — he talked about Oxford, Cambridge Imperial, UCL — to have somebody like him with a US$3tn company say this is the best place and he’s investing because this is where the talent is, that was a great start to London Tech Week.
There are lots of really positive, genuine stories.
We’ve had incredible companies all talking about why they’re here, why they’re scaling and why they think that our talent is probably the richest talent that they can find.
Diversity is also important. We did some research that showed about 88% of founders and investors, particularly in London, feel that being able to recruit inclusive and diverse teams is helping their productivity and innovation.
There are 300 languages spoken in London, so there’s no better place to build diverse teams.
What are you really excited about in tech right now? What is inspiring you at London Tech Week?
Acceleration. I’m feeling that with pace, we need to get faster and there’s a genuine collective ambition to do that.
There’s all very different parts of this jigsaw. When you look at technology, when you look at an ecosystem, it’s a very strong ecosystem. Everybody is very keen to see the growth in the UK tech sector.
Here, hearing about that — what big companies like AWS, Microsoft, bp, AstraZeneca are doing — and how they’re using technology to actually accelerate precision medicine and things that would really help society, I feel as if technology is a force for good.
The more we can accelerate that, the better it is for everybody — not just the people here but for wider society.
What are you looking forward to? What’s exciting you right now?
We’ve just launched our London’s 10-year growth plan which very much has frontier innovation at the heart of that.
What I’m excited about is making sure that we become makers of that technology with deep science tech, wrapping around those early-stage innovations, making sure that we get the IP right, get the product go-to-market and make them scale, rather than purely being adopters of technology.
We’ve got the research, we’ve got the talent, we’ve got the universities, we’ve got the growth capital. Yes, there’s more we can do in that space, but we are all getting together to make that happen.
Because we’ve got a proper 10-year plan now and got 12 month objectives against that, I feel we’re in a really good position to deliver.
London Tech Week just underlines that even more for me because we’ve got the private and public sector all saying the same thing — let’s do it together.
Bringing a London bus to London Tech Week, how important has it been to attract people to you? How has facilitated conversations about your impact?
It demonstrates that we are on a journey — come on board, come with us, collaborate with us.
Also, the bus is 100% electric, which shows our commitment to net zero. It’s also made by BYD.
I first met BYD during London 2012 when I was leading our hosting programme for the 2012 Games. They were interested in investing in London, they’ve invested, they’ve scaled, they’re now doing electric buses all across the UK as well as electric cars.
It demonstrates that again, that an international investor has committed to the UK. Lending us a bus means we can actually host all our delegates here. It’s been super exciting.
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