Cardiff

Thriving tech meetup scene supports the city's startup ecosystem

£641 mDigital tech business turnover
(2017)

StartupDominant distribution of businesses by age (2017)

£138 kDigital tech turnover by employee (2017)

78Digital tech business births (2016)

£606 mGVA
(2017)

4,640Jobs in digital tech
(2017)

21,508Digital tech jobs
(2017)

Developments

Cardiff’s tremendous digital tech support takes the form of investment, funding a budding community across all aspects of tech. Digital tech support in the city is growing, with new offers, such as the Development Bank of Wales.

The race is on to become Wales’ first tech unicorn. Emerging from Cardiff’s tech scene are some worthy contenders, Wealthify, DevOpsGuys and AMPLYFI have all had multi-million-pound backing to support their rapid growth. Hot on their heels are a new generation of tech startups including Delio, We Build Bots, Bipsync and Backbase.

The launches of Cyber Wales and Tech Wales have brought together businesses with universities and public sector bodies to tackle the major challenges facing industry and to promote Wales’s tech capability both nationally and internationally.

Some of Wales’ largest co-working spaces have launched the Coworking Collective, to support the growth of the Welsh tech and creative sectors. Its founding spaces are Hwyl Hub, Rabble Studio, The Sustainable Studio, Tramshed Tech and Welsh ICE. Combined, they are home to 247 companies and 552 people.

Owen Derbyshire

CEO, Properr

About Properr
Properr develops digital products that simplify the home-buying process. Our flagship product, TrackMyMove, brings everyone involved in a property transaction into an online deal room, providing unprecedented transparency, automating archaic processes, and guaranteeing security.

Why Cardiff?
Cardiff has a thriving insurance, financial and property sector – all key to our continued success. Combine that with a supportive national government, excellent entrepreneurial networks and easy access to higher education and you end up with the perfect place to set up a PropTech business.

Founded: 2016

Raised: £1.2m

Sarah Edwards

Managing Director, Capital Network Solutions

About Capital Network Solutions
Cyber Network Solutions is a managed Cyber Security and infrastructure services provider based in Cardiff. With a highly accredited cyber security team, CNS has established its reputation as one of the leading and most respected cyber security companies in the UK.

Why Cardiff?
Cardiff is a diverse and desirable place to live and work. With strong cultural, sporting and entertainment attractions and with exciting entrepreneurial spirit, Cardiff is an ideal location for our business. With strong links between business and universities, the talent pool is readily accessible and there are ever increasing business opportunities.

National & International focus
Our customers are based locally and across the globe. We have received support via the Welsh Government to help increase our profile internationally which has also enabled us to promote the significant expertise that Wales has within many technical areas such as cyber security, AI and App/Software development.

Founded: 1996

Popular meetups in Cardiff

1,134 members

Cardiff Tech Talk

869 members

South Wales Agile Group

602 members

MSFT Stack

We have clustered Cardiff meetups according to their topics. Meetups with similar topics are attracted, whilst meetups with different subjects are repelled. A full screen version can be found here. Click on a node, or search for a topic in the full screen version.

We have clustered Cardiff meetups according to their topics. Meetups with similar topics are attracted, whilst meetups with different subjects are repelled. Please view this page on desktop to use the visualisation interactively.

There are no clear meetup clusters in Cardiff

Source: Tech Nation, 2018; Meetup.com, 2018

The size of each node is determined by the number of connections it has with others. A large node signifies a highly connected meetup with many topics shared with other groups.

Community perceptions survey findings

The Tech Nation 2018 Survey was conducted between January 2018 and February 2018, in partnership with Streetbees. This year’s survey received the largest response yet from members of the UK tech community. In a total of 3,428 submissions, people told us about the opportunities and challenges their local ecosystems face, and the digital tech leaders they admire. The majority of respondents (33%) were founders and CEOs.

What Cardiff startups say is a strength

1Helpful tech community

2Appealing area

3Access to resources

What Cardiff startups say is a challenge

1Access to talent

2Access to funding

3Bad transport links

Who Cardiff startups say is influential

Chris Ganje

CEO, AMPLYFI

About AMPLYFI
The internet is vastly underutilised. AMPLYFI is fundamentally changing organisations’ relationships with the internet; rapidly becoming their business intelligence and research portal. For any search topic, our pioneering artificial intelligence-based technology reads, and analyses millions of open-source items that it finds and harvests from the entire internet.

Unique to Cardiff?
Three key drivers led AMPLYFI to headquarter in Cardiff: access to a strong pipeline of talent from its world-class universities, extensive Welsh Government and Development Bank of Wales funding and support mechanisms, and local start-up support from programmes such as the NatWest Accelerator and Barclays Eagle Lab.

Strengths & Challenges
To build on the strengths, and tackle the challenges, I think the following should be implemented in Cardiff:

– Quality physical and digital infrastructure i.e. office space and comms, are critical for start-ups to remain in Cardiff to scale and grow.

-Promoting Cardiff as a leading academic destination so that its universities continue to attract and produce the highest quality STEM graduates post-Brexit.

-More direct long-haul flights from Cardiff to destinations in North America and Asia to aid Welsh exporters.

Tech Nation 2018 is now open!

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