Cambridge is where the chip inside almost every phone on the planet was designed. Arm was founded in the city in 1990, growing out of a small team working on the Acorn RISC Machine project, and its processor architecture is now found in more than 99 percent of the world's smartphones, with over 300 billion Arm-based chips shipped to date. Arm does not manufacture a single chip itself, it licenses the architecture to Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and virtually every other company that makes a phone, which means every mobile app ever built for iOS or Android runs, at the hardware level, on a design that came out of Cambridge.
That is not an isolated success story, it is a pattern. Cambridge is the centre of what is often called Silicon Fen, the largest technology cluster in Europe outside London, built around the University of Cambridge and home to deep tech spinouts across semiconductors, biotech, and AI. A mobile app built in this city is built by a market that already understands, at a level few others do, exactly how demanding mobile-grade engineering has to be.
Akoode works with Cambridge-based founders, CTOs, and product teams who want mobile engineering held to that same standard. Our teams have delivered across FCA workflows, NHS Digital standards, and enterprise security requirements, building native and cross-platform mobile apps across Cambridge and the wider UK mobile app development market that meet App Store and Play Store expectations from day one.
