I’m Elizabeth Corse – Tech Nation’s South East Scaleup 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 South East? Then follow Elizabeth on Twitter, where she’ll be sharing the best ones that come her way.
Elizabeth 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 Elizabeth to tweet? Get in touch
Read our latest report: ‘The future of UK tech built‘. See below for headline stats and case studies from the South 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.
How is your company disrupting a part of the economy?
We manufacture, launch and operate satellites in orbit that allow our clients to measure and understand what happens down on Earth, as well as providing ubiquitous connectivity. Satellite images are disrupting the way we measure and monitor the global changes caused by humans or nature. The economic impact in sectors such as transportation, energy, agriculture, or insurance to name a few is tremendous.
Satellite connectivity enables devices and people to be ubiquitously connected. The impact that this will have for the Internet of Things and 5G telecommunications is huge. But above all we are disrupting the space industry itself, making the use of space technology simple and affordable for everyone to use as a tool to solve global challenges.
Why did you feel that the South East was a good place to disrupt your industry?
My reasons why the UK was the best way to start Open Cosmos:
1. There is an entrepreneurial culture that supports innovation at scale as well as access to private capital to fuel it.
2. Space has been identified as one of the strategic industries for the country and there are resources and facilities available to support its development and growth.
3. Thanks to London and the English language, it is possible to attract global talent – as well as tapping in the local engineering, scientific and software talent.
Streeva is a fintech company on a mission to make payments work better for everyone, starting with UK charities. £564million in Gift Aid goes unclaimed every year.
Throw a coin in a bucket or more commonly now, or tap on a contactless point, and you’re unlikely to stop and fill in a form. That’s where Swiftaid comes in. Users can forget the form every time you donate, as it happens automatically.
A donor signs up to Swiftaid, links their card and then every time they donate via contactless to Swiftaid registered charities, the Gift Aid is automatically attached.
Why did you choose to base your company in your place or region?
We are based in Guildford, Surrey. I was surprised at how many tech companies are based there; it has everything you need to help your startup grow, accelerate and scale. The access to the University of Surrey is great and we continue to work closely with them. Plus, it’s only 30 mins into London – winner!
How could the place or region that you are based in be better prepared for your business growth/scaling?
We haven’t hit any barriers yet; we’ve been here for over two years, we’re still here and we’re not planning on moving anytime soon – so that says it all really!
We’re a software technology company based in Reading that provides software automation. That means we’re helping customers at the moment, bringing together legacy systems and new systems so they can integrate them within their businesses. The problem for our customers is that they’ve got teams of people that are left connecting old platforms to new technology – and these processes are held together very manually.
It means they spend a lot of their time o repetitive processes, just to hold an entire business together. We create a system, which sits within a business – like a layer that can pull people systems and processes together allowing them to very quickly and in a very adaptable manner pull together pieces of automation applications. Robot Processing Automation or RPA basically helps businesses join up all of its activity.
Our customers typically save 10 times what they’re paying us, and it also speeds up their processes and saves their operation costs. And the reason that we’re winning businesses is that our system is fast to integrate.
What changes do you feel your company has brought about in your region/the UK/the world?
There are good reasons to do it here. We’ve got Oxford University and Reading University on our doorstep, great transport and railway links. We’re in a perfect central location between London and Bristol, so to be able to do that deep technology and research would be really great. We’d like to help out with a higher education level layer and further education. For example, staging competitions to help people use our tech, while also being a sponsor for future talent through tech hackathons and similar events.
Serelay enables any mobile device user to capture photos and videos which are inherently verifiable, and any entity that receives these can verify their authenticity quickly conclusively and at scale. While detecting “deepfakes” has been in the news, most experts and industry insiders agree that the longer-term, scalable solution to synthetic media and visual manipulation (including deepfakes) will be based on provenance, not detection. In other words – it’s about tracking media files from the moment they are created and documenting, where relevant, their content, time and location. Serelay is currently the only provenance solution on the market which does not store a single photo or video on its servers for verification purposes. Our work has been supported and funded by Google and the European Space Agency.
Why did you choose to base your company in your place or region?
I came to Oxford to study and ended up staying a little longer than intended – after my studies, I set up the university’s startup incubator from an initial idea, having supported 40 venture incorporations, £70m in funding raised by portfolio companies, and two exits.
When it was time to set up my own venture, Oxford was already home to me on a personal level and I was also well aware of what a great place it is to start an ambitious startup. I think there are very few places in the world where you’ll be able to find so many smart people in one square mile, it’s also a truly multicultural city and refreshingly one where the main currency is knowledge (as opposed to money).
Jonathan Doan Chief Commercial Officer, Mindfoundry
What does your company do?
