Bristol is one of the UK's most prominent
tech ecosystems, with budding companies that have the potential to challenge
their globally acknowledged counterparts.
Before the corona pandemic, Bristol was
identified as one of the most productive digital clusters accounting for more
than 35,924 digital jobs and almost 225 startups. Now that's really a behemoth
number to turn to.
This prominent city is home to many
international tech firms and some supercomputer players. Bristol has everything
starting from Cray to just eat, Sony, Amazon, and oracle.
But Bristol's tech-savvy nature is not only
due to these big boys playing around but also due to its strong backend
university ecosystem which includes the University of Bristol, the University
of the West of England, university of bath, and bath spa university.
The University of Bristol alone watches
more than 5000 software engineers graduating every year to maintain the tech
glory of this tech startup hub.
Notable mentions among the workspaces
include Engine shed, SET squared, and Webstart.
Among various achievements in its
portfolio, Bristol has also been chosen by the oracle to one of its new global
startup cloud accelerators.
The city has a great lineage in the
aviation industry which can be seen with the 40 million investments by the
airbus for the wing of the future center, while UKS leading the academic center
for robotic research being situated in the heart of the city.
Now to begin our countdown for the hot
startups that are creating buzz all around the globe.
BLU
wireless technology
Starting our list with a silicon IP
company, this is successfully demonstrating a 60 gigahertz technology to meet
the emerging WiGig standard.
Blu wireless technology is founded by Henry Nurser, Mark Barrett, and ray McConnell, blu wireless has very quickly raised
almost a 10 million pounds and a 10 million mound investment by=y the ARM.
Brightpearl
Making a spot of number 2 in our list,
Brightpearl is Bristol's multichannel retail management platform, with offices
in the United States of America.
It is known to supply cloud-based inventory
management and a retail business platform to some independent wholesale
retailers.
Founded by Andrew millennia and Chris
Tanner, the company is known to have raised 45.2 million pounds with leading
investors including Eden ventures, MMC ventures, and Notion capital. This
financing is further supplemented by a loan from Silicon Valley Bank and
Columbia lake partners.
Duel
Duel provides a solution for the lack of
emotional connection and social proof in clinical looking online shops with the
rich trusted and informative experience that buying in-store gives.
Founded in the year of 2015 by Paul archer,
duel aims at boosting conversions and driving high-value traffic to increase
online selling by providing a visual testimonial platform for e-commerce brands
and retailers.
FiveAi
As the name suggests this Bristol and
Cambridge start-up that uses AI and machine learning to help accelerate the
development of autonomous vehicles and public transport and ensure their proper
navigation of these amenities in the complex urban environments.
Founded by ben peters, john Redford, Simon
walker, stan Boland, and steve all press in 2015, this venture has successfully
amassed 37.7 million dollars funding. Another 35 million dollars series A round
led by lake star in September 2017, with kind participation from the notion,
kindred, and Amadeus capital partners.
Fusion
processing
Founded in 2012 with a vision of utilizing
radar and machine-vision expertise, together with in-depth knowledge of
leading-edge processor technology to provide a better enhancement to the
automotive and transport oriented products.
The biggest flex by the fusion processing
is being the part of the UK consortium which has promised to deliver 200
driverless cars to South Korea with a signed amount of 30 million pounds.
Jim Hutchinson the current leader has also
signed an agreement to provide a cycle eye to a European truck company with its
current order with the first bus in Bristol.
Graphcore
Graphcore is known to create and improve
the artificial intelligence chips of tomorrow. Currently, the company is
building intelligence processing units .company claims that its intelligence
processing units can improve machine intelligence training and inference
workloads 10 to 100 times when being compared with the current system hardware.
Founded by Nigel toon and Simon Knowles in
the year 2016, the company had successfully secured 50 million dollars in a Series C round led by
the silicon valley venture capital sequoia.
Some other prominent investors in the board
of the company are Amadeus capital partners, atomic, Robert bosch venture
capital, C4 ventures, dell technologies capital, draper esprit, foundation
capital, pitango venture capital, and Samsung catalyst fund.
Graphcore with its innovative technologies
has already attracted some very lucrative investments.
So I hope you all have liked this little
article about Bristol and its booming tech culture that has the potential to be
the next Silicon Valley.
Written by - Yash Bundela
Edited by – Adrija Saha
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