Friday 25 January 2019 9:54 am | Updated: Monday 03 June 2019 2:57 am

London startups take the lead in Tech Nation’s fourth Upscale accelerator

City startups have landed more than two thirds of the places available on Tech Nation’s fourth Upscale acceleration programme, beating out over 100 applicants.

The digital entrepreneur network, which also runs a fintech accelerator backed by the Treasury, has selected 30 startups as “ones to watch” in 2019.

The fast-growing tech firms will enter the programme’s fourth annual cohort today, seeking mentorship on issues such as hiring and retaining talent, maintaining culture while scaling a business and international expansion.

The programme comes in the wake of London tech startups having raked in £1.8bn in funding last year, more than any other European city and almost double that of its next closest rival.

“The UK is Europe’s undisputed tech hub and much of our success is down to the ambition of fast-growth companies like these,” said digital minister Margot James.

A fifth of the companies picked this year are in the fintech sector, including London startups such as money management app Cleo and crypto exercise app Sweatcoin. Eight of the companies, including City fintech startup Fluidly, have female founders.

Here's a look at the final 30:

Name	Location	What do you do?
Airsorted	London	"Airsorted helps people host their homes on Airbnb and other platforms. Aimed at either landlords or travellers, the company provides a hassle-free service, including property listing, cleaning, linens, communication with guests, check-in, key exchange and more."
Apperio	London	"Apperio exists to make the world's legal clear, connected and collaborative. Providing a single, real-time view of every firm, matter, task and billable hour involved through an intuitive platform, Apperio ensures general counsels and lawyers can access the information and insights they need."
Automata	London	"Automata's mission is to empower people to automate the physical work they should no longer have to do. Its first product, Eva, is a simple, affordable, desktop robot arm built for professionals, helping to improve productivity on a production line or in a lab."
Bookinglive	Bristol	"Bookinglive provides powerful scheduling, reservation and purchasing experiences that create profitable customer relationships. Its leading secure data-driven platform is trusted by government departments, retailers, NHS trusts and large multinational organisations to manage their most important customer engagement journeys."
Cleo	London	"Cleo exists to radically improve everyone's relationship with money. For millions, money has been too difficult for too long. Cleo was built to change that. A personal champion and companion, Cleo helps people achieve their goals and feel genuinely good about money, while sharing or creating products and services that really work for them."
Doctify	London	"Doctify allows patients to search, compare and book the best doctors near them. Its online booking tools, complete with patient reviews, enable users to make an informed decision about health professionals, and book an appointment, treatment or scan, from any device, 24 hours a day."
Fertility Focus	Coventry	"Ovu Sense, from Fertility Focus, predicts ovulation 24 hours in advance, doubling the chance of pregnancy for each reproductive cycle. Comprised of a vaginal sensor, which measures core temperature, and a smartphone app for data upload, Ovu Sense can be used by all women, including those with ovulatory issues."
Fluidly	London	"Fluidly addresses the biggest SME pain point, cashflow management. Its intelligent system, featuring automated cashflow forecasting and management, connects to accounting packages and bank accounts to optimise cashflow. Saving SMEs both time and money, it also ensures they have control, certainty and confidence about their financial future."
Funding Options	London	"Funding Options is the UK’s leading online comparison marketplace for SME finance. Using online comparison technologies previously only available to consumers, it makes it fast, easy and transparent for SMEs to access the right alternative finance. The company is also pioneering open banking technology, enabling it to fund small businesses in minutes."
Futrli	Brighton	"Futrli solves the pain points of SMEs and the accountants that advise them, helping businesses get it right when it comes to their futures. Business owners can produce flexible, three-way forecasts built from P&Ls, balance sheets and cash flow statements, and prepare live business plans, budgets and reports, helping them get more visibility."
Healthera	Cambridge	"Healthera connects patients to a network of hundreds of pharmacies and NHS GPs. Using the Healthera app, which is listed on the NHS Digital apps library, patients can order and track their prescriptions, access clinical services, and monitor their medication intake in one digital end-to-end solution."
Hubble	London	"Hubble is London's biggest online marketplace for renting flexible office space. Its platform enables large, flexible office brands, small independent brands and those with spare space to let their offices. Making it easy for businesses between 1 and 250 people to find and move into an office space, Hubble cuts the average move time from three months to three weeks."
Immersive Labs	Bristol	"Immersive Labs is enabling organisations to upskill and assess current cyber workforces, as well as identify and develop the talent they never knew existed. The company’s virtual hands-on learning platform features hundreds of browser-based labs and real-world security scenarios that allow organisations to upskill from within and be the best they can be."
Lending Crowd	Edinburgh	"Lending Crowd specialises in lending to SMEs across Britain by accessing finance from private investors to provide loans of up to £500,000. Borrowers can check their eligibility in just 60 seconds, and it takes less than 30 minutes to complete a loan application. Once the loan has been funded, the funds could be in the borrower’s account within two working days."
