Libra is a springboard for underrepresented founders in the UK who are growing and seeking specific support for their scale journey.
The Libra 2.0 programme will focus on companies with at least one ethnic minority founder with lived experience of little or no access to capital and commercial and networking opportunities to help them access equal opportunity in their scale journey. In addition, to qualify, a company must already be already at the seed funding stage and have the ambition to scale and grow fast.
The free, non-residential, six-month programme is centred around themed insights sessions, delivered by some of the most established entrepreneurs, covering topics such as raising series A, selling into corporates, scaling your operations and expanding internationally. The programme will focus on peer-to-peer learning and the cohort companies sharing the challenges in their own individual journeys. During networking events, the cohort will also be introduced to key stakeholders and decision-makers within corporates, investment firms, government bodies, and others. Additionally, the Libra programme offers access to the cross-programme sessions hosted by Tech Nation sector programmes focused on Fintech and Applied AI and Net-Zero.
Libra is not currently accepting applications, but you can pre-register your interest in the programme.
Tech Nation is delighted to introduce the Libra 2.0 programme cohort. Our cohort brings with it a high calibre of startups in various sectors, including artificial intelligence, finance, data analytics, all the way down to health and wellness – to name just a few.
Click on each company logo to discover more about the cohort member and the sector they operate in. For more information, please email abimohamed@technation.io.
Midlands | Ecommerce & Marketplace | @weareandfacts
&facts is an insights platform helping growing ecommerce brands make better product decisions. &facts helps brands understand what customers want by analysing and providing insights into the real-world behaviour of millions of consumers.
London | Digital Entertainment | @thealicecamera
Alice Camera is an AI camera that has the experience of a smartphone with the quality of a DSLR and allows creators to share content seamlessly. The camera combines professional quality optics with AI-accelerated hardware and computational photography algorithms driven by deep learning.
London | Beauty / Consumer Goods / Net Zero | Supply Chain Solutions
Bendi develops an online browser extension designed to provide sustainability comparison data for consumer fashion purchases.
London | Finance
Bloom creates technology to help growing communities save for the future. Bloom Money provides a modern take on an old tradition, the ROSCA, or Rotating Savings and Credit Association. ROSCAs help entire communities prosper — but managing them can be tricky. Bloom takes the hassle out of setting up a savings club, providing customers with a safe, convenient way to send and receive money.
London | Adtech & Marketing | Artificial Intelligence | @boltzbit
Boltzbit creates the first Foundation AI platform that allows its users to build multi-tasking continuous-learning AI from multimodal data (data mixed of images, audio, text, code and many other type of data) without a single line of code. The solutions of Boltzbit AI have wide range of use cases in financial services and digital marketing. Solutions cover not only NLP but also computer vision, reinforcement learning and many other AI domains.
London | Logistics
Cargoscanner helps hauliers generate more revenue by reducing how often their vehicles travel empty. Its technology automatically matches available vehicles with available loads, saving valuable time and resources for hauliers, and reducing emissions from empty vehicles. Cargoscanner is the only geo-based cargo and empty vehicle smart matching solution on the market.
North West | Electronic hardware | @coyosy_official
Coyosy develops electronic audio hardware for upgrading and repairing electronics hardware. It is reimagining personal everyday tech using modularity as the driver for profitability at scale.
Scotland | Cybersecurity & surveilance
Cyberodane provides email security solutions for organisations' networks. The service is based on a believe that securely operating a business in the cloud requires new levels of IT preparedness, centred around cyber resilience. The solution unifies the delivery and management of security, continuity, and data protection for email via one, simple-to-use cloud platform.
South West | App & Software Development | @DataDuopoly
Data Duopoly is building the “waze” for people navigation in venues and destinations. Whether it’s bringing Cornwall’s tin mining coast to life or discovering more about the amazing plants inside the Eden Project’s gigantic biomes, Data Duopoly’s products offer visitors a personalised experience to better discover and navigate venues or areas. Designed to relieve visitor frustrations around queuing and overcrowded spaces, the technology uses GPS and WiFi triangulation to identify potential pinch points in real time, re-routing visitors to prevent congestion.
North West | Education & Human Resources | @DiceyTech
Dicey Tech is a talent marketplace, built on the currency of ‘projects’. It builds tools to surface exceptional young talent for the companies that shape the future. The platform enables organisations to create projects that students complete to gain skills and improve employment prospects.
East of England | Ecommerce & Marketplace | @fintellity
We pride ourselves on making money management inclusive by opening the doors for everyone. Our payment processing and unique affordability algorithm are the foundation of our services to help those struggling with finances, soaring debt, poor credit and the unbanked, rebuild their financial profiles and get access to regulated products and services. We encourage entrepreneurship with our payment tools to enable extra income from hobbies & passions to help improve finances and mental health. We provide the right tools at the right stage, supporting the journey from no money, to making money, to fully-fledged businesses scaling.
