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London

Second only to Silicon Valley for global connections

  • Introduction and foreword
  • Key findings
  • International
  • Digital tech business
  • Community perceptions
  • Collaboration
  • Jobs and skills
  • Recommendations
  • Methodology
  • Community partners
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£64.1 bnDigital tech business turnover (2017)
StartupDominant distribution of businesses by age (2017)
£201 kDigital tech turnover by employee (2017)
4,541Digital tech business births (2016)
£36 bnGVA
(2017)
318,480Jobs in digital tech 
(2017)
256,082Digital tech jobs
(2017)

Developments

London is a melting pot of myriad industries – creative, finance, fashion and much more. The capital’s companies benefit from close proximity to other startups, and the ability to learn from people who have been there, done that.

Well-established and active networks thrive across the city, and many venture capital firms choose to call London home.

Activity here is underscored by large investments. Improbable, a platform through which third parties build vast virtual and simulated worlds, raised £388 million in May 2017, while Blockchain, a leading bitcoin platform, raised £31.5 million just a month later.

Fintech continues to grow fast too while Revolut, which raised £179 million in April 2018, already has nearly 2 million customers, and is signing over 6,000 more each day.

  • Growing Underground – a farm 33 metres below the ground in Clapham – is producing 20,000kg of green vegetables every year. It supplies wholesalers, local restaurants and Londoners through Farmdrop, and is also stocked by Marks & Spencer. This is enabled through LED technology, which makes possible to grow plants without any natural light.
  • Construction on Google’s new headquarters is expected to start in 2018. The 11-story, one million-square-foot building is near Kings Cross station. Combined with Google's current building and another property, it will create a campus of 7,000 Google staff members.
  • Transport startup Citymapper has been granted permission to run its first commercial bus route in London. It is a significant step towards the company’s ambition to offer smart transport services, based on data collected through its journey-planning app. The ‘CM2 – Night Rider’ route operates at weekends between Aldgate East and Highbury and Islington.

Tugce Bulut

Founder & CEO, Streetbees

About Streetbees
Streetbees is a global intelligence platform that reveals how people behave, and why, by analysing real-life moments collected from our worldwide users.

Why London?
London brings together both blue-chip clients eager to find new markets with the best tech talent from around the world, as well as leading investors – everything we need to thrive.

National & International focus
We have a truly international footprint – we work with leading international FMCG companies every day, and have a network of 1m users in 150 countries around the world.

Founded: 2015

Raised: £17m

Dylan Collins

CEO, SuperAwesome

About SuperAwesome
SuperAwesome’s technology is used by hundreds of brands and content-owners to safely engage with over 500 million kids every month. The company has pioneered the ‘kidtech’ market: technology which delivers digital functionality with a ‘zero-data’ design to ensure total safety for kids.

Why London?
Our HQ is in Covent Garden which is incredibly central and easy to reach for all of our team. We have people who live all over London commuting into our office every day so our location is critical.

National & International focus
Our company is international with several offices around the world (NY, LA, Singapore, Sydney), so communications with customers, partners and our team is incredibly important and virtually continuous.

Founded: 2013

Raised: $21m

Popular meetups in London

15,069 members

Virtual Java User Group

13,804 members

London New Tech

12,914 members

Silicon Roundabout

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

We have clustered London 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 this visualisation interactively.

London meetup clusters: Data Science Open Source Creative Tech Emerging Technology Software Development

Source: Tech Nation, 2018; Meetup.com, 2018. Thanks to the Oxford Internet Institute and JSIC

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 London startups say is a strength

1Appealing area
2Access to talent
3Helpful tech community

What London startups say is a challenge

1Access to talent
2Cost of living
3Brexit

Tech Nation 2018 is now open!

Great news. All data featured in the 2018 Tech Nation Report is available online for non-commercial use by third parties.  The data can be accessed through the data.world platform. If you use the data, please let us know. We would love to showcase your work.

If you'd like know why we are doing this, check out our blog.

Next cluster

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