Tech Nation, December 16, 2021 11 min read
As part of our ‘12 Days of Scaleups‘ campaign, we have been gradually revealing the Regional Winners of Rising Stars 4.0 this month. The fourth version of Rising Stars remains UK’s only national early-stage tech scaleup competition. It is once again fully virtual and our judges have selected not one, but five winners from all 11 regions of the UK. With all 55 companies revealed, you can now…
So, what makes a Rising Star? To enter, businesses must meet a few simple criteria. Our experienced judges then select the winners based on areas such as value proposition; competitive advantage; traction; team experience and, importantly, the potential to scale.
“With Tech Nation’s Rising Stars competition now in its fourth year, it’s amazing to see so many inspiring companies innovating to change our world for the better – and it isn’t hard to see why tech investment is booming across the UK. From revolutionising modern healthcare and disrupting the finance sector to transforming education and tackling climate change, each of these fast-growing regional tech startups are helping us improve our economy, society and quality of life. This year’s Regional Winners represent the brightest and the best of UK tech and talent, and I’m excited to see what they do next.” – Esme Caulfield, Tech Nation Competitions Lead
Our 55 Regional Winners are a mixture of B2B (58%) and B2C (42%), with an average business age of 2.2 years. Almost half (49%) have previously attended an accelerator, and 38% have at least one female founder. When it comes to funding, an impressive 69% of our 55 Regional Winners are generating revenue. In terms of the funding stage they are at, 27% of our Regional Finalists are Pre-Seed and 36% are Seed-funded, while 29% have had no previous rounds of funding.
As for what’s next, 49% of our Regional Finalists are looking for Seed Funding, while 34% are looking to raise Series A. 73% of companies planning to expand internationally in the next 12 months, with 58% wanting to expand into the USA.
The companies that applied for Rising Stars 4.0 represent a good portion of early-stage scaleups across the UK, and allow us to take a closer look at what sort of companies are at the beginning of their scaling journey.
Gigged.AI (Glasgow)
Gigged.AI is a digital talent platform powered by artificial intelligence. Its cutting-edge technology allows UK-based companies to accelerate digital projects by tapping into on-demand talent.
Know-it (Glasgow)
Cloud-based credit management platform Know-it streamlines the credit control process so you can credit check and monitor customers, mitigate credit risks, chase payment, collect overdue unpaid invoices and so much more, all in one place.
Kythera AI (Edinburgh)
Kythera AI is a middleware provider specialising in advanced tools for designing AI in 3D game engines including (but not limited) to Unreal Engine, Open 3D Engine and Unity. Its mission is to improve the overall quality of the design and experience of AI in games and other simulations by pushing the boundaries of tech and producing improved solutions to the problems faced today.
Letting Cloud (Edinburgh)
Letting Cloud is dedicated to changing the way people search and let property – in a trustworthy and transparent way. The company’s platform aims to bring everyone in the letting industry together under one community cloud to provide a better experience and match people and property in a modern way with purpose.
PolyDigi Tech (Edinburgh)
PolyDigi Tech is on a mission to protect the data and identities of companies and individuals with innovative authentication solutions suitable for banking, payments, IoT services and more. Its solutions provide high security that is easy to integrate, implement and use while reducing the ongoing cost of protecting assets and identity.
Haystack (Newcastle)
Haystack is a data insights and careers marketplace that uncovers, highlights and curates opportunities based on a user’s interests, values and tech stack. Users are able to plug into their local and remote tech landscape with Haystack as well as uncover unique tech opportunities, check behind the scenes insights into their favourite employers and discover their next dev, data or design role.
Kodobe (Middlesbrough)
Kodobe is an immersive customer experience management platform that provides tools and APIs that allows businesses to continuously keep their customers engaged within their digital platforms. With Kodobe, businesses can grow key metrics up to 4x for new customer conversion rates, existing customer retention rates, and transactions.
onHand (Durham)
onHand’s location-based app is a platform for corporate volunteering and climate impact that helps companies and people learn, take action and have a real impact on the causes they care about.
