So, reader, here we are. Oh yeah! We are so back, baby.

Use your noggin, mate

Noggin HQ raises £2.3m for its alternative credit scoring tech

Top story this week comes by way of our pals at Noggin, based over in Ouseburn’s Toffee Factory. One of my favourite things about writing this Digest is getting to bang the drum for brilliant North East tech companies that perhaps aren’t yet household names. So, if you don’t know Noggin… get them on your radar.

Founded by childhood friends Eva Atkinson and Laura Mills, Noggin is taking on a pretty enormous banking problem.

Traditional credit scoring doesn’t always give an accurate picture of whether someone can actually afford to borrow. Noggin’s technology, however, uses permissioned banking transaction data to give lenders a more up-to-date view of people’s finances, thus potentially opening up credit to people who might otherwise be overlooked.

This week the company has hit two pretty significant milestones, becoming one of only a handful of businesses to gain authorisation as a UK credit reference agency in the last decade and closing an oversubscribed £2.3m seed round, led by Blackfinch Ventures. Class!

Eva and Laura are exactly the sort of North East founders we should know about, talk about and help where we can. They’re tackling a huge, real-world problem in a heavily regulated market, they’ve attracted serious external investment and… they’re building it here.

We talk a lot about ambition in the region thesedays, don’t we? One of Noggin’s investors describes the opportunity as building a category-defining credit infrastructure business from the North East. No pressure, then! I’ll be watching this one closely.

Farewell Paul

NICD and me: Moving forward

And speaking of credit, it’s time to dish some out.

After almost a decade at the helm, Professor Paul Watson is stepping down as Director of the National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD). Since its launch, NICD has become an important part of the North East’s data and AI landscape, working directly with organisations to help them unlock value from their data and build capability along the way.

Under Paul’s leadership, the team has delivered more than 180 collaborative projects, supporting businesses and contributing to economic growth across the region. We’ve partnered with Paul many a time and he really is the bee’s knees. NICD will mark the end of Paul’s tenure (and look ahead to its next chapter) at an event at The Catalyst on 16 September.

But I want to say something about Paul the person, too.

I’ve been lucky enough to know Paul for a good few years now; he’s been incredibly generous to me personally with his time, his encouragement and his belief in some of the things I’ve tried to do. But perhaps what tells you most about him isn’t how he interacts with people like me. It’s what I see when I’m wandering around The Catalyst at lunchtime.

I’ll regularly see Paul sitting with the junior members of the NICD team (people at the very beginning of their careers, often from all over the world) chatting, listening, asking questions and making them feel part of something. There’s no performance to it. He’s a hugely accomplished academic and computer scientist who could quite reasonably spend his time talking exclusively to other… important people. Instead, he has consistently made time for people who are still finding their feet.

We understandably spend a lot of time in this Digest celebrating investment rounds, startups, shiny technologies and growth. But ecosystems are built by people at the end of the day, particularly the people who create opportunities for others, share what they know and quietly nurture the next generation. Paul has done an awful lot of that in the North East.

So, congratulations on an extraordinary stint, Paul. And, from me personally, thank you.

North East gets small share of Innovate’s latest

Three North East female business leaders get Innovate UK backing

Three North East founders are among just 61 women nationally to land £75k through Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Awards. First of all, massive congratulations to our three. Let’s be aware of them and let’s support them, folks:

• Kate Murray, Ubrix, Consett: building a platform to help housebuilders and principal contractors cut costs and delays by bringing sales, build and aftercare for new-build homes into one place.

• Lou Willis-Keeler, Souuthe, Saltburn: developing a patent-pending device that mimics the calming effect of a real hug, designed to reduce the body’s stress response for people in palliative, dementia and child care.

• Suzanne Vernazza, Premere / Know Your Floors, Gateshead: building an AI-enabled pelvic health platform combining clinical guidance, education and personalised support to help people prevent and manage pelvic-floor problems.

However, perhaps in typical Jamie-fashion, there’s a stat I can’t quite get past… 1,590 women applied.

That’s a funding success rate of less than 4%. I get it… competitive funding is, well, competitive. And ok, Innovate UK has made sensible changes this year, including ‘extending business support’ to another 39 highly commended founders, but it does make me wonder about the other 1,490.

How many hours did they collectively spend writing applications? How many genuinely promising businesses sit just below an inevitably arbitrary funding line? And what, if anything, does our innovation ecosystem do with all that intelligence and ambition once the competition closes?

Perhaps the opportunity isn’t simply finding more money. It’s getting better at supporting the enormous pipeline of founders who put their hands up for it in the first place. If this section has somehow landed on your desk and you’re at a loss when it comes to this world, please drop me a line and I’ll work out how I can help.

