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Yorkshire

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

What’s new in Yorkshire?

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: Yorkshire’s five top early-stage companies

By Kane Fulton, December 3, 2020

⏱ 5 min read

Community

Running DMC: How Barnsley expanded its digital tech hub during Covid-19

By Kane Fulton, November 16, 2020

⏱ 4 min read

Community

Minister for Exports: Humber region ‘must unleash its entrepreneurial talent’

By Kane Fulton, November 10, 2020

⏱ 2 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

What happened next for our 10 Rising Stars 2.0 winners

By Kane Fulton, October 8, 2020

⏱ 7 min read

Community

‘The amount of DevOps, network and security skills in the north is through the roof’

By Kane Fulton, October 6, 2020

⏱ 4 min read

Community

How to win global enterprises as customers – from a digital tech ‘futurecorn’

By Kane Fulton, October 5, 2020

⏱ 4 min read

Meet Jem

  • About Jem
  • Email
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

I’m Jem Henderson – Tech Nation’s Yorkshire 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 Yorkshire? Then follow Jem on Twitter, where she’ll be sharing the best ones that come her way.

Jem 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 Jem to tweet? Get in touch
Tweets by tn_yorkshire

Tech Nation Report 2020

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

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

 

£74mInvested in emerging tech (2015-2019)
£52mInvested in AI (2015-2019)
£35,000Digital tech salary (median)
3Digital tech unicorns
3High-value tech scaleups (2019)

 

3Digital tech unicorns
3High-value tech scaleups
£35,000Median digital tech salary (2018)

Rik Barker
CTO, Sky Bet

 

What about Leeds/Yorkshire has enabled you to scale your business?

Leeds is becoming more and more recognised for tech excellence. It holds great links to local universities in the city itself, in addition to Sheffield, York and the wider region. There’s a high calibre of staff developing in the North of England, with the startup scene in Leeds continuing to blossom. With the variety of skills required for the technology sector, being a Yorkshire-based business has enabled us to tap into a very diverse talent pool across the region.

How could Yorkshire be better suited to the creation of ‘unicorns’?

I think there’s some work to do in terms of further investment in the region from local government and the LEP. There’s a minimal FinTech presence in Leeds, which is surprising when you consider the vast amount of entrepreneurship and market disruption at the moment via challenger banks, combined with a variety of tech skillsets within the local workforce.

What do you think Yorkshire/Leeds should be known for when it comes to tech businesses?

A good mix of skillsets and a really diverse talent pool for employers to tap into, capable of providing scalable growth. The tech workforce in Leeds is of a relatively young age, on average, which is great because it provides fresh thinking to both new and historic challenges organisations might face.

There’s a strong and growing list of businesses calling Yorkshire home: First Direct, ASDA and Burberry have Leeds offices and there’s WANdisco presence in Sheffield, as well an impressive number of startups and scaleups. They include 3Squared, Hive, Paper and Razor, as well as our own Sheffield office. It’s important to mention that there’s a strong tech agency scene in parts of Yorkshire too, many of which work with global clients. This doesn’t happen by accident, and regions have to facilitate agency growth in order for them to succeed.

Anna Sutton
Founder, The Data Shed

How is your company disrupting a part of the economy?

Terms like ‘data democracy’ are banded around in the media, but many decisions made by people in organisations are still based on their experience and expertise with no real foundation of data and insights. Something that we’re really passionate about is putting data into the hands of people who are making decisions on behalf of the company daily and can derive value from it – regardless of their technical capability.

The whole premise of our Data Refinery product is to disrupt a market where licences are ridiculously expensive, allowing people to do a big chunk of the work for a fraction of the cost. This makes organisations better, driving bigger returns and more profit from efficiencies and cost reduction. We are also disruptive in the way that we approach conversations with clients. By solving a business problem, rather than a ‘data’ or ‘tech’ problem, people are starting to sit up and take notice of us.

Why did you feel that the place or region that you are based in was a good place to disrupt your industry?

Yorkshire has a long-standing relationship with the world of data and – in my opinion – there isn’t a better place to set up a data business. Funnily enough, my dad and John Dobson, one of the founding partners of Callcredit (now Leeds ‘unicorn’ TransUnion), had a business called Business Mail Data Services back in the 1980s – so you could say it’s in my blood!

Alongside the Credit Bureaus which of course are giants in the data world, Yorkshire has a huge financial services sector. Legally, businesses in this sector have had to be ahead of the data curve – this means that lots of the tech and data talent in Leeds is used to wrangling data, and that’s a fundamental part to our success.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is gary-gallen.jpg

Gary Gallen
CEO and founder, Rradar

What does your company do?

We empower and educate businesses through smarter legal services. By fusing first-class legal advice and representation with the latest technology, we create a preventative educational strategy that makes the law more accessible and affordable, supporting people to run better businesses.

Rradar launched in Hull in 2012. It has grown from a one-person startup business to a tech-enhanced law firm. It currently has over 130 full-time employees working out of four key strategic office locations – Hull, Leeds, Birmingham and Glasgow. We’ve won a clutch of legal, tech and insurance industry awards and had a turnover of more than £9 million at our last year-end. We continue to expand rapidly with plans for more UK offices, recruitment and our first acquisitions.

Why did you choose to base your company in Yorkshire?

Each of the four cities that we are based in offer a hotbed of potential for tech and law talent, enabling future employee and business scaleup. Our HQ in Hull provides strategic connections to Leeds, Birmingham, London and further afield, which helps us easily transfer resources between each location.

The high-quality office space and affordable rates in Hull enable us to expand and future-proof the business; we anticipate an increase in staff and demands on technology and communication connectivity. Our location offers us the opportunity to design and create a space with the specifications needed to reframe the delivery of legal services.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is paul-hallett-2.jpg

Paul Hallett
Co-founder and CEO, Vet AI

What problem is your business solving/addressing?

Vet-AI is an R&D company developing a number of solutions that focus on supporting pets, vets and giving pet parents the tools to access care more affordably and conveniently when their pets need it most. With vet fees rising by 12% year-on-year, pet parents are often reluctant to take their pets to the vets.

Leeds was an obvious choice for the startup business to be located. I knew there was an abundant talent pool on our doorstep, as well as a thriving tech community which sees lots of innovation. Yorkshire is a more cost-effective place to innovate than the capital and it has a great business network with partner agencies from PR, branding, behavioural research and legal support based locally. The university’s local network was also key to the growth of the firm too.

What challenges are you facing in your business?

The regulatory body in its industry, The Royal College of Veterinary Scientists (RCVS), remains strict in its legislation which is imperative to Vet-AI’s ability to prescribe and deliver medication to pets online via its app, Joii. We have gone to great lengths to invest in, and provide credible evidence to show, the results from remote veterinary consultations – but we remain unable to prescribe online currently.

We have also found that early stage (Seed – B2C) investment in Yorkshire is poor. We have recently completed our second round of funding, but the previous rounds were very challenging and resulted in us having to go to London to secure this.

External support for founders

Our curated picks of support for founders from around Yorkshire

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 Yorkshire

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

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

Featuring comment from Leeds Digital Festival, Leeds City Council, Antonym, and Hark.

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

Featuring comment from Sheffield Technology Parks, Twinkl, and Slanted Theory.

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

Digital Media Centre’s Tracey Johnson talks Barnsley’s aspirations.

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

Featuring comment from Connexin, Bombyx PLM, and HullCoin.

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 Jem know

 

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