Tech Nation has announced the latest cohort of its Upscale programme.
Almost half of the 33-strong programme, which features the UK’s best-performing tech companies, are based outside of London, hailing from Belfast, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Oxford.
HealthTech companies make up a significant proportion of this year’s Upscale cohort, while the UK is now third in the world for HealthTech investment after the US and China.
The full list can be found further down.
Tech Nation, now described as ‘the scale–up network for entrepreneurs’, has also launched its inaugural Scale Ratio, which compares the number of seed stage, early growth and late growth companies in the UK’s tech ecosystems.
It says a 50:30:20 ratio of seed (50%), early growth (30%), late growth (20%) companies in a UK regional tech hub is indicative of a mature, balanced ecosystem, well placed to benefit from the accelerated growth of late-stage companies while creating the next wave of tech scale-ups.
London, Manchester and Cambridge generally exhibit the 50:30:20 ratio and attracted the most investment in the UK in 2020, with 70% of investments made into the late-stage companies in the regions.
The system has identified Belfast, Dundee and Exeter as the three emerging tech hubs to watch in 2021 as they have the most growth potential.
These cities have the highest proportion of seed stage companies compared to any other in the UK.
Dr George Windsor, Head of Insights at Tech Nation, said: “Crucially, the Scale Ratio tells us about the growth potential of the UK’s tech hubs and provides the levelling up agenda with new evidence to boost regional ecosystem development.
“It highlights exactly where scale–ups are not receiving the support they need to grow from seed stage upwards to ensure these gaps are plugged. Despite the challenges of the past 12 months, the growth and potential of homegrown tech pioneers gives us something to celebrate.”
“Tech scale–ups hold the key to the UK’s competitiveness in the next decade through job creation and investment.”
Upscale 6.0 cohort
accuRx (London)
Bringing patients and their healthcare teams together, accuRX is making patients healthier, staff happier and health systems more efficient. Today, healthcare is a communication industry – it’s where the value is added, where staff spend their time and good communication is crucial to deliver good care. accuRX’s platform powers communications between patients and their healthcare professionals.
Atom Learning (London)
Providing affordable, high quality education for primary school students, Atom Learning is an online learning platform that covers Maths, English, and Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning. Filled with exceptional, teacher-made content, its smart, machine learning algorithm keeps students on their optimal learning path. The goal is to provide all students, regardless of location and background, with a high quality, affordable learning resource.
Bidnamic (Leeds)
Unlocking the full potential of Google Shopping, Bidnamic is an AI marketing platform that helps retailers outrank competitors. Bidnamic uses machine learning to profile every single product to predict its optimal bid value algorithmically, applying real-time performance analysis and high-frequency bid management. It increases ad spend efficiency, market share and revenue, decreases costs, and enables the full revenue potential of every product.
Blink (London)
Building the frontline of the future, Blink is addressing the biggest pain point for frontline businesses: key workers who are disconnected and unengaged. Accessible through a mobile app, it connects frontline workers to the wider business; equipping them with the information they need; and empowering them with the recognition they deserve.
Brytlyt (Ashford)
Empowering transformational insights for businesses at the speed of thought, Brytlyt’s software allows businesses to accelerate database operations up to 1,000 x faster than legacy systems, by leveraging the power of graphics processor units. Its database has been independently benchmarked as the world’s fastest, and is built on top of the world’s most popular open-source database.
ClauseMatch (London)
ClauseMatch is transforming regulation into digital, machine-readable form with an easy-to-use, AI-powered smart document collaboration platform. It makes it easier for businesses to automate and manage their compliance, and to keep up with regulations.
E-days (Nottingham)
Absence matters, whether it’s unplanned or planned – but managing or booking time off can feel like a complex and problematic experience. E-days are transforming the way companies manage absence, and how people experience absence. They’re on a mission to lessen the pain and provide the tools, support and reporting for people to work smarter, happier and healthier.
