The UK’s leading tech clusters are competing head to head with European capitals, according to new analysis of company growth, in a sign that the success of the UK tech sector is pushing far beyond its London heartland.
Following the IPOs of Farfetch and Funding Circle, the UK is now home to 15 unicorns and six cities have produced so-called unicorns – $1bn tech companies – according to research prepared for Tech Nation and the Government’s Digital Economy Council by venture capital analytics company Dealroom.co. This latest research is published ahead of the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s first meeting with the Digital Economy Council on 24 October 2018.
Looking at the creation of $1bn tech companies, Oxford and Cambridge combined have produced more fast-growing tech companies than both Paris and Berlin.
The two cities, both renowned for their world-leading research and scholarship, have thriving tech sectors and are home to some of the UK’s most promising tech companies. The presence of a large number of pioneering tech companies across both cities is testimony to how academic research and excellence can contribute to the next generation of world-leading companies.
Cambridge is home to Darktrace, which provides leading artificial intelligence cyber defence to the likes of Raspberry Pi and power company Drax. It was founded in 2013 by a combination of mathematicians from the University of Cambridge and experts from MI5, GCHQ and the CIA. Elsewhere, chipmaker CSR and chip designer ARM have maintained close links with Cambridge University after they were acquired for £1.5 billion and £23.4 billion by Qualcomm and SoftBank respectively. Both CSR and ARM continue to hire engineering and computer science expertise from the university.
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