Kane Fulton, December 14, 2021 5 min read
One year ago, we launched our inaugural ‘The 12 Days of Scaleups’ campaign to unveil our Rising Stars 3.0 Winners. This December, we’re revisiting the festive theme to announce and celebrate our Rising Stars 4.0 Regional Winners from across the UK as part of our latest 12 Days of Scaleups.
Now into its fourth year, Rising Stars remains the 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 each region.
Yesterday, we announced the competition’s Regional Winners from London. Today, we are excited to announce the South East of England’s Regional Winners of Rising Stars 4.0: AriaTech, Kumberno, Musemio, Naurt, and UNTAP.
From 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. Director Sagar Javkhedkar tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
We are absolutely thrilled to be shortlisted as a Rising Stars 4.0 South East Regional Winner. It goes without saying, but a big shout out to the AriaTech team whose passion, client centricity, thought leadership and dedication have enabled us to deliver impactful and insightful capability for our clients in the cyber risk space.
Our Tech Nation regional representative has been the key to accessing the Rising Star competition and the other opportunities available in the Tech Nation community. We are grateful to the Tech Nation team – including the judges, organisers and the support staff for this opportunity and professionally organised competition.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
Being based in Woking and the South East offers us an excellent ecosystem – including access to large client organisations based locally and a professional (and student) talent pool that is key to our future plans for recruiting.
Kuberno’s mission is to beat bureaucracy and give governance a good name. The Severnoaks-based 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. Cofounder Zoe Bucknell tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
Our mission is to beat bureaucracy and give governance a good name. We are tackling this by rethinking how technology can deliver future-fit governance globally and by disrupting a stagnant and overlooked technology niche. We are delighted to be a Rising Stars Regional Winner just at the time our business is accelerating so that we can leverage access to the Tech Nation network and insights, as well as tap into the pool of knowledge and experience of our fellow semifinalists.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
While our team is predominantly based in the South East, we are location agnostic – our first employee hailing from Bolton.
From 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. CEO Olga Kravchenko tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
Our core mission is to make arts and culture accessible and exciting for every child across the globe, and that’s why we developed Musemio. On this immersive learning platform, cultural institutions can publish interactive experiences based on their collections.
We’re still in the early days of immersive technologies adoption, but I see 2021 as a tipping point. With a massive shift towards the digital transformation accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis, more organisations now realise the power of immersive for audience engagement, revenue growth and increased loyalty that can be enabled through our innovative solution.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
After relocating from London to South East, we have received support from local organisations and universities to develop sustainable partnerships with cultural institutions around the region.
Based in 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. CTO Nicholas Slack tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
It is an honour to be selected as a regional winner for rising stars 4.0 as this initiative is the UK’s only truly national scaleup competition. We look forward to the opportunities this will bring to help us in our mission to empower businesses to re-imagine what is possible with true location technology. With current location technology being inadequate for the majority of its use case, we look forward to unlocking the growth these companies could make with improved location data indoors and outdoors.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
Brighton has a great ecosystem of support, from Elizabeth from Tech Nation to Plus X and the Brite program. The talent from the local area and the universities have been great in helping us move forward quickly in our journey.
Hailing from 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. CEO Manfredi Bargioni tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
The Rising Stars competition is a great opportunity to showcase the most exciting and innovative startups across the UK and to highlight the entrepreneurial spirit that is driving them. At Untap we are very excited about being selected as regional winners among such tough competition and are looking forward to increasing our visibility to potential clients, partners and investors through Rising Stars.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
Out Tech Nation regional representative has been the key to accessing the Rising Star competition and the other opportunities available in the Tech Nation community. They have been a great resource, supporting us in exploring the Tech Nation initiative stack.
