Scotland can close its scaleup gap with the money it already commits, says CodeBase chief

A new report by Scottish tech executive Richard Lennox argues that Scotland can unlock tens of thousands of high-value jobs by redirecting the public investment it already makes toward what founders genuinely need, rather than on running programmes.

Richard Lennox, COO, CodeBase | contributed

The report, ‘Framing Scotland’s Entrepreneurial Economy’ highlights Scotland-based scaleup companies, defined as enterprises growing their turnover or employee numbers by more than 20 per cent over a three year period, representing only 0.5 per cent of all SMEs, but generating around one-third of total SME turnover.

Closing the scaleup gap could translate to over 130,000 new high-value jobs and more than £20 billion in additional annual revenue. Its central argument is that the missing ingredient is not more money or more programmes, but a coherent model for allocating support so that every pound already committed is traceable to a founder's need, at the right stage and in the right form.

Richard Lennox, who helped build two of Scotland’s most successful tech companies, Skyscanner and Current Health, and is currently the COO at CodeBase, said: "Scotland's entrepreneurial ecosystem is trending in the right direction, with more companies forming and more founders succeeding. But we are still far better at serving the founders already on a path than the ones who most need help, and we underserve the growth stage, the exact inflection point that matters most to Scotland's economy.

"The fix isn't a bigger budget or another programme. It's discipline about where the existing money goes. Every intervention should be able to answer one question: did this put something of genuine value in the hands of a founder, at the moment they needed it? If it can't, we should stop funding it and redirect that money to something that can."

The Lennox Report points to some of Scotland’s recent scaleup success stories in the form of companies like Wordsmith, Simple Online Healthcare, Malted AI, and Chemify, with Lennox adding: “In Scotland, we have a concentration of technical talent, research excellence, and entrepreneurial ambition, and this has produced companies capable of competing globally. In turn, we now have a small yet powerful group of operators who know what scaling looks like from the inside.”

“The prize” continued Lennox, is a Scottish economy that compounds in favour of the people who live here. When a company scales here, it hires here, pays taxes here, trains the next generation of operators here, and produces founders who begin the next wave. In European terms, we can look to countries like Estonia and Sweden who understood the equation and put the right pieces in place, and it paid dividends for both.”

Beyond the reallocation of existing support, Lennox identifies a single ecosystem-level move that sits with government rather than any programme: attracting at least one anchor global technology employer of genuine scale - for example, Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI.

Lennox said: “Dublin, Berlin, and London compounded their entrepreneurial ecosystems in part because large-scale technology employers like Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet established significant campuses that trained technical talent at scale, created the density of expertise that spun out into new companies, and signalled to international talent that the ecosystem was worth relocating to. Scotland does not have an equivalent and relies on the successful homegrown businesses like Skyscanner who have scaled.”