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Nottingham

Meetup hub and £1.3 billion tech turnover

£1.3 bnDigital tech business turnover (2017)
ScaleupDominant distribution of businesses by age (2017)
£108 kDigital tech turnover by employee (2017)
102Digital tech business births (2016)
£1.1 bnGVA
(2017)
11,607Jobs in the digital tech sector (2017)
22,129Digital tech jobs
(2017)

Developments

A vibrant and creative city, Nottingham has a rich talent pool and strong cultural identity. The booming tech scene here also benefits from close connections to London.

  • Nottingham-based UNiDAYS is expanding into New York, Australia and Europe. The world's leading student affinity network connects a verified global student audience with relevant brands and services.
  • In 2016, Phil Randall, the co-founder of North 51, a £7 million turnover business, launched Userfy. A specialist user testing company, it helps businesses achieve higher returns by testing their wireframes, designs and live solutions with real users. Userfy is a great example of successful founders giving back and building the local ecosystem.

Olly Betts

CEO, Open Wrks

About OpenWrks
OpenWrks creates financial technology that improves everyday lives. We give people and small business owners fast, secure and flexible control of their financial information so they can get the products and services they need the most.

Why Nottingham?
Nottingham is host to an electric FinTech and entrepreneurial spirit, with financial powerhouses such as Experian and Capital One proving that Nottingham is a place to start, grow and succeed. With access to new talent from two world-class universities, there’s a virtuous circle of innovation, talent and business success.

National & International focus
OpenWrks is backed by London based venture builder, Blenheim Chalcot and has clients based throughout the UK. We build technology that isn’t limited by location and work with any business that want to improve the products they offer their customers by implementing Open Banking into their business.

Founded: 2015 

Geoff Love

CEO, Esendex

About Esendex
Esendex forms part of Europe’s leading supplier of Application-To-Person business messaging services. We help over 30,000 companies communicate brilliantly with their customers and staff; sending almost 3 billion messages a year through our portfolio of brands.

Why Nottingham?
Esendex employs a high number of graduates, and so benefits from being situated in a university city. We work closely with Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities, offering mentorship programmes and placement schemes that often turn into FTEs. We’re also easy commuting distance from Derby and Leicester, which gives us access to a broader talent pool.

National & International focus
Our group has offices in Italy, Spain, France and Australia, which allows us to support customers throughout Europe and APAC. The group strategy is managed from our HQ in Nottingham, but sales and support is offered on a local basis, and similarly we have field-based marketing, finance and engineering staff, feeding back essential data on product usage and the micro/macro environment.

Founded: 2001

Popular meetups in Nottingham

1,891 members

Tech Nottingham

1,303 members

Agile Nottingham

989 members

Nottingham Programmers

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 Nottingham startups say is a strength

1Helpful tech community
2Appealing area
3Proximity of a university

What Nottingham startups say is a challenge

1Access to talent
2Access to funding
3Lack of awareness of local tech community

Who Nottingham startups say is influential

Emma Seward

Director, Tech Nottingham

About Tech Nottingham
Tech Nottingham is an organisation with the mission to make Nottingham a better place to live and work in technology. Under my stewardship it has grown from being a single meet-up to running 40 events a year with a vibrant, thriving tech community both on and offline.

Unique to Nottingham?
Unlike other cities where there are many disparate groups, people working in tech in Nottingham benefit from a single, cohesive tech community. There’s a low barrier to entry, and it is always welcoming and supportive regardless of peoples’ background, experience or interests.

Strengths & Challenges
We are working to marshal the strength and cooperation of our community and local tech companies to let the world know what a wonderful place Nottingham is to live and work in tech. We have more tech jobs than we can fill, and more companies than places to put them, so we hope that spreading the word about Nottingham will bring more people and external investment to the city.

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.

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