If you’re looking to start a business venture, then it makes sense to check out the UK business ventures that are finding traction with investors.
One place to start is reviewing the 35 companies that have been accepted into Tech Nation’s Upscale growth programme for the UK’s fastest-growing mid-stage tech companies.
The ventures collectively employ over 1,400 people and have raised c.£250m in venture capital investment.
Tech Nation says that the UK’s mid-stage scaling tech companies (at Series A) have raised €5.1bn in 2022 so far, compared with €5.6bn in the whole of 2021.
The top three fastest scaling sectors for UK mid-stage companies are fintech, healthtech and energy tech.
In Association with
The UK ventures listed below have attracted median investment of £5.2m and average headcount across the firms is 40 people.
Arctoris - South East
Arctoris is a tech-enabled drug discovery company. It combines its unique automation platform, Ulysses, with advanced machine learning.
CGHero - North West
CGHero is a collaborative talent platform for digital artistry in the media and entertainment industry, offering flexible access to over 6,000 'heroes' with vetted skills to deliver a wide range of creative production work including 2D, 3D, Animation and VFX.
Clue - South West
Clue is a SaaS investigation case management and intelligence platform used by governments, police, private, and non-profit sectors globally to help counter threats including fraud, organised crime, modern slavery, corruption, environmental crime and more.
cord - London
cord’s direct messaging tool enables someone to have a conversation with a person who wants to hire them. Every message is instant and in real-time.
CreditEnable - London
CreditEnable is a global credit insights and technology company that enables intelligent lending to SMEs. It provides decision-optimising solutions to help SME lenders grow efficiently and support SMEs to prepare for and access affordable credit from formal financial institutions.
Cumulus Neuroscience - Northern Ireland
Cumulus Neuroscience was formed to revolutionise how brain health is measured and analysed at a massive scale, thus enabling breakthroughs in therapy development and diagnosis for conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer's.
Deazy - South West
Deazy is the scalable way for businesses to engage vetted developers. It has built a closed ecosystem of vetted global development teams, a tech platform to intelligently match and facilitate the end-to-end process of finding developers and building dev squads.
Developing Experts - East of England
Developing Experts provides an edtech learning-careers platform designed to stimulate excitement in STEM from primary school age and beyond to inform positive career choices for building a diverse and inclusive STEM talent pipeline over the long term.
Dishpatch - London
Dishpatch is a leading platform connecting the authentic chefs with food lovers nationwide. It democratises access to the best restaurants by delivering pre-prepared food to customers' doors each week. Dishpatch essentially combines an e-commerce front end built on Shopify, with an in-house food manufacturing and fulfilment operation.
Duel - London
Duel is a brand advocacy SaaS platform that helps consumer retail brands grow through the advocacy of their customers and fans. Duel lets brands engage with, manage and scale communities of 1000s of advocates through gamified, tiered-based programs.
amicable - London
amicable’s vision is to transform how people end relationships. Shifting attitudes to separation, court reform and technological advancement present a global opportunity to disrupt the market. amicable’s tech-enabled divorce service is uniquely positioned to capitalise on this. Its The Divorce Podcast covers all aspects of separation.
Eatron Technologies - West Midlands
Eatron develops and sells/licenses its products to the automotive industry for serial production use in the new electric vehicle (EV) programs. Its first product is a edge-cloud connected BMS (battery management system including software and hardware) and the second is an intelligent motion software platform for adaptive suspension controls both targeting EV applications.
Fable Data - London
Fable Data turns banking data into revenue. Its compliance technology sits within a bank anonymously reading millions of accounts every day. This gives Fable Data an unrivalled measure of consumer and SME economic activity in real time, from which it produces Data As A Service insight products on the macro economy, regions, sectors and on how individuals brands are performing.
Flavourworks - London
Flavourworks is a leading, next gen entertainment studio pioneering immersive storytelling with cinematic games and interactive video content. It sits at the intersection of filmed entertainment and gaming.
Flock - London
Flock is reinventing insurance for commercial motor fleets. It leverages immense amounts of data (telematics data, hyperlocal weather data, crime data, etc.) to quantify driving risk in real-time, enabling fleet customers to reduce risk by providing them with risk insights and incentivising safer driving with lower premiums.
Helpthemove - North West
Helpthemove is a software company that automates processes that relate to moving home. The core software is a solution that integrates with the councils, water and energy companies to automate change of tenancies.
