Growth platform Tech Nation has revealed the 13 new companies selected to join its 11th Future Fifty programme for late-stage tech companies.
Collectively operating in 19 countries, they have raised $2.2 billion in VC investment and employ almost 4,300 people.
Tech Nation says it is the most regionally diverse Future Fifty cohort yet, with nearly half (46%) of the late-stage companies hailing from outside of London.
In the East of England, Somersham-based Paragraf manufactures high-purity graphene (for making electronics) at scale, while Cambridge-based AI company Speechmatics – led by CEO Katy Wigdahl (pictured) – has developed Automatic Speech Recognition technology that understands every human voice.
In the North West, Manchester-based The Modern Milkman has modernised the milk round to help reduce customers’ household waste, while Zuto, based in Macclesfield, is working to make car financing more transparent.
In the South West, Huboo is a fast-growing eCommerce fulfilment provider, enabling retailers to access a complete operation which takes care of the picking, packing and posting of products to customers all over the word via a global carrier network.
Future Fifty’s alumni include Revolut, Skyscanner, Monzo and Deliveroo. The programme has boosted more than a fifth of the UK’s 138 tech unicorns, companies valued at more than $1bn.
The programme is designed to offer tailor-made guidance that addresses challenges unique to the most successful tech companies in the country. Over the next six months, the cohort will be guided through a rapid scaling journey via peer-to-peer learning opportunities, open dialogue between experienced entrepreneurs and founders, in-depth masterclass sessions run by seasoned coaches, sessions with key government officials and exclusive ministerial roundtables, and access to a dedicated Tech Nation Visa team.
HSBC UK, Evelyn Partners and Slaughter and May will be programme partners for this year’s Future Fifty programme.
Faculty – London
Faculty is a Tech Nation Applied AI company which builds industry-leading AI that helps organisations turn their data into deeper insights, better strategies and smarter decisions. Its Frontier product provides a systematic approach to decision intelligence, helping organisations make robust, proactive decisions on the things that matter.
Florence – London
Florence builds the technology to power the healthcare workforce. Its goal is to use technology to solve the dramatic challenges surrounding a shortage of healthcare staff globally. It does this by creating software that helps healthcare providers build, train and operate a flexible staffing pool. Its core product, Florence Flex, is a temporary staffing marketplace that connects care providers to nurses and care workers looking for extra shifts. It has supporting SaaS tools that help care providers onboard, roster and train their internal staff pools.
Graphcore – South West
Graphcore has developed an Intelligence Processing Unit (“IPU”). The IPU is a completely new processor, specifically designed for AI computing. Its IPU lets innovators create the next breakthroughs in machine intelligence to enhance human potential. Graphcore believes its Intelligence Processing Unit technology will become the worldwide standard for machine intelligence computing. The Graphcore IPU is going to be transformative across all industries and sectors with a real potential for positive societal impact from drug discovery and disaster recovery to decarbonization.
Huboo – South West
Huboo is a fast-growing eCommerce fulfilment provider, enabling retailers to access a complete fulfilment operation. It takes care of the picking, packing, and posting of products to customers all over the word via a global carrier network, so that online retailers can focus on growing their business. Huboo has transformed traditionally complex fulfilment solutions with its revolutionary and unique ‘Micro Hub Mode’l. The model combines best-in-class tech with brilliant people to deliver exceptional service to their clients, creating a cost-effective solution that helps democratise eCommerce. With fulfilment centres across the UK and mainland Europe, its seamless software and intuitive dashboard provides everything from transaction management and quality control, order tracking and real-time billing, to integration with sales channels and marketplaces, enabling it to receive and process retailers’ orders directly, in real-time.
Paragraf – East of England
Paragraf’s patented contamination-free deposition technology, developed by CEO Simon Thomas, delivers game-changing opportunities for the commercialisation of graphene by allowing it to manufacture high-purity 2D graphene sheets at scale. Paragraf not only specialises in the manufacture of high-purity graphene but also its seamless integration into ready to use products that can be quickly adopted by customers and partners to support the advancement of their technologies. Paragraf is committed to materially transforming electronics through the development of high-purity graphene products that will facilitate massive improvements in the performance of technologies across all aspects of life.