Exonar (Newbury)
Due to the exponential increase in the volume of information and data generated and held by companies in the digital age, every company is now a data company. This elevates the risk of privacy and security breaches and fines, while diminishing organisations’ ability to harness the value of its own information. Exonar allows organisations to find structured and unstructured data from any source, with unrivalled scale and detail.
Gravity Sketch (London)
Creating and collaborating in 3D radically improves the efficacy and efficiency of developing physical products. Gravity Sketch is an intuitive 3D design platform that allows cross-disciplinary teams to create, collaborate, and review in an entirely new way. It removes friction from outdated workflows, helps enhance and expedite designers’ creative intent, and makes collaboration in cross-functional teams faster and more cost-effective.
iProov (London)
Protecting the identity of online users with secure authentication and great usability, iProov assures the user is genuinely present when they verify their face or palm. It detects copies, replays and deep fakes, and is already trusted by banks and Governments worldwide.
Judopay (London)
Judopay is the leading ‘mobile centric’ payments platform, making payment tech more accessible for businesses and consumers. Connecting to more than 100 payment and technology partners, a single integration to Judopay opens the door to easy international expansion, the best fraud solutions, a full range of alternative payment methods, business intelligence and analytics, and other innovative payment technology.
LabGenius (London)
A revolution in the evolution of protein therapeutics, LabGenius develops new protein-based drugs (biologics) using their novel machine learning-driven drug discovery platform. They are drastically lowering the cost and risk associated with developing completely novel protein therapeutics, allowing them to deliver new therapeutics to many patients who don’t have access to effective treatments.
Laka (London)
Laka has turned insurance upside down by no longer charging customers premiums upfront. The Laka Collective (aka their customers) contribute a share of the actual claims cost incurred in a month, in a system that is fair, transparent, and democratic. The goal is to offer better and more affordable insurance and related services.
Leaf Grow (Newcastle)
Enabling smarter social marketing, Leaf Grow empowers online businesses, big and small, to drive profitable, sustainable revenues and brand growth from their paid social advertising. Its proprietary technology helps businesses do more, with better results, in less time.
Locate a Locum (Belfast)
Mobilising the world’s healthcare workforce, Locate a Locum allows temporary healthcare workers and organisations to connect with each other in an easy and efficient way. Working to empower the workforce, they are giving every healthcare worker and healthcare organisation the power to manage their own work life.
Molo (London)
Molo is the UK’s first digital mortgage lender, using the power of technology and data to allow customers to get a mortgage online in a matter of minutes, rather than weeks. To achieve this, Molo has been built as a full stack lender (not a broker), going to market through a direct proposition (B2C), and leveraging their proprietary tech platform to provide customers with real time decisioning on their mortgage.
Navenio (Oxford)
Changing the way we experience the indoor world, Navenio is transforming hospitals globally by enabling healthcare teams to be in the right place at the right time, delivering the very best in patient care. Navenio’s system tasks healthcare staff and teams based on their location, achieving dramatic results where output is doubled, hidden capacity is unlocked and services to patients and between teams are transformed to new heights.
One Team Logic (Cardiff)
Safeguarding children and adults around the world from abuse, harm and neglect, One Team Logic combines the best technologies with world-class safeguarding expertise. The core product, MyConcern, is used by organisations such as schools, training organisations, national sporting bodies and religious organisations globally to record, monitor and manage safeguard concerns about children
Orka (Manchester)
The way people want to work is changing, but the processes and tools that companies use to hire hourly workers have not. Orka builds products designed specifically for hourly workers, solving challenges around high-turnover, high-volumes and high-velocity employment within traditional industries, and unlocking full workforces’ potential.
Red Sift (London)
Red Sift is building an open cloud platform that makes cybersecurity accessible to everyone, because they believe the answer to stopping the rise of cyber attacks is through computers, not consultants. Their platform helps people use the latest technology, like AI and Machine Learning, to unlock data that already exists about threats, and turn them into active protection.
