The third cohort of the International Growth Programme spent the week in Australia following four months of online sessions preparing the ten companies for growth into the market.

The visit is the culmination of the programme and allowed the companies to meet potential business partners, government agencies and experts they had connected with over the last few months, on the ground, pushing forward their expansion plans for the market.

Caroline Craggs, Head of APAC Operations at Intelligent Growth Solutions said, ‘This programme has enabled us to do in 3 months what could have taken a year on our own’.

Each company was matched with their own sector specific mentor who gave advice and connections on the ground, as well as a go-to-market specialist who has helped each company advise and develop a tailored market entry strategy.

The cohort in Melbourne

The week started in Sydney with advice from UK tech companies, ISMS.Online and Nplan, who have already landed in Australia, by the UK government on the tech benefits of the newly agreed Australia-UK FTA, and by local tech ecosystem builder, Stone & Chalk, and Investment NSW on setup costs and engaging with the local community in Sydney and the wider New South Wales.

This was followed by networking sessions with potential partners and time for the companies to do their own 1-2-1 meetings to follow up with specific business opportunities – both with current and new partners, and potential hires in the market.

In the latter part of the week, the cohort went on to visit Melbourne. Group sessions included those organised alongside Invest Victoria and Launch Vic on the growing tech ecosystem, on digital transformation in Australian corporates and the talent pool and hiring with the University of Melbourne’s new innovation precinct. The evening presented an opportunity to meet with potential business partners and their mentors both at networking events and 1-2-1 meetings.

The visit also received local press coverage highlighting the interest by the UK tech sector in Australia and helping to put our cohort on the map.

Listening to UK tech companies ISMS.Online and NPlan who have already landed in Australia

The UK tech companies that joined us on the visit included:

Hammock (London)

Hammock is the property finance platform that helps landlords save time and money. They provide banking, bookkeeping, tax statement and business intelligence services for the property sector.

Topolytics (Edinburgh)

Topolytics is a data aggregation and analytics business that makes the world’s waste visible, verifiable and valuable.  Topolytics’ WasteMap® – a data analytics platform – ingests, processes and normalises data on waste movements, sites and companies and generates insights for waste producers, recyclers, investors and governments.

Wombat (London)

To make investing in your future accessible and enjoyable, by building products that smash down the barriers to the stock market.

Versed.ai (Cambridge)

Versed AI helps companies monitor, manage, and mitigate supply chain risks with AI-powered supply chain visibility and transparency. They do this by using cutting edge natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract buyer-supplier relationships from text documents. They can then aggregate this into a large supply chain map.

Recap (Lincoln)

Recap makes crypto taxes simple. They help users calculate crypto taxes in a simple to use, privacy-focused app. With thousands of transactions across different wallets, blockchains and exchanges, crypto taxes can be messy. With Recap, users can easily track all their crypto assets in one place and automatically calculate their crypto tax position.

Avvoka (London)

Avvoka is a document automation, negotiation and analytics tool designed to help law firms, in-house legal teams and businesses draft documents, negotiate them, and leverage data insights from that process to draft better documents, and get to “yes” faster.

IGS – Intelligent Growth Solutions (Edinburgh)

IGS is a multi-award-winning international agritech innovator delivering vertical farming solutions to customers across the world. The approach and technological design are based upon a culture of continuous innovation, a refusal to accept conventional thinking and brilliant, simple design.

Authenticate (Sheffield)

Authenticate are driven by helping businesses to create more transparent, sustainable and resilient supply chains through collaborative supplier engagement. By leveraging the power of their software solution, they deliver innovation and value to pioneering businesses by increasing efficiencies and mitigating risk whilst striving for a sustainable world, fit for the future.

Moneyhub (Bristol)

Moneyhub are a group of developers, financial experts, and optimists who share a vision for improving the financial wellness of people, their businesses, and their communities.

This visit and the work Tech Nation does supporting UK tech companies to derisk and accelerate their growth into the Asia Pacific is part of the UK government’s Digital Trade Network.