Move GB	Bath	"Move GB is on a mission to enable lifelong health and happiness for all. The UK's largest activity marketplace with 300,000 users and over 6,000 physical activity providers, Move GB offers one membership to tens of thousands of activities, classes, gyms and studios, and gives members the daily freedom to mix up their activities."
Olio	London	"Olio is a free neighbour-to-neighbour food sharing app. Users simply snap a picture of their surplus food items and add them to Olio, then neighbours receive customised alerts and can make requests. Olio’s Food Waste Heroes programme also matches volunteers with their local retailer to collect unsold food and redistribute it to the local community via the app."
Open Cosmos	Oxford	"Open Cosmos provides simple and affordable space missions to help solve the world’s biggest challenges, enabling organisations from across a wide range of industries to use space technologies as a tool. Offering constellation, in-orbit demonstration, payload development and qualification services, Open Cosmos offers a one-stop-shop to orbit."
Openrent	London	"A rental community for landlords and tenants, Openrent has thoroughly disrupted the market to become the country’s largest letting agent and make renting fairer, safer and cheaper for everyone. Landlords can advertise their properties on major property portals for just £29, saving them thousands, while tenants are never charged admin or agency fees."
Oxehealth	Oxford	"Oxehealth's Digital Care Assistant (DCA) gives staff caring for the elderly and vulnerable more time for hands on care where and when they are needed most. The DCA acts as an assistant, paying attention to every room when staff can’t be there, helping care facilities improve patient or resident outcomes and experiences, and reduce the cost of care."
Patch	London	"In the seemingly endless drive towards urbanisation, there is no brand that speaks to urban gardens or urban gardeners. That's where Patch comes in. The company allows customers to discover the right plants for their space, delivers them to their door, and helps them look after them through its in-house plant doctors and great content."
Previse	London	"Previse is transforming B2B commerce so that suppliers are paid instantly upon invoice. The company’s AI technology analyses companies’ data to predict the invoices unlikely to get paid, so Previse can pay the rest instantly. The 1% fee paid by suppliers who opt for instant payment is shared between the buyer, the funder and Previse, in a genuine win-win."
Koru Kids	London	"Koru Kids is building a new childcare system from scratch using modern technology. Now the UK's biggest childcare brand, Koru Kids trains and deploys 100+ nannies each week, transforming the lives of thousands of families. The team builds seamless, comprehensive software and delivers high quality ongoing training and development for nannies."
Shepper	London	"Today, businesses use Google to find anything digitally and view pictures online. Shepper is the other side of the coin. Businesses use Shepper’s B2B inspection services to send a real person, from a managed network of local, trusted people, to a physical location to carry out checks and collect information, helping to drive down costs and speed up delivery."
Sweatcoin	London	"Sweatcoin is a digital currency backed by the economic value of physical movement. Created with the mission to motivate people to be more physically active and fight the UK’s obesity problem, Sweatcoin’s tracker app converts steps into a virtual currency and includes an internal marketplace that lets users buy goods and services with their Sweatcoins."
Tessian	London	"Tessian creates machine intelligence to secure enterprises from threats executed by humans, keeping the world’s sensitive data and systems secure. Used by large enterprises across the financial, legal and technology sectors, its email security platform automatically prevents security threats like misaddressed emails, data loss and non-compliance."
The Accountancy Cloud	London	"Designed with startup founders in mind, The Accountancy Cloud platform automates accounting, finance and cashflow tasks, eliminating back office admin. Using data to produce interactive financial statements, and integrating with accounting software, it acts as a hub for accounting operations where founders can access real-time advice from finance experts."
The Plum Guide	London	"The Plum Guide is on a mission to build a marketplace of the world’s best holiday homes. Solving the issue of quality control in the homestay market, it separates the good from the great using the Plum Test, which leverages an innovative combination of tech, data and expert human curation to determine if a home has what it takes to deliver a perfect stay."
Voxpopme	Birmingham	"Voxpopme is the world’s number one video insight platform. Its unique technology platform enables fast and easy end-to-end video research through solutions that revolutionise the process of capturing, analysing and sharing video feedback. As a result, every data point businesses rely on to make decisions can be backed up by real human stories."
Wazoku	London	"Wazoku helps companies become everyday innovators, where innovation is a core, strategic capability. Passionate about enabling organisations to engage and collaborate with their workforce, ecosystem, customers and the world, Wazoku’s cloud-based idea management software enables users to crowdsource solutions to challenges that keep them up at night."
Wefarm	London	"Wefarm has built the world’s biggest farmer-to-farmer trusted knowledge network for the 1bn small-scale farmers globally who have no access to the internet. Farmers can ask any question on agriculture, in any local language, for free and Wefarm gets them bespoke content back, using sophisticated machine learning and the knowledge of the crowd."