Startup growth potential is heading west - Nick Freer

I bumped into a well known investor on George Street in Edinburgh just before Christmas, a guy who splits his time between the States and Scotland. He told me he thinks Edinburgh’s tech startup scene is close to plateauing, after years of well documented success.

Glasgow, he said, is the Scottish city showing the greatest potential for growth as a startup hub, and I agree that the smoke signals from the west of the Central Belt indicate that a power shift is taking place. Companies like Glasgow-based foodtech startup ENOUGH (formerly 3F Bio), a University of Strathclyde spin-out originally backed by Eos Advisory and pioneer in high-scale sustainable protein production, raised £36 million in its last investment round, and is just one case in point.

In December, another former spin-out (from the University of the West of Scotland), remote sensor specialist Novosound, reported that it had secured a major contract with a Nasdaq-listed healthcare company alongside an investment led by Par Equity. Novosound’s continuing progress Stateside has many rating the company, not unlike Current Health a few years’ back (Current Health secured the second largest European healthtech exit when it was acquired by US consumer electronics giant Best Buy in 2021), as one of the next big things to come out of the Scottish technology sector.

Here is how the CEO of the Nasdaq company, Lishan Aklog of PAVmed, describes Novosound’s offering: “We believe Novosound’s proprietary ultrasound technology has the potential to be a once-in-a-generation breakthrough in medical imaging.” High praise indeed.

STAC on track to create one of Europe's largest IoT clusters

Remote sensor technology is an area Scotland appears to be building critical mass in, and we have another client company story in the wings to evidence this in the coming weeks. Watch this space.

Talking of space, well a different type of space, space communications is one of Scotland’s future economies that is beginning to take off. Recently rebranded as Krucial, formerly R3IoT, the Glasgow-based space communications startup secured investment from New York-based Space Capital in 2021, a press announcement we handled at the time, and is a good example of how the Internet of Things (IoT) is integral to so many of our economies of the future.

This point was highlighted by Paul Wilson, CEO of Filament Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC), this week as Wilson forecast that STAC, based at Skypark in Glasgow, could become Europe’s largest IoT cluster.

As Wilson puts it: “When you look at Scotland’s key future industries including Energy, Healthcare, Education, Natural Capital, and the Satellite Communications sector, IoT is absolutely integral to each.”

Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate communications agency the Freer Consultancy

In other news, Techscaler, powered by tech incubator CodeBase, launched at the end of last year, with startup hubs being rolled out across Scotland. You would expect this initiative to even a playing field where Edinburgh has arguably dominated over the last decade.

For me, I’m not convinced that Edinburgh has reached a plateau point. For one, there are too many second time tech founders starting up new companies here. Let’s see how the startup cookie crumbles, but trying to democratise the tech ecosystem order on a geographic basis has got to be a good thing.

Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate communications agency the Freer Consultancy