Housekeep - London
Housekeep is an online marketplace connecting consumers with local, vetted home services professionals. Housekeep's tech matches customers with local, trusted professionals and it assigns these professionals local, dense travel routes – reducing travel time and increasing utilisation. Housekeep cleaners earn 50% more, due to in-house job allocation and route optimisation technologies.
Humanising Autonomy - London
Humanising Autonomy teaches machines to understand human behaviour to ensure human-to-machine interactions are safer, pleasant and more human.
i6 Group - South East
i6 Group is revolutionising fuel management for airlines, airports, and into-plane operators by digitising the entire fuel supply chain. It connects the entire fuel supply chain in real-time through cloud-based software, secure technology, and i6-enabled vehicles and carts.
Playter - London
Playter is a B2B Buy Now, Pay Later fintech that is the creator of 'post purchase' BNPL. Its platform helps ambitious SMEs instantly convert their invoices into BNPL, spreading the cost of their bill over 6-12 months.
Indra - West Midlands
Indra Renewable Technologies develops and manufactures smart energy products, including an electric vehicle Smart Charger, a Vehicle to Grid (V2G) charger and vehicle battery systems.
Juno - London
Juno is a simpler, clearer and faster way to manage major life events – like moving home or dealing with the death of a loved one. It delivers regulated legal services through its own law firm, staffed by experienced lawyers and paralegals, underpinned by legal automation technology. It has started with conveyancing.
Membr - North West
Membr is a cloud-based gym management software with a global footprint in 25 countries across four continents. By delivering a member-centric platform that keeps exercisers connected, active and engaged, it enables fitness clubs to create stronger bonds with members.
Scan.com - London
Scan.com is the platform that makes diagnostic and preventable medical imaging accessible to all. It integrates with private hospitals and diagnostic centres via a proprietary API, and makes their spare capacity available to patients via a website (Scan.com) and a B2B portal/API.
Penfold - London
Penfold provides a mobile and desktop application for customers to open, combine and manage their pension savings. The Penfold app helps users set up a pension or consolidate their old pots into one, and then through a range of personalised tools helps change their savings behaviour and get on track with their retirement goals, all enabled by a backend platform.
Placed - London
Placed is a talent attraction and recruitment software built for high churn service sectors and the next generation of job seekers. On the B2C side, it has built a mobile app that connects gen Z job seekers to relevant opportunities and curated content about all things work. Through a marketplace candidates can explore, browse and access useful resources, quizzes and follow employers that are interesting to them. On the B2B side, it offers software that employers in the service sector can access the next-gen job seeker and showcase their brands.
PlayerData - Scotland
PlayerData exists to revolutionise the way athletes train. It is doing this by providing athletes and teams of all sizes and levels access to their performance data.
Lunio - North West
Lunio is a SaaS platform offering automated invalid traffic prevention to digital marketers. It identifies invalid users across marketing campaigns and protects against these by building powerful invalid user pools that are then excluded across campaigns. This allows for the surgical removal of IVT, bots and invalid users, leading to cleaner more actionable marketing data.
RESPONSIBLE - Northern Ireland
Its technology enables fashion brands to offer their customers an effective trade-in option in store and online when they consider a new purchase. Its systems facilitate the logistics related to the movement or refurbishment of products that are traded in for resale or recycling as well as general returns.
Skrap - London
Skrap is a B2B marketplace for construction hire services and equipment, making the journey seamless for contractors to order via mobile and web app.
SourceWhale - London
SourceWhale is a B2B SaaS recruitment engagement platform that integrates with social media sites including Linkedin, email providers, CRM and applicant tracking platforms to help recruiters source, engage and keep track of candidates. It works with both agency and in-house customers to increase their sourcing speed through workflow automation capabilities, such as email sequencing, response tracking and hiring pipeline analytics.
Swoop - London
Swoop is a global SME finance marketplace powered by data and APIs. It empowers SMEs to easily access every form of funding and make the right money decisions in one fell swoop.
TAINA - London
TAINA leverages cutting-edge technology to empower financial institutions globally to automate their FATCA and CRS regulatory compliance.
Tumelo - South West
Tumelo is driving retail investor engagement through shareholder democracy. Its APIs and user-interface shows investors in funds which companies their money is being invested into and gives them a shareholder’s voice on the ESG issues that matter most to them, from CEO pay to board diversity to climate change.
WellBox - North West
WellBox (Incendo) provides a range of solutions for enterprise companies to simplify business giving. WellBox is a range of gifts designed for business gifting where there are multiple recipients in many locations with varied tastes and requirements. The gift range spans food, drink and wellbeing.
