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North East

Find support and useful resources, make new contacts and discover events and opportunities

What’s new in the North East?

Community

International Women’s Day: 19 tech leaders share learnings on Covid-19 and leadership

By Kane Fulton, March 8, 2021

⏱ 11 min read

Community

Looking to get investor-ready? Book a chat with Tech Nation

By Kane Fulton, March 4, 2021

⏱ 2 min read

Community

What does it take to scale a deeptech company?

By Kane Fulton, February 17, 2021

⏱ 8 min read

Community

Meet the Rising Stars regional winners: the North East’s five top early-stage companies

By Kane Fulton, December 2, 2020

⏱ 5 min read

Community

Rising Stars 3.0: ‘Tech founders can apply today to compete online from anywhere’

By Kane Fulton, October 13, 2020

⏱ 4 min read

Community

Unlocking Global Tech: what does the UK offer international founders looking to expand?

By Kane Fulton, September 17, 2020

⏱ 4 min read

Community

16 innovative AI companies to watch in 2020

By Kane Fulton, July 2, 2020

⏱ 8 min read

Community

Tech Nation Talks North East: coordination key to scaling digital tech in the region

By Kane Fulton, May 15, 2020

⏱ 6 min read

Community

Meet Kate Patton: our North East Entrepreneur Engagement Manager

By Kane Fulton, May 6, 2020

⏱ 2 min read

How to

The working from home stack: tools, tips and solutions for founders and remote teams

By Kane Fulton, April 23, 2020

⏱ 6 min read

Meet Kate

  • About Kate
  • Email
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

I’m Kate Patton, Tech Nation’s North East Entrepreneur Engagement Manager. We’re building a national network of ambitious entrepreneurs. If you’re a founder who requires support, feel free to book a meeting with me using this form.

Opportunities and events

Interested in attending events for digital tech founders in the North East? Then follow Kate on Twitter, where she’ll be sharing the best ones that come her way.

Kate also tweets noteworthy national opportunities for founders – everything from accelerators and competitions to investment and collaboration opportunities, panels appearances, and much more.

  • Have an event or opportunity for Kate to tweet? Get in touch
Tweets by tn_northeast

Tech Nation Report 2020

Read our latest report: ‘UK tech for a changing world‘. See below for headline stats and case studies from the North East.

For additional stats, explore Data Commons. It’s our ground-breaking national database of technology businesses, founders, investors, VC funds, angels, accelerators, universities and service providers to the sector.

£100mTotal VC investment in 2019

 

£22mInvested in emerging tech (2015-2019)
£896kInvested in AI (2015-2019)
£35,000Digital tech salary (median)
3Digital tech unicorns
3High-value tech scaleups (2019)

 

1Digital tech unicorn
1High-value tech scaleup
£35,000Median digital tech salary (2018)

Pete Daykin, CEO and founder, Wordnerds

 

In your own words, what do Wordnerds do?

How do the world’s biggest brands make sense of the millions of tweets, emails, webchats, online reviews, CRM-entries, forum posts and survey results written by their customers? What about their competitors? In our world of big data, we’ve become really good at understanding the numbers, but numbers are easy: we know exactly what they mean.

Wordnerds is a software platform that helps brands uncover and understand the true voice of their customers. By combining cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) with old-school linguistics, our disruptive tech is a new way to train computers to read – and genuinely understand – language, and not just count the words.

Why did you choose to base the company in the North East?

I choose to live in the North East because it’s an amazing place with a unique mix of urban and rural, coast and country, modern and historical. I have family and friends here; people that have kicked lumps out of me at football for 30 years.

We have access to the combined genius of five universities, all within a stone’s throw of our Gateshead Quayside office – some of which boast world-class AI departments with research facilities and hardware to match. The UK’s National Innovation Centre for Data – NIC-D – has been built in Newcastle; we can walk there from our office. It is a resource that forms the vanguard of the UK PLC’s attempt to introduce businesses that want to use data better with the people, tech and hardware to do so.

Arwen Duddington, Zerolight

How is ZeroLight disrupting the automotive industry?

The cloud is the key to our continued disruption of the automotive industry. We offer the world’s only globally scalable, cloud-based car-configuration and content-production platform. This enables us to provide a range of solutions that deliver tangible competitive advantages for our clients by driving customer engagement, higher specification sales, and lower content-production costs.

Why is the North East a good place to grow your business?

With five leading universities and a number of top colleges on our doorstep, we have a very deep talent pool, and we’ve worked hard to enhance this by establishing strong links with these institutions.