Well that’s it this week, gang. So much content to digest! No room for even one, small cheeky pun! Boo! Then again, as a little birdy once told me, they’re never too far from a Digest.

Sadly no Digest next Friday as I’m away (again?! Sue me and my free newsletter, right?) but we’ll be back with no interruptions on Friday September 4th.

Have a great weekend, cheers for reading, Jamie

More news this week

Newcastle biotech pioneers BSF aim for robotics and luxury cars in strategic deal

Former Sage software boss joins Newcastle clean tech scale-up

Advanced Electric Machines seals £16m funding deal

Kona Clean Tech in collaboration with Durham University

Post of the week

Oops. Almost forgot! Newcastle Uni alumni James and Jacob have launched Delta Technology Services, a new North East-based consultancy helping organisations harness Microsoft cloud, automation and AI. Nearly missed this one but thanks to Jeremy Pidgeon for flapping, sorry flagging. A great little coup for the digest.

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How are you? Sorry for the delay today, I’m about to take a couple weeks leave and have spent the last 24 hours trying to get wrapped up. Sadly reader, not much to rock your socks today. We’re in the typical Summer news lull.

So… I’ll take this opportunity to deploy some good old fashioned filler content. I’ve had an interesting morning!

Yes, among morning meetings today I met a very impressive young man. This guy currently works in a restaurant and previously worked in region, laying train tracks. When he’s not working, however, he’s build a software startup. And honestly, I was pretty blown away by what he demoed this morning.

I’ll not go into the market or solution today but I couldn’t help but get excited about what this guy is up to. He’s essentially using tools like Base44 and Wix to create an MVP and he was full of humility in terms of wanting to gain knowledge in both a technical and operational capacity.

After having a conversation around focus, routes to market and what could happen next, I introduced him to a couple of people I trust in the ecosystem who may be able to help with the technical and financial sides. He was genuine, curious and determined. As you might guess, meeting him made my day.

I’ve spent large parts of the last fortnight mulling over governmental changes and having my head firmly in policy mode. Not everything needs to be a lesson and I’m sure I’m repeating what many of you already know but it’s so darn true that entrepreneurial potential arrives in many forms.

There isn’t one single, polished pipeline. Moreover, folks don’t always come with the ‘right’ vocabulary, qualifications or existing network. As technology makes building more accessible, we should expect founders to emerge from every kind of background. That’s cool, right?

The role of an ecosystem, for me, is to ensure that when someone takes those first brave steps they have an accessible front door, useful judgement and a pathway into the relationships they have not yet had the opportunity to build. I talk a lot about what the North East doesn’t have or needs to do; I probably bore you with it. It’s worth saying that we do have established ways and means of making a positive difference to people’s lives. I’m proud of that.

Right gang, no Digest for the next two weeks! Ya man needs a break. Hope you’re having a cracking summer! Cheers, Jamie

This week’s news

iamproperty sees revenue top £60m in year of growth and innovation

North East e-learning business lands seven-figure investment

Sage focuses on AI development as revenues soar

Sunderland’s blockbuster film studio plans move to next phase

Features

“I genuinely thought I was done”: How AI pulled this founder out of semi-retirement

hedgehog lab founder Sarat Pediredla talks to Prolific North after returning from semi-retirement to launch LevelFive, with former CTO Alan Morris. The duo believe AI has created a smartphone-scale shift in software development, enabling small, experienced teams to build products faster and more cheaply. In the article Sarat talks about LevelFive’s business model and argues this could be particularly significant for the North East, allowing a smaller population to compete through greater productivity rather than sheer headcount.

Barclays Regional Investment Map H1 2026

The latest Barclays Regional Investment Map, produced by Barclays Eagle Labs with data from Beauhurst, was released this week and offers its useful snapshot of business creation, grants and equity investment across the UK.

As Phil Witcherley highlighted on LinkedIn today, the North East continues to generate new companies and shows growing activity across advanced manufacturing, life sciences and digital but recorded £44.7 million of equity investment (19.4% less down on the previous six months). What data like this offers is a basic but helpful temperature check on where capital is landing and how regions like ours compare with elsewhere.

Its limitations are equally important. Six-month regional investment figures are extremely volatile, particularly in a smaller ecosystem where one substantial raise can transform the total, while the data records completed investment rather than the amount of viable demand that went unmet. This is why I tend to refrain from making big PR splashes around such data releases, I don’t think it’s too helpful. This coverage over in Wales today has been done similarly in the North East to little avail.

It’s also true that more incorporations, patents or university spinouts do not automatically produce more investable companies either. The map can therefore show us what happened but it’s worth noting it can’t fully explain why: i.e. whether the constraint is pipeline quality, investment readiness, the wrong type of finance, insufficient follow-on capital or difficulty reaching the right investors.