Mind Foundry builds machine-learning tools intended to make data science a “big-tent” process – one where data scientists can collaborate with business generalists and deep domain experts. We’re on a mission to bring the power of machine learning to an ever wider community of people who seek to make better data-driven decisions. But we’re really only getting started in bringing about changes in our region, the UK and the world.
Why did you choose to base your company in your place or region?
The story of Mind Foundry is so deeply grounded in Oxford that there could be some debate over the precise moment the company began. Companies House confirms that the company was incorporated in November 2015. The founders, however, Oxford University Professors Stephen Roberts and Michael Osborne, were very well established as luminaries in the machine learning field well before that time.
Oxford University claims, credibly, to be a world-leading center of learning, teaching and research in the field. If we zoom out further, in both geographical and historical terms, some of the most seminal figures in the history of probability (Thomas Bayes) and computing science (Alan Turing) are associated with the United Kingdom. With those foundations noted, perhaps the more important question is why, with a world of opportunities before us, do we expect to remain based here in Oxford. The answer is the talent ecosystem. That is a potent source of differentiation for us in a globally competitive field.
We are grateful for all the advantages we have enjoyed as a product and member of the Oxfordshire technology ecosystem. It would be hard to imagine our present stage of growth, had we not had access to funding, mentoring, world-class talent, and Oxford’s vibrant network of brilliant people working on interesting problems.
Vitaccess is a digital health consultancy based in Oxford that develops smartphone apps for patients globally, to help the pharmaceutical industry and researchers understand the impact of treatments and diseases in the real world – and not just when patients attend clinics.
What makes your city a good place to be a tech founder?
With Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, one of the largest acute teaching trusts in the UK, plus two outstanding universities and multiple science parks, the city attracts global talent in both healthcare and tech. The Oxford Centre for Innovation is our home and we participate in hackathons and tech events all the time.
What is your company’s national and international focus?
Our potential reach is global – any location where clinical research takes place and patients have access to smartphones. Our digital work has so far been launched in Europe, US and Canada. We tackle Japan in 2020. Our team is majority UK based and female, with some colleagues in the US, Paris, Romania and Athens.
How is your company disrupting a part of the economy?
GPS does not work indoors – so Navenio offers pioneering, frictionless, accurate and scalable indoor location solutions that uniquely have no need to install any new infrastructure. Enabled ‘simply’ by using sensors in smartphones, unlike other indoor location solutions, Navenio offers frictionless adoption to drive powerful use cases.
Navenio’s primary market is global healthcare where it delivers real-world benefits for every user, transforming hospitals through improving workforce efficiency. Initially, Navenio focused on optimising the workflow of the supporting teams in hospitals that underpin the flow of patients. The tech uses a person’s location and attendance to dynamically prioritise and assign work.
Why did you feel that the place or region that you are based in was a good place to disrupt your industry?
Healthcare is a constant part of our everyday lives and with growing populations and global economic challenges. Oxford has a very strong healthtech ecosystem.
Navenio’s ground-breaking solution is attributable to the development of three world-class innovative University of Oxford-based technologies, so our proximity to the university has been instrumental to get us to this point as well as providing a pipeline of future talent as we scale the business.
Stephen Farmer Head of Corporate Communications, Altitude Angel
How is your company disrupting a part of the economy?
The skies are becoming over-crowded. The UK alone already sees 6,000 flights a day, with 750 commercial aircraft in UK airspace at any given time. This is exacerbated by the increasing use of drones, which cannot communicate with or be adequately tracked by existing air traffic management (ATM) systems. If we look at where we could be sometime in the near future, with the likes of Google and Amazon looking to deploy extensive drone fleets for various commercial purposes, and with hobbyist activity on the rise, it is clear that we will need sustainable, safe, and scalable systems to manage our skies.
Altitude Angel’s products – the GuardianUTM (unmanned traffic management) software, and the developer API platform – enable the safe integration and use of fully autonomous drones into global airspace, integrating with existing ATM systems and opening up more of the skies to commercial activity.
Why did you feel that the place or region that you are based in was a good place to disrupt your industry?
The UK, and in particular the Thames Valley where Altitude Angel are headquartered, has a world-renowned reputation for tech innovation and is the UK home to a number of large multi-national tech business including Microsoft, Huawei, Nokia and Thales.
While not a primary reason for Altitude Angel to be based in Reading, the location has proved advantageous for several reasons. Due to other market-leading businesses being based locally, recruitment of high-calibre employees, especially in technical disciplines, has been ‘easier’ than it may have been should we be based elsewhere.
The problems with plastics in the oceans have highlighted that we cannot carry on with a current model of consumerism, where you have no responsibility for the disposal of products you buy.