Riverlane (Cambridge)
Pioneering quantum software, Riverlane is building the operating system for quantum computers. Over the next year their operating system will run on 20% of the world’s quantum computers, with an ultimate mission to run every program on every quantum computer in the world.
Rovco (Bristol)
As the energy market evolves, Rovco is disrupting the sector, combining innovative robotic platforms and cutting-edge technology to support energy transitions. Rovco are pushing the boundaries of offshore robotics, optimising operations and reducing the need for offshore teams. They support clients automation and decarbonisation strategies, driving operational efficiency, saving money and time.
Second Nature (London)
Making healthy living second nature, Second Nature helps people lose weight in a healthy way. Providing people with world class technology and coaching to help them achieve their goals, their vision is to eradicate obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Sensat (London)
Providing industries with the understanding to shape a sustainable world, Sensat is building an intelligent eco-system that translates the real world into a version understandable to AI. This technology will help us to build a more sustainable future, using the wealth of new insight to help humans make better decisions.
Speechmatics (Cambridge)
Powering applications that require mission-critical, accurate speech recognition, Speechmatics®’ any-context speech recognition engine processes millions of hours of transcription worldwide every month in more than 30 languages. Their speech recognition technology is used by enterprises in scenarios such as contact centres, CRM, consumer electronics, security, media & entertainment and software.
Superscript (London)
Superscript is a business insurance challenger, with an ambition to be the global leader of small business insurance. It provides personalised, flexible and scalable subscription-based insurance designed specifically to meet the ever-evolving needs of ambitious businesses. Modernising the broken insurance experience, Superscript simplifies and puts customers at the heart of the insurance journey.
Tillo (Brighton and Hove)
Powering the future of gift cards, Tillo connects the world’s most popular brands with businesses looking for exciting new ways to reward and incentivise. Unlocking a world of new opportunity to drive sales and reach new global audiences, their digital platform connects brands with businesses across its extensive network, opening up multiple new distribution channels and allowing them to manage sales, all in real-time.
Total Processing (Manchester)
Providing complete global coverage, Total Processing is proudly pioneering a payment strategy for local and multinational businesses, through access to the world’s leading payment gateway and acquiring options, with built-in risk management and data analytics. Their accredited network of strategic partners provides businesses of all sizes with a fully integrated omnichannel software solution called Total Control.
Unmind (London)
Unmind helps employees to lead more fulfilling and balanced lives by changing the way organisations think about mental health. Their workplace mental health platform empowers employees to measure, understand, and improve their mental wellbeing.
Virti (Bristol)
Virti uses XR, artificial intelligence and gamification to help employees learn faster and remember training for longer. Virti’s mission is to make experiential education affordable and accessible for everyone. It uses virtual and augmented reality coupled with AI to transport users into difficult to access environments and safely assesses them under pressure to improve their performance.
Vitaccess (Oxford)
Giving patients a voice, Vitaccess are creating powerful, real-world evidence platforms to quantify patients’ experience of treatments and illness. Their smartphone app and real-time data analytics dashboards together provide biopharmaceutical clients with evidence of how drugs and treatments affect patients’ quality of life every day, outside of the clinical setting.
Vizibl (London)
Helping companies to work better, together, Vizibl is the world’s leading supplier collaboration and innovation platform. It allows both buyers and suppliers to manage all aspects of their relationship more effectively to deliver mutual value. Vizibl’s software makes every aspect of the relationship life-cycle transparent, so that enterprise companies can align on their governance, strategy and develop great ideas together with their partner ecosystem.
YuLife (London)
YuLife is on a mission to inspire life, and turn financial products into a force for good. By harnessing the power of gamification and behavioural science, YuLife insurance rewards healthy living and puts everyday wellness within reach of everyone. It equips members with a game-like app to access discounts and vouchers from leading brands in return for completing everyday wellness activities, thus incentivizing healthy living.