We’ve explored finance in the Digest a lot this year. My parting thought on this source and the narrative around it is pretty simple: a useful starting point for diagnosis but should not itself be mistaken for the diagnosis.

Post of the Week

Pangram

Finally folks, an FYI from me in changing media times. Substack has introduced Pangram: an AI-detection tool that analyses patterns in writing and estimates how much was written by a human or with AI assistance.

As you can see, it has classified today’s Digest as 100% human-written (unlucky for YOU, reader!) Indeed, results are estimates rather than proofvbut Substack hopes the feature will give readers greater transparency about what they’re reading. In terms of wor Digest… the ideas, opinions and final editorial judgement remain mine, even when I absolutely do use AI to help research, challenge or refine my thoughts. Ta!

And while my tired-ass took more stops between Whitehaven and Tynemouth than I’d like to admit, Westminster kept moving. Yup… by the time I got home, the government had reorganised itself. Burnham be making moves, ladies and gents.

And for us noble Tech Digesters, the surprising dispersion of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is where I want to begin today.

DSIT dismantled

I’ve seen reactions wildly vary this week from ‘this is the end of Britain’s technology ambitions’ to ‘it’s just machinery-of-government tinkering’. The truth, as ever, probably lies somewhere in between.

DSIT’s responsibilities haven’t disappeared, they’ve been redistributed. Business innovation now sits alongside industrial strategy, while AI has moved closer to the centre of government. The logic seems to be that technology is no longer a standalone policy area; it’s a capability that should run through everything government does. So this is a move from government to maximise the cross-cutting potential that tech brings across the spectrum of economic growth.

I’ve seen moves like this before; I’ll give some context before I chime in on whether or not I think it’s a good thing.

Tech has long played two distinct roles in the economy. First, it’s a vertical: a sector in its own right, made up of software companies, AI startups, cyber firms, semiconductor businesses and deep-tech spinouts. Companies creating and developing their own unique IP. These businesses face unique challenges around R&D, talent, regulation, investment and scaling, so they benefit from dedicated policy, specialist support and a clear voice inside government. Such companies are built to scale fast, I’ve written about tech as a vertical previously if it’s useful.

But technology is also a horizontal capability. AI, software, robotics and data are increasingly transforming every part of the economy, from manufacturing and healthcare to energy, defence and public services. In that sense, technology isn’t simply an industry to support; it’s an enabler of every other industry.

The challenge for government (and for places like the North East) isn’t choosing one over the other. It’s recognising that we need both: specialist support to help world-class tech companies emerge and broad adoption so every sector becomes more productive and competitive. That’s why when we’re developing local ecosystem strategies or initiatives like AI Growth Zones, you’ll find emphasis on both innovation and adoption.

In my experience, however, the latter is far better understood than the former. We talk confidently about helping existing industries adopt technology but far less about what it takes to create the next generation of technology companies in the first place. Perhaps that’s the lesson from DSIT. Technology shouldn’t stop being a vertical simply because it’s become a horizontal. We still need institutions, policies and people who understand the unique dynamics of building globally competitive technology businesses.

So the question now is whether the move will prove to be a smart integration? I’ve two worries in particular.

The first is the pretty obvious time wasted argument. I’ll echo top tech advisor Matt Clifford who believes the reshuffle is a mistake. ‘Tying up our most senior science and tech officials in a [reorganisation] wastes time and energy that’s desperately needed for the actual substance’, he said.

It’s no secret Britain is losing the global arms race when it comes to AI innovation. Reorganising the mechanics of government slows progress. We need only look at the last ten years of disruption in North East England (North East LEP, North of Tyne Combined Authority, North East Mayoral Strategic Authority) to appreciate this.

Though my greater concern, as hinted above, is the risk that technology companies become diluted within a much broader economic brief.

Startups and scaleups have distinct needs: access to specialist talent, patient capital, research commercialisation, procurement opportunities and export support. Those priorities can easily become secondary if technology is viewed only as a productivity tool for other industries.

If that happens, we’d risk making the same mistake we’ve made for years: celebrating what technology can do for the economy while paying less attention to the companies building the technology itself. I’ve been sharing thoughts on LinkedIn this week about how all of this could better shape our region’s approach to innovation, here’s a link if you’re interested.

On rankings

And speaking of everyone’s favourite generative AI dumping ground, a few readers have sent me LinkedIn’s Cities on the Rise editorial this week.

The platform published a list of the UK’s ‘fastest-growing’ regions, placing the Tyneside area third. At a glance, this might put a spring in the step of many a Tynesider. The methodology is perfectly reasonable for what it’s trying to achieve.