London | Ecommerce & Marketplace | @heyfoodlama
FoodLama is an easy-to-use Chrome browser extension that helps discover the foods that suit your preferences, as you shop online. After speaking to and testing with thousands of users, it recently launched the product in beta.
London | Artificial Intelligence | Blockchain | Education & Human Resources | @FullSpektrum
FullSpektrum is a London-based innovation company, providing ground-breaking technologies and services designed to facilitate the full digital transformation of local education and integrated care services for neurodivergent learners, including children and young people with Special Educational Needs & Disabilities (SEND). The company also designs and develops specialised ecosystems of new support service frameworks for those who experience acute learning & development hurdles throughout their entire curriculum journey. Quite simply put, as digital change-makers, FullSpektrum is dedicated to redesign, redevelop, and systematically reform the National Curriculum by utilising a plethora of technological disciplines. This includes elements of applied diagnostic systems, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, data science and artificial intelligence (AI), all combined to holistically facilitate a personalised and inclusive curriculum for SEND learners from all backgrounds.
West Midlands | Human Resources
Using analytics and machine learning, the FutureMatch platform enables organisations to identify, attract and select early career talent (16 - 24 year olds) into graduate, apprenticeship and early career roles. Its solutions enable organisations to recruit early careers talent fairer and more cost effectively.
London | Health & Wellness | @hormoniousflo
Hormonious Flo is on a mission to end period pain naturally. It is digitalising the research-backed methodology that health coaches use to address the underlying cause of period pain to make the process affordable. It helps Genz Z and Millenial women simplify the process of biohacking their daily lifestyle to achieve and maintain pain-free periods. Its vision is to build a better understanding of the female body to close the data gap in women's health care and help women optimise for better wellness.
London | App & Software Development | Health / Mental Care / Saas
Heyr is a preventative mental health (MH) solution that offers users and clinicians accessible, scalable, digital behavioural healthcare. The message-based app allows young adults to access on-demand help and build better mental habits. Heyr uses clinically validated techniques e.g. cognitive behavioural therapy that are designed to help users connect better with their thoughts and build coping skills. The AI-powered app also offers supportive tools including a wellbeing tracker, journal and mood exercises to help users navigate everyday challenges & sustain long term behavioural change. Heyr is the world’s first MH app that rewards users for staying mentally fit. Users can “check-in” to earn points, which can be spent on in-app reward marketplace. Heyr is building a new type of currency based on mental wellbeing habits.
South West | Finance | @husmus
What happens if Experian and Lemonade had a baby? Enter Husmus; a UK-based insurtech/proptech startup on a mission to shape the future of renting. Insurance is the solution to renting's risk problem. But there is bias in insurance risk models, the products are not fit for purpose and there is little trust in insurance companies to pay claims. Husmus resolves all of these conflicts by offering tailor-made products priced using our behaviour based risk model. And the twist is, users do not pay their premiums upfront.
London | SaaS | @HyphaPlatform
Hypha is a B2B SaaS platform for collaborative innovation. It helps teams innovate better and faster by bringing together relevant innovation knowledge in one place; connecting and visualising it; applying proven frameworks to make sense of it; and providing engaging ways to collaborate and create. It is designed for innovation, insights, trends, strategy and growth teams. Essentially anyone who wants to create something new. And do it better and faster.
London | Adtech & Marketing | App & Software Development | @KodobeInc
Kodobe offers a gamified customer experience and loyalty platform that makes it easy for businesses to embed gamification into their customer engagement and marketing activities so that they can improve key metrics for their customer acquisition and retention marketing activities.
East of England | Data analytics & business intelligence | SaaS | @kweevoapp
Kweevo is a SaaS analytics platform designed to help businesses generate insights quickly, unlock more value from their data, and make informed decisions. It offers automated and pre-built innovative dashboards to empower businesses with the insights they need and generate more revenue. Kweevo simplifies analytics for businesses and helps them become data-driven organisations.
London | Education | @lmfnetwork
LMF ED TECH is the first of its kind hybrid educational and community platform that specifically supports females' professional development by building their confidence and careers. It offers an accessible subscription service that will offer expert-led masterclasses, downloadable resources, mentoring, career information, community conversations and interactive events around professional and soft skill topics.
London | Education & Human Resources
Manageable helps managers become confident coaches to their teams.
