Founders Forum Group acquires Tech Nation
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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 the North East of England. Today, we are excited to announce the Yorkshire Regional Winners of Rising Stars 4.0: Iatro, Paperound, Promatica Digital, Scaled Insights, and Slingshot Simulations.
Based in 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. CEO Thomas Porteus tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
The NHS is under severe strain and Primary Care needs technology-driven transformation to survive and thrive. At Iatro, we’re focused on building the digital tools to support Primary Care services to adapt to provide the best possible service to patients.
We’ve seen great traction in the last 18 months, with over 800 GP practices using our software already, and look forward to furthering progress over the next year, with new products to support GPs in managing patients with long term conditions more effectively.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
West Yorkshire is a great place to build a healthtech startup, with good infrastructure and a thriving digital scene – including a number of small and large digital health businesses.
HQed in 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. Founder Jake Fox tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
We’re on a mission to transform the way businesses access and activate digital talent in the UK. It’s great to be recognised as a regional winner, particularly when we are actively pushing to support regional economies with a fresh way of utilising local emerging talent.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
The strength of networks and the proactivity of regional stakeholders across Yorkshire has played a key role in helping us grow.
From 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. Founder & Chief Clinical Officer Mo Rahman tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
Roughly 20 per cent of GP appointments are for non-clinical issues – such as loneliness, isolation, or financial concerns. Social prescribing allows GPs to refer patients to practical, local services to help improve their wellbeing. Our product, Social Rx, is a case management system to aid social prescribing link workers and also to drive social prescribing improvements with insightful dashboards and reports. We are delighted to be a Rising Stars Regional Winner, and we can’t wait to showcase how our product can lead to improved wellbeing and reduced GP workload.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
Based in Leeds city centre, we are excited by the possibility of growing our network in the Yorkshire region.
Using behavioural AI, Leeds-based 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. CEO Stuart Sherman tells us more.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
Our mission is to assist medical professionals in positively influencing the lives of their patients. Using our Behavioural AI Technology to better understand the nudges that individuals need to take better care of themselves, Scaled Insights helps doctors understand their patients, even as patient care evolves into faster, lower, patient touchpoints.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
Scaled Insights is uniquely suited to Leeds – from our location and partnership with Nexus, to our relationship with Leeds City Council, partnerships with Leeds University, Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust and YHSN – to the concentration of NHS groups in the Leeds City Region, we couldn’t pick a better place to grow.
Leeds-based 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.
How does it feel to be a Rising Stars regional winner?
As the digital transformation of all industries accelerates and digital twins move from pilot projects to mainstream operations and the metaverse, the amount of data being generated is growing substantially faster than an organisation’s ability to use it. Shining a light on these dark data and making them intelligence ready at scale is our core mission so that our rapidly growing customer base, their people and everyone in their ecosystem can make better decisions, faster, at lower cost and with much broader engagement through data-based storytelling.
How has your region supported you in your journey so far?
We are fortunate to be surrounded by a thriving high-tech sector and an incredible pool of talent in Leeds and the broader Yorkshire region. Combined with regionally-focused investment initiatives, an ecosystem fostered by our presence in the Nexus building in the heart of Leeds and a wonderful quality of life in the area, it is a potent formula for success.