We offer producers of goods the chance to make every individual product they produce uniquely identifiable. That unique identification allows a customer to individually own an item. There is a transaction where a product transaction goes from being owned by the producer to being digitally owned by the consumer.
There is a digital relationship formed between the producer and the consumer. Our concept of digital ownership then means the product can be digitally registered into disposal, which means the ownership transfers from whoever bought it from the producer to whoever is going to dispose and recycle it, so we create these unique product identities and a platform, which allows a lifetime of any given product to be digitally tracked.
Why did you set up your company in the place/region you are based?
If you’re doing a tech startup, most people would think you’d want to move to Silicon Valley. But if you look at product management, and you look at places in the world where category managers/product managers live, the Thames Valley is the number one location in the world for product management.
We have lots of brands such as Pepsi and Mars and all these big brands around here who are doing their product management here. When it comes to brand management, the places you’d want to be is either in New York or in the Thames Valley, and we’re in the Thames Valley, and it’s a fantastic place to be.
Adam Bradley Country Manager for UK & Ireland, Sophos
What about your place or region has enabled you to scale your business?
Our central location in Abingdon, Oxfordshire has helped us to grow by attracting new and fresh talent to Sophos. Our people are drawn by the prospect of an exciting career developing and making a difference in cybersecurity in a scenic and historic part of the country. Our industry is a rapidly-evolving and fast-moving one, and the importance of recruiting the best people cannot be overstated. In return, we are committed to offering employees a wonderful working environment that fosters collaboration and creativity; it’s green, spacious, and comfortable, with lots of natural light and ambience. Our location in Abingdon is ideally suited to that. And as we continue to grow as a global business, the easy access to the motorway network and international airports available from Oxfordshire has helped Sophos to reach out and extend across borders.
What do you think your place or region should be known for when it comes to tech businesses?
Oxfordshire, not just because of its world-renown university, already has a strong reputation for both innovation and commercialising new developments. There is a huge variety of tech businesses across Oxfordshire, from biotech to engineering simulation and 3D printing innovators – and of course cybersecurity. I think tech diversity is important, but I would like Oxfordshire to continue to grow as an epicentre for cybersecurity.
Where would you set up a business in the UK if you had to do it again? Why?
Sophos currently has a global estate of 40 offices in 25 countries, including the UK. Wherever we are, if employees, partners and customers can easily find their way to us, we are in the right place.
We face a global crisis. Seafood feeds 3 billion people and supports the livelihood of 12% of the world’s population, yet with 30% of the world’s fisheries overfished and 60% fished to the limits of sustainability, food security and poverty are serious concerns. On top of this, illegal fishing is associated with a range of other crimes – including human trafficking and slavery, causing misery and suffering for thousands of people.
OceanMind is a not-for-profit organisation with a mission to empower enforcement and compliance to protect the world’s oceans. Our work helps preserve marine biodiversity, protect livelihoods, and prevent slavery in the seafood industry using satellites and artificial intelligence to identify fishing activities and suspected non-compliance. Every day, the team are contributing to work that changes people’s lives and helps protect the oceans.
Why did you set up your company in the place/region you are based?
OceanMind began as a partnership between the Satellite Applications Catapult and the Pew Charitable Trusts to develop technology to identify illegal fishing globally. Once this technology was proven, I developed a business plan to show how an independent non-profit organisation could be established to leverage the technology to impact the sustainability of seafood stocks through a mixture of fee-for-service revenue and grant-funded projects.
In 2017, we won the support of Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, and in July 2018 we span out of the Satellite Applications Catapult into our own independent non-profit. In September 2019 we had almost doubled in size and moved from offices within the Satellite Applications Catapult to our own offices at the Harwell Innovation Centre.
Greater Change is a non-profit tech company that’s making it possible to donate cashlessly to homeless individuals and their long term goals for getting out of homelessness. As society becomes increasingly cashless, there will be many people who want to give and help those they see on the streets, who are unable to act on this moment of empathy and generosity.
Why did you set up your company in the place/region you are based?
Greater Change was founded in Oxford with the support of Aspire Oxford and Oxford University Innovation.
Alex McCallion, our founder, first got the idea for Greater Change while doing a lot of outreach work as a student. It naturally evolved as a project based in Oxford due to the amount of support we get from Aspire and the University. Furthermore, the quality of the work done by Aspire with their clients convinced us that there was no need to look for a different testbed for our pilot scheme. Oxford, being a fairly tech-forward city, also meant that there was a good demographical fit.
As we started expanding to various other parts of the UK, it made more sense to split our time between London and Oxford to enable us to reach other parts of the country, as well as meet with potential partners more easily.
External support for founders
Our curated picks of support for founders in the South East
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