The UK has long been fertile ground for startups, offering a home to new ideas and cutting-edge solutions. The tech sector adds an enormous £150bn to the economy each year, employs more than 1.7m people, and while London leads the charge, cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester have each become vibrant tech hubs in their own right.
But startups don’t remain startups forever. The successful ones scale-up; heading for a public listing, acquisition, or profit-led success. But, right now, not enough start-ups are staying on UK soil for that portion of their journey. From Darktrace to DeepMind, too many leading tech firms are snapped up by overseas acquirers or public markets (very often in the US). We’re currently incubator Britain, not scale-up Britain. If we want to change that, the new Government needs to do more to incentivise talent to start-up and stick around.
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