The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport has declared 2021 the ‘best year ever’ for the UK tech sector, with significant growth in VC investment, IT jobs, unicorns and futurecorns.
Growth in the UK technology sector was fuelled by £29.4 billion of new investment, a 230 percent increase on the 2020 figure of £11.5 billion.
This is the biggest annual percentage increase in money raised by UK startups and scale-ups since 2013/14 when investment grew from £1.5 billion to £3.5 billion.
The £29.4bn raised by UK tech companies was one-third of the total flowing into the European tech ecosystem in 2021 (£89.5 billion) and two to three times more than the investment in Germany (£14.7 billion) or France (£9.7 billion).
More than one-third of the money coming into UK tech is from the US, up from 31.5 percent last year, most of it going into fintech and health tech companies. Over 28 pe cent of UK venture funding came from domestic capital.
Record investment last year helped create 29 unicorns (tech companies worth more than $1 billion), including e-commerce platform Depop, car selling platform Motorway, insurance disrupter Marshmallow and challenger bank Starling Bank. The UK now has 115 unicorns, more than France (31) and Germany (56) combined.