Settld (Durham)
Settld is a SaaS product that simplifies end-of-life admin for bereaved individuals and professionals. They automate the process of notifying and resolving over 750 banking, insurance, utility and other service provider accounts when someone dies, to turn an average six-hour workload into a 15-minute task for the user. For service providers, they reduce cost to serve, complaints and deliver major CX improvements for bereaved customers.
Zoa (Gateshead)
Zoa is the first UK-based rental-as-a-service platform that eliminates barriers to enable retailers and fashion brands to adopt a truly circular model. They offer retailers and fashion brands white-label technology, operations and management so that they can rent out their stock under their own brands.
Iatro (Leeds)
Iatro provides software and services to primary care organisations in the NHS. Their products include GP practice websites that serve as the digital gateway for patients engaging with their practice, and remote review tools to support digitally-led long term condition management.
Paperound (Skipton)
Paperound.com is a marketplace for busy business owners to access student resource, on-demand for ad-hoc company tasks. For founders, Paperound gives them access to affordable, pre-vetted resources when they need it most, without needing to commit to a full-time hire. For students, this gives them a way to earn money and build their experience.
Promatica Digital (Leeds)
Promatica Digital is a leading healthcare software provider. Their goal is to create solutions that genuinely help people working in the NHS and other healthcare organisations. They have delivered their software to over 20 organisations across the NHS, and these parties use their IT systems to facilitate the safe and effective delivery of patient care.
Scaled Insights (Leeds)
Using behavioural AI, Scaled Insights analyse 300 words of any human’s speech and convert it into a unique personality score. People can be clustered into groups with similar personalities, and those groups can then be correlated with their behaviours so businesses can then understand how to influence each group’s decision making.
Slingshot Simulations (Leeds)
Slingshot Simulations transforms large, highly complex and disparate data into actionable insights that enable organisations to make better decisions faster and at a lower cost. Their patent-protected capabilities are unique in bringing together the contextual power of advanced data science and web search technology with the science of digital twins that enables data to be visualised, analysed, simulated and experienced through VR and AR.
CropSafe (Belfast)
CropSafe aggregates weather and satellite data to provide better and more accurate guidance for farmers who want to fix on-farm issues. With the power of satellite data, CropSafe makes insights and financing easier to understand and helps farmers make more profitable decisions.
Ecko (Antrim)
Ecko is a first-of-its-kind collaboration platform that allows its users to monetise their sessions as NFTs. Ecko promises to empower and connect music creators through transformative technology.
Kairos (Belfast)
Kairos is a central communications hub for elite sports teams. The online web app and mobile platform allows teams to seamlessly and efficiently manage all aspects of team communication including; scheduling, messaging, subjective data collection, travel, and u18 guardian communication.
Kinva (Lisburn)
Kinva is a game-changing digital platform connecting health therapists and their clients. Through one-to-one support and tailored plans, the company creates a healthier future for patients, connecting them with health therapists and improving the effectiveness of therapy.
Overwatch (Belfast)
Overwatch is an all-in-one software used by pharmaceutical companies to assist with developing drugs for some of the world’s most critical illnesses including cancer, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. By aiming to reduce the high failure rate of clinical trials in the pharmaceutical industry largely caused by poor quality preclinical data, Overwatch’s software greatly increases the reliability of data and eliminates errors experienced in commonly performed studies by 100%.
Find out more about our Northern Ireland Regional Winners
Digit (Derby)
Digit provides equal music-making, education, and work opportunities through inclusive digital technologies – as well as a curriculum of skills and training, education, and performance programs. Digit is a record label, a technology manufacturer and a music education and performance company that uses a mixed business model as a means to offer a diverse and inclusive work environment.
Elestial (Northampton)
Elestial is an in-orbit services provider with the aim of helping to clean up and maintain commercial orbital highways in the short term while supporting large-scale infrastructure development in space long term.
Kanda (Warwick)
Kanda is a new way of building business for tradespeople, who can offer finance to their customers who want work done in their homes but can’t afford to pay the full amount upfront.
Regionally (Walsall)
Regionally is a UK investment service that connects investment-ready regional scaleup companies seeking growth capital (ranging from £500,000 – £15,000,000+) to national and international private investors via a market-leading investment platform.
