The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport has launched a new grant competition to boost the growth of innovative tech start-ups and scale-ups across the UK.
For the previous six years the grant has been awarded to Tech Nation. The government is introducing a competitive process to ensure value for money for taxpayers, and to bring the funding in line with the majority of government grants, which are awarded under a competitive process.
Commenting on the decision, Jonathan Moyes, Head of Investment Research, Wealth Club said: “Any rival bidder will have their work cut out. Tech Nation has done a stellar job of raising awareness of the UK’s thriving start-up ecosystem and helping nurture promising start-ups and scale-ups.”
A significant number of top-performing investee companies Wealth Club sees in VCTs and EIS funds are Tech Nation alumni. For instance, in March 2022 Credit Kudos, a disruptive credit scoring business and Tech Nation Fintech alumni, was acquired by Apple for a reported $150 million.
Other alumni that are now household names include Cazoo, Gousto, and Bloom & Wild, as well as Depop, the fashion marketplace, which was acquired by Etsy for $1.6 billion in 2021. (I never heard of them, Ed.) In fact, a third of all UK-based unicorns have graduated from one of Tech Nation’s programs. Tech Nation is a significant driving force behind the rise of the UK’s venture capital egosystem and DCMS should be cautious about anything that could put this at risk.”
