London-headquartered KultraLab will open a new office in Edinburgh after it received more than £2m from Scottish investment syndicate Kelvin Capital and Scottish Enterprise - in a move that will create up to 25 jobs.
The new 'product hub’ will consist of teams from engineering and product development, and it seen as central to the company's plans to deliver its artificial intelligence-powered behavioural change platform to clients.
Formed in 2019, KultraLab’s platform aims to transform how employees engage, learn and perform by combining behavioural science, mobile communications, AI personalised learning and performance analytics.
The business, which already employs 25 staff, has so far signed up 100 consumer businesses.
Steve Baggi, founder and chief executive of KultraLab, said: “We have a number of major advantages: everything we do is driven by science, and we focus closely on the consumer sector, where we have extensive and long-standing connections.
“With our new funding we are well placed to reach scale very quickly.”
Stuart McKee, chair of Kelvin Capital, said: “KultraLab’s highly experienced management team has rapidly created a new technology that has already secured major buy-in from the consumer sector and is set to accelerate its growth with this new investment.
“Choosing Edinburgh as its location for product and technology development is a tremendous endorsement of the skills available to the marketplace and we are delighted to be early-stage backers of the business and its board and look forward to working with them to achieve their ambitious plans.”
As Scottish Government Business Minister Ivan McKee announced at the 2022 World Forum for foreign direct investment in Edinburgh earlier this week, Scottish Development International (SDI), Highlands and Islands Enterprise and South of Scotland Enterprise, supported 113 inward investment projects in during 2021 - with 39 of these being new investor projects choosing to locate in Scotland for the first time.
In total, the figures showed that SDI, together with its enterprise agency partners, helped secure more than 7,500 planned jobs for Scotland through inward investment during the last year.
McKee said: “Businesses which invest in Scotland tend to stay in Scotland, and I hope KultraLab will be no different.
“Scotland’s economic potential is huge, we want to establish ourselves as a nation with a culture that encourages, promotes, and celebrates activity in every sector of our economy.
“The Scottish Government is committed to supporting KultraLab, and other inward investors, to achieve their ambitions here, in strong alignment with our commitment to a wellbeing economy and prosperity for all.”
Mark Hallan, director of global investment at Scottish Enterprise, said: “The decision by KultraLab to open an engineering hub in Edinburgh underlines just why so many innovative companies choose to grow in Scotland.
“KultraLab was attracted to Scotland due to our incredibly talented workforce and world-class universities - alongside the supportive business environment, this is what makes Scotland stand out from the rest of the crowd.”
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