Taran3D (Birmingham)
Taran3D is a creative 3D business that produces interactive content and experiences with their ever-evolving 3D, virtual reality and augmented reality capabilities.
Financielle (Manchester)
Financielle is on a mission to help bridge the gap in personal finance and inspire millions of women to invest and build wealth for their future through education and motivational content, practical money tools and a supportive community – which can all be found in the Financielle app.
Jyrney (Manchester)
Jyrney is redefining how travel, transport and mobility companies access ground transport, enabling a true door-to-door experience for their customers. In a particularly fragmented market, Jyrney enables mobility-as-a-service, bringing ground transport within a traveller’s online booking tool, with visibility of total journey cost, CO2 emissions and meeting duty of care needs.
My First Five Years (Manchester)
My First Five Years creates a safe and supportive learning space for parents to support their child’s unique development. Using scientific research, and supported by many years of industry expertise, My First Five Years adapts to suit the individual needs of children through creative play.
RDvault (Manchester)
RDvault has developed the world’s first fully-automated R&D Tax Credits platform empowering SMEs to swiftly and easily claim R&D tax incentives from HMRC. The scaleup’s cloud-based platform lets users integrate their accountancy packages such as Xero, Sage and QuickBooks to extract, collate and prepare all the relevant information necessary to create an HMRC compliant R&D claim.
THRIFT (Liverpool)
THRIFT tells you what any unwanted or unused items are worth on the second-hand market and where they can be sold.
Cufflink (Anglesey)
Cufflink helps companies and individuals store and control access to their personal data in a more secure way. Their patent-pending architecture and easy to understand data licenses effectively limit the chances and impacts of cyber security attacks by categorically defining exactly what information is accessible to whom.
Go Banana (Cardiff)
Go Banana is the UK’s first marketplace for building supplies, connecting building material sellers with trade professionals and DIY-ers, providing a convenient and cost-effective way to compare and buy the supplies you need. The GB platform also offers sellers an online selling solution, acting as a sales and marketing partner.
Kinderly (Newport)
Kinderly aims to give children the best start in life. It is an early years education technology and training company that supports childcare providers to be at their best, while also ensuring that parents are kept informed and engaged with their child’s early years and learning development.
Kuva (Newton)
Kuva’s ethos is all about privacy. It’s hard to find your own private space online, but Kuva promises building one is easy with them via its comprehensive remote working solution for professionals that doesn’t collect, store or monetise information about you or your clients. Kuva builds technologies that deliver privacy in all online transactions.
Wyser (Swansea)
Wyser’s suite of AI products and services enable law firms and ADR providers to process case data accurately, improve caseload cost efficiency, target new revenue streams and automate repetitive tasks. The company’s suite of AI-enabled services optimises the collection and assessment of case data for law firms, ombudsmen and dispute resolution providers.
All About The Cooks (Bristol)
All About The Cooks (think Airbnb for food) aims to revolutionise the way we eat at home by bringing together a community of home-cooks. The marketplace website allows talented home-cooks to sell their food to people near via their postcode and filters on the site.
Intelligent AI (Exeter)
Data analytics company Intelligent AI focuses on the commercial property insurance sector, bringing together AI, Open Data, IoT and Satellite Image Analysis to deliver digital twins of risk on global commercial properties and assets. Clients can make the most of the company’s intelligent risk management, AI risk report readings, and online risk surveys too.
itsettled (Bristol)
itsettled uses its bank-grade automated cashflow management & credit control platform to identify payment risks and automatically collects overdue invoices. The platform features include: automated process; early warning alerts; unlimited users, invoices, and credit checker and credit reports; accountancy software integration; credit management resources; pause the process; and customer support.
Lumio (Bristol)
Lumio helps its customers streamline their money, tracking track all their investments, bills, and savings in one place. The process enables customers to save money on upcoming and abnormal bills, and it will also set aside varying amounts of money according to your spending.
xigxag (Latchley)
Xigxag puts listeners at the heart of everything they do – all by innovating digital reading and shaping the future of books. The digital reading app boasts a proprietary listen-and-read x-book® concept, market-first features and a community platform for listener-readers. Xigxag promises a richer, more social, multi-mode digital experience that will ensure sustainable book consumption.
