This year’s Tech Nation Rising Stars 4.0 winner from Scotland is Edinburgh-based Kythera AI - a start-up which provides advanced tools for designing artificial intelligence in 3D game engines.
The growth platform has today announced 10 winners of its fourth competition, which recognises the brightest and best early-stage tech scale-ups from every area of the UK.
This year’s winners were selected by a panel of seven judges - including Enterprise Nation founder Emma Jones, Singular Ventures partner Nahu Ghrebremichael and GC Angels head of investment Jess Jackson - based on their value proposition, competitive advantage, market traction, team experience and potential to scale.
Kythera AI's success as an early-stage Scottish tech company reflects the strength and fast growth of Scotland’s tech sector overall, according to a statement. The business will now be inducted into the Tech Nation alumni network.
Scotland is now home to two tech ‘unicorns’ - companies valued at over $1bn - and received $710m in venture capital investment funding last year - up 40% on the $422m received in 2020.
Tech job creation is also growing rapidly in Scotland, with 149,000 people currently employed by tech start-ups and scale-ups in the region.
This year sees the most regionally and gender diverse set of winners in Rising Stars history, with seven out of the 10 businesses hailing from outside of London and the South East.
Six out of the 10 companies also have a female founder or co-founder and this representation mirrors the strength of female-founded businesses overall, which have already attracted more investment in 2022 so far than the whole of 2021 and 2020.
Nine out of 10 of this year’s winners also stated they have taken steps to make their businesses more diverse and inclusive over the last year, citing strategies including using inclusive language in job descriptions, providing training to their teams, and having transparent pay structures.
Joy Thurston, operations coordinator at Kythera AI, said: “We've been on a mission to bring intelligent life to virtual worlds in games and beyond since 2012, and this competition has been a great way for us to share our story so far.
“This is an exciting time for Kythera AI, with a number of AAA contracts recently secured and our first round of seed investment successfully completed.”
Esme Caulfield, competitions lead at Tech Nation, added: “It’s been so exciting to see this year’s Rising Stars winners disrupting a wide variety of tech sectors. like fintech, lawtech and so many others, including - for the first time - deathtech.
“Perhaps even more excitingly, this is one of our most diverse cohorts yet, with the majority of winning companies having female founders or co-founders, and nearly three quarters hailing from outside of London.”
The Rising Stars 4.0 winners in full:
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