London | Artificial Intelligence | Lawtech | @melior_ai
90% of all business documents are unstructured. Melior AI's platform makes it easy and blazing fast to classify, understand, review and find legal and business documents.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @monaddapp
Monadd helps people keep their records up to date by introducing visibility, control and AI-powered automation for managing address changes, cancellations and interactions with services. It offers artificial intelligence-powered software that helps anyone discover the services linked to their household and allows them to manage them. Originally designed to make address updating simple and prevent waste generation from misdelivered items, Monadd aggregates data sources to discover services tied to users' address locations, making the long process of updating addresses, pausing and cancelling services easier. We help improve people's lives by bridging the gap between offline and online administration while relocating, remote working, and ongoing management of services and subscriptions.
London | SaaS | @mysocial_pulse
My Social Pulse develops scalable, dynamic and transformational SaaS products for the fintech and regtech industries, enabling full SEC, FINRA (USA) and FCA (UK) compliance within the face of a rapidly changing technological and digital world. Its core solution is a robust Communications Surveillance tool, which enables regulated companies to comply with their obligation to capture, retain and supervise communications from their numerous comms channels (email, SMS,MS Teams, Zoom, Slack, etc) in the face of a rapidly evolving non-traditional work environment. The product also addresses corporate cyberbullying, improved customer service and retention and sales and data analytics.
London | Health & Wellness | @GetOcuShield
Ocushield has created the first and only medically approved blue light filtering products. Its products filter harmful light, protecting customers so that they can start feeling better, sleeping better and getting more done.
South East | App & Software Development | Health & Wellness | @Resony6
Resony is an evidence-based therapeutic mobile app helping people manage daily stress and anxiety. It is based on a unique multimodal therapy, combining cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) principles and physiological techniques. This is fully digital and can be used alongside medication or in-person psychotherapy.
London | Energy | @sitigrid
Sitigrid is an energy bank, providing a platform that allows customers to buy energy directly from neighbours at a favourable price. It connects renewable energy generators directly with consumers in a local energy marketplace.
The platform ensures everyday low prices on energy for consumers and favourable returns for generators as well as a guarantee on the source of power generated through renewable energy certificates.
South West | App & Software Development | Ecommerce & Marketplace | @SoftlinkAi
Softlink.ai is developing software for anyone who has a product or service, wants to drive sales online, can use a smartphone or computer, to build websites, landing pages, shop and accept payment online with inbuilt email marketing and business automation in one place and on their smartphone.
East of England | App & Software Development | Sustainable fashion
Swapped is a sustainable fashion app that allows users to swap their preloved occasion items by swiping left and right and matching with other users. It's like Tinder for clothes. It helps customers to consume clothing in a more conscious and circular way and creating a mindset shift on how often they consume new items of clothing.
East of England | Agriculture | @TierraFoods
Tierra Foods is a food tech company turning under-used plants into carbon-negative ingredients. It optimises under-used nutritious plants from the forest in Central America into novel superfood ingredients
The resulting desirable ingredients for the food industry are sold to B2B global food manufacturers. These ingredients help customers achieve their net zero and nature-positive targets. They also get full farm-to-fork transparency and supply chain resilience.
London | Finance | @getuome
Uome aims to empower small businesses and individuals to enhance client relationships, get paid quicker and reduce financial admin. It provides the tools they need for transparent interactions with their clients and to manage payments securely. With Uome businesses can effortlessly engage with their customers via real-time messaging, including updating customers on a project, chasing a payment or sending a new invoice/quote to a customer. Uome allows small business to provide progress updates to their customers via pictures, videos and messaging which builds trust between them and the customers.
London | Data Analytics & Cyber security
Veriom predicts, analyses and communicates software quality risks related to defects and security issues across the product lifecycle. It collects data points from the codebase, tests, design and production to discover and prioritise quality risks such as: code quality and vulnerabilities cost of quality; test quality; defect leakage rates; defect types; quality gap analysis technical debt ratio; and performance. This allows Veriom to report issues early to customers via its quality analytics tool.
London | Finance | Platform | @wealth_os
The WealthOS unified platform provides the cloud infrastructure, operational and regulatory features, business logic, external integrations and API connectivity to build and run wealth products like trading apps and robo-advisors. Its features include client onboarding, payment management, trading, fees, tax wrapper rules, client comms, regulatory reporting etc. enable the product to be run compliantly and efficiently. WealthOS’ feature automation and orchestration eliminates the slow and costly effort required to build digital experiences on traditional platforms.
South East | Software Development Tool | @ZeroCodeCloud
ZeroCode Cloud is a push-button, drag-and-drop, browser-based platform that enables businesses and individuals to build fully functional enterprise-grade cloud software, without needing to read, write or maintain code. Using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, users can express technical ideas and build secure, scalable, and resilient cloud software and web pages in minutes instead of months. The platform provides reusable pre-built standards-compliant lego-like components for building software. This lowers the barriers to technology adoption for SMEs and large enterprises by addressing cross-cutting concerns in the software development process.