Arete Medical Tech (Cambridge)
Arete Medical Tech is transforming respiratory clinical pathways by combining an innovative and novel medical device with a digital health platform. They augment AI and ML with a patented device that allows them to collect previously untapped data for risk stratification, medicine optimisation, and prediction modelling. In addition to transforming patients’ lives and improving clinical resource usage through remote monitoring and self-management, Arete Medical Tech brings specialist-grade clinical solutions into patients’ homes.
electronRx (Cambridge)
electronRx is a deeptech company of interdisciplinary scientists and engineers paving the way for personalised digital medicine through the development of novel chronic disease management solutions. Their proprietary machine learning algorithms harness sensors readily available in a standard smartphone to extract medical-grade heart, lung and vascular health insights with no additional wearables or devices needed.
Fintellity (Ely)
Fintellity offers regulated businesses tools that contribute to socially responsible payments by providing services that prevent financial crime and protect vulnerable groups, as well as facilitating bank transfers to be a cheaper alternative to traditional card processing.
HR DataHub (Houghton Conquest)
The HR DataHub intelligence platform helps organisations make data-led people decisions by giving them insights from the outside world. The company collects reliable, wide-ranging HR data, and use cutting edge technology to offer actionable insights.
MYNDUP (Epping)
MYNDUP stops the “one size fits all approach” to mental health by offering live 1-1 video sessions across the mental health spectrum: From therapy, counselling, meditation & mindfulness through to life, career and executive coaching.
Find out more about our Regional Winners in the East of England
AriaTech (Woking)
AriaTech aims to provide value-added services in the Risk Management field. With more than 35 years of collective knowledge from the founding members across audit, consulting, and industry domains, AriaTech believes in adding value through automation with their industry-acclaimed tools and products to enable clients to increase their productivity and manage their risks better.
Kuberno (Severnoaks)
Kuberno’s mission is to beat bureaucracy and give governance a good name. The company uses its practical experience from startups to FTSE30 Banks, via the odd IPO, to act as your pilot in navigating complex governance. With Kuberno you will achieve transformational governance to support your boards build both agile and sustainable businesses.
Musemio (Portsmouth)
Musemio is a digital destination for children to enjoy and understand culture, the arts and history via a mobile 3D and VR environment where they can play and join gamified mobile VR quests while learning. The immersive platform integrates content from global cultural partners to create the experience that children enjoy the most: interactive games.
Naurt (Brighton and Hove)
Naurt is a location optimisation software that provides hyper-precise location data – improving your accuracy by 40% to 90%. As it’s software-based, think of it as a plug-and-play fortware toolkit that works anywhere in the world both indoors and outdoors in all conditions, unaffected by weather or terrain.
UNTAP Portfolio Management (Farnham)
UNTAP Portfolio Management helps Private Equity funds consolidate financial results, value creation planning and execution and ESG metrics to achieve: Increased confidence of delivering the value growth set in the investment thesis; increased confidence in providing sustainable returns to investors, and improved data control and automated production of reports to investors. Untap is the only truly integrated Portfolio Management solution for the PE sector.
Deployed is a collaborative statement of work platform that makes it simple to define, track and review work for projects that start smarter and finish stronger.
Punk Money lets communities, friends and families lend money easily and securely between themselves through a formalised contract and automated repayments, facilitating easy and secure loan arrangements between individuals.
Renude is a licenced expert and AI-powered online skincare suggestion service. Customers are connected to a professional specialist who helps them create a customised skincare programme based on their skin goals, budget, and preferences. Their intelligent platform analyses customers’ skin using computer vision while also tracking their preferences in order to tailor their recommended skincare plan to their specific needs.
Social Reputation is a digital financial service startup that uses an innovative model (of social reputation scoring) that enables individuals with limited access to use formal financial services.
Trust Keith combines real humans with technology to help UK tech scaleups successfully comply with all data regulations, reduce their breach risk, and protect their staff online.
