Scotland's high growth firms scoop £1m at Scottish Edge finals in Edinburgh

A string of Scottish businesses with high growth potential have been awarded a combined £1 million at the Scottish Edge finals.

Theo Paphitis (left) and Sir Tom Hunter spoke at the Scottish Edge finals. Picture: Sandy Young

The funding competition, held at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Gogarburn conference centre in Edinburgh this evening, awarded medical tech firm Nebu-Flow and industry services company Paragon Inspection Services £125,000 each, naming them winners of the Higgs Edge award for science, technology and engineering.

University of Glasgow spin-out Nebu-Flow has created an aerosol formation technology for the efficient respiratory delivery of hard-to-nebulise drugs, while Dundee-based Paragon has developed a patented inspection system to enable fast, accurate inspection of small-bore industrial tubing systems without any shutdown of plant.

Additional funding packages were presented to a number of Scottish Edge round 15 winners, after 18 businesses pitched as part of the finals.

Seven Wild Card Edge winners – start-ups in the pre-trading phase – shared a total of £75,000, while Young Edge victors, whose directors are all aged 18 to 30, grabbed a slice of a further £75,000 prize pot.

Speakers at the event included Dragons’ Den star Theo Paphitis and Sir Tom Hunter, whose Hunter Foundation is a key supporter of the contest.

Hunter said: “Scottish Edge provides pivotal gap funding to potential high growth businesses, but the funding is almost secondary to the support those businesses then benefit from, not least the peer to peer knowledge exchange.

“Scotland lags in building substantive high growth businesses and Scottish Edge is a key component to eradicating that gap and accelerating Scotland’s economy.”

Scottish Edge is the UK’s biggest funding competition for small businesses and also provides a support package that includes mentoring and “signposting to alternative finance”.