To assess if your company would benefit from this programme, check if you/ your company fulfil the following criteria:
*Agencies and consultancies are excluded.
As a founder, you will benefit from the Libra programme offering, giving you access to networks, commercial and capital.
The programme will create peer-to-peer network within the cohort itself and through access to the Tech Nation Alumni. All our programmes focus on creating a safe and trusted environment.
We want to bring you insightful and inspiring sessions from experts, who know what’s involved in scaling a tech company and can speak openly about their journey.
Tech Nation programmes focus on creating lasting relationships between founders and larger corporates across the world that can offer a mutually beneficial relationship.
We aim to break down barriers to understand and access venture capital, angel investors and family offices. With us, you’ll have several opportunities to network with key stakeholders.
“I’m so excited to be leading the Libra Growth Programme at Tech Nation for the second year. We have seen numerous reports highlighting the racial inequalities for ethnic minority founders scaling. This year, the Libra Growth Programme will push the needle and open access to capital, network, and commercial to early-stage ethnic minority.”
Abi Mohamed, Libra Programme Lead
“Black founders should recognise the value you get from Tech Nation’s programmes, from gaining access to networks of entrepreneurs, skilled operators and investors. Most importantly, you could leave the programme with more customers and traction if you maximise the experience.”
Andy Ayim MBE, Angel Investing School
“There isn’t a pipeline problem, there is a social and financial capital allocation problem. For female founders, the ecosystem is five years behind the current status quo, and for Black and ethnic minority founders, the ecosystem is 10 years behind. Programmes like Libra will help to hopefully narrow the gap.”
Tom Adeyoola, CEO Metail & Co-founder, Extend VC
Clients partner with Cooley on transformative deals, complex IP and regulatory matters, and high-stakes litigation, where innovation meets the law. Cooley is known for working with start-ups to launch dynamic new ventures and guiding them through their respective journeys. The firm has 1,500+ lawyers across 17 offices in Europe, the US and Asia. Cooley maintains an environment of inclusion and is dedicated to maintaining a truly diverse workplace that values and celebrates differences.
Scroll through to see the calibre of our expert advisors
Tom Adeyoola
Co-founder, Extended Ventures
Dama Sathianathan
Partner, Bethnal Green Ventures
Nakai Jirira
Investment Associate, Deloitte Ventures
Christian Tooley
Senior Manager, Bain & Company
Evgeny Shadchnev
Founder & Ex-CEO, Makers
Brianna Bao
Investor, Simsan Ventures
Akash Bajwa
Investor, Earlybird VC
Gabbie Swycher
Associate, Redrice Ventures
Dayo Koleowo
Partner, Microtraction
Chenelle Ansah
Investor, Cornerstoner Partners
Audrey Handem
Associate, SpeedInvest
Emily LaRocque
Deals Manager, Landscape Ventures
Mandy Nyarko
Co-founder, Startup Discovery School
Leo Chandler
Investor Relations Manager, Nesta
Maria Rotilu
Principal, Octopus VC
Elias Suliman
Senior Investment Advisor, Department for International Trade (DIT)
Michael Eisenberg
Founder & Early-Stage Investor,
Genuine Capital
Olivia Sibony
CEO & Co-founder, SeedTribe
Melanie Ellyard
Principal, Sure Valley Ventures
Lyubov Guk
Founding Partner, Blue Lake VC
Parveen Dhana
Ecosystem Director, Innovate Finance
We launched the Libra programme last year in response to the numerous reports highlighting a number of underrepresented groups lacking access to equal opportunities across the tech ecosystem. The Libra 1.0 programme focused on Black founders and their lived experience of little or no access to capital, commercial and networking opportunities.
This year, Libra 2.0 will support more ethnic minority founders groups: Black, South Asian, East Asian, and Arab.
In the latest Atomico State of European Tech Report 2021, the data highlights these groups as having the least amount of funding. The reports also highlight a record year of capital for startups, with over $100Bn invested across Europe, but raising capital hasn’t become any easier for early-stage founders in the UK. Access is not equally distributed and ethnic minorities are one group of underrepresented founders that feels most alienated.
Yes, and we encourage that you apply to the programmes you feel will benefit you the most. Keep in mind, you could be eligible for several! For example, if you fulfil the criteria of Libra but you’re an aspiring fintech, you could apply to both the Libra and Fintech programme. To find the right fit for you, check our programme comparison page.
The programme is fully funded by Tech Nation.
We have several resources for applicants.
The programme is estimated to last for 6 months, kicking off in September. We’ll be looking to run one expert-led session per month, along with a peer-to-peer networking session and you will also be offered to partake in individual founder coaching sessions. The time spent on the programme varies every week, but we estimate 5 – 6 hours per month.
