Copyright scotsman
At a tech conference in Aberdeen on Tuesday, startup founders rubbed shoulders with business leaders and investors to discuss the “future of digital”. Run by News UK with the support of Opportunity North East (ONE), Scottish National Investment Bank, and CodeBase, there was a stellar cast on show. Among them were Ana Stewart, chief entrepreneurial adviser to the Scottish Government and an entrepreneur and investor in her own right, Wordsmith AI CEO and founder Ross McNairn, and Theo Health CEO and founder Jodie Sinclair. The gathering of tech talent and investors comes at a time when Scottish tech faces a conundrum, namely that while we now have more startups than ever before, access to early stage capital remains challenging, and as a small nation our brightest technology companies must sell their products beyond our own borders to reach scale. Using a pyramid analogy, tech ecosystems need to build a foundational layer of startups at the base of the pyramid, and then when you flip the pyramid over, the tip of the pyramid becomes a funnel that the most successful startups, who become scaleups, move through. What is to our advantage, is that in a smaller country like Scotland we can use the domestic market as a test bed before hitting the internationalisation button. A good case in point would be my youngest brother Matthew’s digital healthcare startup Infix, which won a contract to roll its technology out across Scotland’s NHS health boards last year and is now trialling its software with the Middle East’s largest hospital operator in Abu Dhabi. As reported in The Scotsman this week, Ana Stewart has just announced her vision for Scotland as a world-class scaleup nation, and a separate report released next week by a panel of senior business leaders will further explore the pieces that need to be put in place so our highest potential companies can reach for the top of the pyramid. If the profile of Aberdeen’s own tech scene has waned against its more storied equivalents in Edinburgh and Glasgow, that narrative needs redressed when you consider that roughly one in ten of Scotland’s startups are now based in or around the Granite City. At a dinner on the eve of the conference hosted by Jennifer Craw-led ONE at its tech hub in the centre of the city, I got to meet old friends and new and hear firsthand about the entrepreneurial strides being made in the region, while meeting some local founders who are out on the international coalface. Fennex, led by husband and wife team Adrian and Nassima Brown, sells its safety management technology to over 20 countries worldwide and recently won a coveted King’s Award for Enterprise. And if evidence is needed that Aberdeen is about more than energy tech, you only have to look as far as Chris Herd-founded Firstbase who, backed by US VC firms, scaled a platform that equips teams and supports remote workers with critical IT equipment and services globally. Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate PR agency Freer Consultancy