Through these close relationships, we’re able to engage with students at the formative stages of their studies and introduce them to new career paths, which has helped us foster our highly successful graduate scheme.

Which markets and parts of the world do you operate in at the moment?

We are a global business in the truest sense. Our major clients – like Cadillac, Audi, and Lamborghini – operate in key automotive hubs, but our technology extends much further, and its impact is felt by car buyers in every corner of the world. We have achieved this through our close relationships and collaboration with global technology leaders – including Amazon, Facebook, Google, and NVIDIA.

Tom Howsam
Founder, Paid

Why did you choose to base the company in the North East?

The North East is my home – it’s where I wanted to set up and grow a new business. The reason for this is that, if we are successful, then Paid will be an example along with others of what you can achieve without needing to move to another city. Having more successful companies in the North East improves the environment for all businesses, increasing the likelihood of investment and the attraction and retention of talent. I want to be part of that and play a part in the digital revolution that we have started. In the short time Paid has been running, we have been accepted to well-known programs from Tech Nation and the Barclays Accelerator, where we were the first northern company to be accepted. This I hope has served as an inspiration to others who want to do the same.

How could the North East be better prepared for your business growth?

The missing piece in the North East is the access to the right finance, such as people who will take a risk as an angel investor and mentor you through the process of business growth and investment. Paid have been incredibly fortunate to have an amazing set of investors, but we have none from the North East. To be more successful as a whole this needs to change. Programmes to help new businesses are a great start but we need the hands-on people who have built, scaled and exited businesses to inspire the next group of companies.

External support for founders

Our curated picks of support for founders from around the North East

Browse meetups

Looking to discover a new meetup? Here’s our curated picks.

Browse coworking space

Find the perfect coworking space for you and your team.

Browse finance support

Browse investment support – from grants and loans to VC.

Browse skills support

Upskill you and your team with accelerators and more.

Tech Nation resources

Tap the arrows to cycle through our toolkits, reports and other resources for founders

Digital Business Academy

Free courses to help, start or grow a digital business

Tech Nation Visa

Visa for exceptional international tech talent to live and work in the UK.

Upscale: the Book

Learn about scaling a digital tech company from those who have done it.

Data Commons for UK Tech

A ground-breaking national database for the technology sector.

The scaleup glossary

Dog food, hockey sticks and unicorns, busting the tech industry jargon.

The ultimate guide to scaling

Are you up and running and ready to take it to the next level?

UK government resources

Resources from the UK government on starting out or growing a business.

Find other companies like yours

Take a look at the companies who’ve taken part in one of our programmes.

UK Artificial Intelligence Guide

How AI will impact our lives, what it’s all about and cut through the jargon.

Fintech collaboration toolkit

Essential onboarding guidelines for fintechs looking to partner with banks.

Insurtech standards

Form corporate partnerships quicker with this suite of legal documents

Tech Nation Report 2020

Our latest report looks at UK tech for a changing world.

Tech Nation Report 2019

The UK is a global centre for socially responsible technology innovation.

Unicorn update

How is the UK doing when it comes to creating Unicorns?

A Bright Tech Future

Research that shows more than 10% of the UK is employed in digital tech.

Tech for Social Good report

The UK is a global centre for socially responsible technology innovation.

What people say about the North East

Thoughts, opinions and analysis on what makes digital tech in the region tick

What are the opportunities and challenges for digital tech founders in Gateshead?

Featuring comment from Ricochet Technologies, Wordnerds and SoPost.

What are the opportunities and challenges for digital tech founders in Sunderland?

Featuring comment from Sunderland Software City, Tungl, Ricochet Technologies, and Workcast.

What are the opportunities and challenges for digital tech founders in Middlesborough?

Featuring comment from Middlesborough Council, Kraken IM, and Mabo Media.

Whatever your stage of growth, we’ve got a programme for you

Tech Nation Founders’ Network

Peer-to-peer network for tech startup founders.

Find out more

Tech Nation Rising Stars

Take your startup to the next level

Find out more

Tech Nation Upscale

Helping the UK’s leading scaleups grow into the tech giants of tomorrow.

Find out more

Tech Nation Fintech

Helping UK fintech startups scale, at home and abroad.

Find out more

Tech Nation Cyber

Helping the UK’s leading cyber security scaleups to accelerate their growth

Find out more

Tech Nation Applied AI

Helping the UK’s Artificial Intelligence scaleups solve real-world problems

Find out more

Have a suggestion for this page? Let Kate know

 

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