Speechmatics – East of England
Speechmatics is a global expert in deep learning and speech recognition, providing Automatic Speech Recognition technology that understands every voice. It offers its speech recognition for solution and service providers to integrate into their stack regardless of their industry or use case. Businesses use Speechmatics around the world to accurately understand and transcribe human-level speech into text regardless of demographic, age, gender, accent, dialect or location.
The Modern Milkman – North West
The Modern Milkman takes all the eco-friendly positives of the traditional milkround and gives it a modern twist. Tech makes it easy and convenient for the customer to reduce their household waste. The Modern Milkman is committed to revolutionising consumer habits by delivering fresh ways to return and reuse packaging, shop ethically and feel good about convenience. It has expanded its return-and-reuse range and incorporated the latest mobile tech to make ordering easy. New customers are joining the fight against plastic waste every day.
Wayve – London
Wayve develops self-driving technology. Wayve is on a mission to reimagine autonomous mobility through machine learning. It is first to deploy autonomous vehicles on public roads with end-to-end deep learning. It is pioneering the AI software, lean hardware and fleet learning platform for AV 2.0: a next generation autonomous driving system that can quickly and safely adapt to new driving domains anywhere in the world.
Yapily – London
Yapily is an open banking platform allowing companies to seamlessly access financial data and initiate payments. Designed and built for open finance, its mission is to become the central nervous system of the global open economy by building scalable, reliable, and secure open banking infrastructure and tools of the highest quality, broadest coverage, and deepest capability to power the next wave of innovation. It aims to be the European market leader in open banking infrastructure, enabling customers to build better and more accessible financial services and products for everyone.
Yoti – London
Yoti offers a secure, privacy-by design, scalable identity platform with a range of complementary solutions – reusable digital ID, identity & age verification, and e-signatures authentication. Yoti operates a world leading, free, reusable digital identity app with c.12 million installs. It enables onboarding with 5,500 identity documents from over 200 countries and supports 17 languages. Yoti provides embedded identity verification, leveraging automated processes (95% automation rate) and a team of two hundred 24/7 Security Centre operatives. Yoti e-signatures offer the convenience & simplicity of e-signing with the security of biometric verification and cryptographic signatures. Yoti is a world leader in age assurance services to social media and live streaming platforms, adult, gaming, dating and eCommerce sites, physical retailers and gambling terminals, enabling platforms to meet their regulatory requirements.
YuLife – London
YuLife, is the tech-driven insurance company on a mission to inspire people to live their best lives, transforming financial services into a force for good. The global wellbeing crisis, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, has meant that there is a huge gap to fill in the market. YuLife’s flagship product, group life insurance, has achieved rapid traction in a market lacking in innovation. YuLife has fundamentally changed the nature of life insurance, creating an innovative new ‘win-win’ model which benefits individuals, businesses and society. The highly engaging, game-like YuLife app enables YuLife policyholders to complete everyday wellness activities in order to earn YuCoin, which they can use to buy gifts for themselves, friends or family, or to improve the world through planting trees and donating to charity. Over a third of YuLife customers engage with the company every single day, compared to once a year for the average insurer, and 87% report an improvement to their wellbeing.
Zilch – London
Zilch is revolutionising the payments industry by merging the best of what people love, desire and trust about debit and credit cards. Leveraging a direct-to-consumer approach, Zilch empowers customers to pay on debit (with up to 2% cashback and rewards) or credit (pay-in-4) for no interest or late fees, anywhere Mastercard is accepted online or in store. As one of the UK’s first pay-over-time providers to be granted a consumer credit licence by the FCA, Zilch’s transparent and customer centric credit alternative is designed with regulators to ensure consumer protection and financial health. Utilising sophisticated Open Banking technology and soft credit checks, Zilch uses its real-time view and understanding of customer’s affordability to give accurate recommendations of what they can afford to borrow.
Zuto – North West
Zuto is passionate about bringing market leading technology to the industry to make the car finance experience as transparent as possible for customers. It aims to eliminate any confusion surrounding whether a customer is actually approved for finance, what APR they will be offered, how much they can borrow, or which selection of lenders customers will be offered. Its platform connects customers with the best lender for their circumstances in seconds and uses extensive customer data to return an APR and monthly repayment, with an upfront approval. Integrating seamlessly with lenders in this way enables Zuto to deliver a faster, customer-first experience.