Venture Cafe Manchester: One Year On

Venture Cafe Manchester marks a year of Thursday Gatherings at Sister in the Renold Building, and uses the anniversary to show what came through it. The programme features Papermill, a document engine for AI workflows whose typesetting adapts generated reports, contracts and compliance packs to changing data, and mushroom plus, a Manchester pre-seed molecular farming startup raising mushroom protein content up to tenfold towards meat-level density. The centrepiece is a fireside chat with ARIA chief executive Kathleen Fisher at six, live-illustrated by John Cooper, who spends the evening building an interactive mural of the city's innovation ecosystem that attendees are invited to add to. Three hours, drop in, no ticket. Why go: the ARIA conversation alone justifies the trip, and the anniversary pulls in a year's worth of the community at once. Best for founders, researchers and anyone who has been meaning to try Venture Cafe.