This comes from a recruitment product. It uses LinkedIn’s labour market data alongside indicators like house prices, rents, major employers and hiring sectors to help people decide where to build a career. I get that.

The problem is when we mistake it for an assessment of an innovation ecosystem. Or as a substitute for the health of momentum of a place’s propensity for economic growth.

Most of the evidence presented is descriptive rather than diagnostic. I doubt the bonny lads and lasses at, say, The National Innovation Centre for Data give pieces like this much credit. But Jamie, you cry! It talks about good stuff!

Sure, we have honourable mentions for regional assets… The AI Growth Zone. Tyne Clean Energy Park. Sage. Nissan. Affordable housing. Interesting facts? Absolutely. But they tell us remarkably little about whether the North East is becoming better at creating innovative businesses or conditions conducive to tangible success. They’re headlines and characteristics, not explanations.

If your goal is to understand whether a regional ecosystem is improving, the questions become very different. We’ve covered this before (see meme below), right? Are more startups being founded? Are they surviving longer? Raising larger investment rounds? Scaling beyond Series A? Commercialising university research? Recycling talent and capital through successful exits? Building stronger links between founders, investors, universities and customers? Those are some of the mechanisms that determine whether a place consistently produces successful companies.

That’s perhaps my biggest frustration with so much regional commentary today. We spend a lot of time describing places and very little time understanding them. Storytelling has its place but strategy… demands diagnosis. Until we become better at measuring and explaining why ecosystems succeed, we’ll continue to mistake collections of good news for evidence of systemic progress.

This week’s news

Hat tip to our pals at Polybox this week, as the budding marketing tech company raises more capital to help fuel the next stage of its growth. Launched in 2022 by Newcastle Uni graduates Rojin Yarhmadi and Nikolaus Benopoulos, Polybox aims to disrupt the world of automated data analysis, reporting and AI. Well done guys!

Newcastle martech bags £700k follow on investment

Tyneside aquatic consultants look to make a bigger splash with AI technology

Tech entrepreneur unveils group savings app

North East meetup stalwart Michael Peacock launches new consultancy

Latos £100m Stockton data centre “on track” - will be UK’s first “neural edge” site

More things I’ve been reading this week:

‘We still have a start-up problem’: North East tech leaders debate the region’s next challenge

Abolishing DSIT would be bad

Feel the Burn-ham

UK tech advocates alarmed by Burnham plan

Don’t scrap DSIT; refocus it

Whitehall has reorganised itself around AI. Now someone has to teach people to use it.

Regional mayors to take key roles in UK policy decisions as part of No 10 North plans

Remembering Dave Anderson

David Anderson, founder of Auxin, has sadly passed away. I met Dave and the Auxin team over a decade ago, when I was invited to contribute to their work on mapping North East tech. ‘The Auxin Report’ was an attempt to understand what was actually here, where our strengths lay and what would need to change if the ecosystem was going to mature. I wrote about this back in 2016 if you’re interested.

Dave was a well-known figure in the North East business community. My dad spoke to him the week before he died, his passing comes as a real tragic shock. I’m sure the news will have stunned and saddened many folks across the region.

Dave did much work helping and coaching North East entrepreneurs across a myriad of sectors. He was of course entrepreneurial himself too. He launched Ride Electric in 2017, which would late become E-Mobilise. Dave was incredibly passionate about facilitating the transition from motor vehicle dependency to e-mobility. He was a great lover of the outdoors.

I’ve just been looking back at our message exchanges on LinkedIn. He was a really kind bloke. He sent me well wishes during my rehab after breaking my back. Unsurprisingly, he also sent me a lot of helpful info on ebikes when I was trying to relearn how to ride a bike.

A celebration of Dave’s life will take place in Tynemouth two weeks today.

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Sadly, Dave's passing isn't the first obituary the Digest has carried in recent years. Adam Banks, Nate Sterling, Ian Birtwistle, Vicky Teinaki, Cameron Craggs and Charles Sellers all left their mark on our region in different ways. The time they gave in shaping the North East isn’t forgotten. People matter most.

Have a well-rested weekend, everyone. Thanks for reading, Jamie

I’ll talk a little bit about funding today, as the Business Growth Fund (BGF) shares some figures with us. By way of a refresher (not the tasty chewy kind. More the Jamie prattles on about tech or something sort, soz) BGF is one of the UK's largest growth capital investors. When it comes to the North East tech ecosystem, BGF moves in the space that’s generally the next step after angel investment, seed or Series A funding. You probably will hear of their activity in the ecosystem once or twice a year.

The fund reveals it has invested £5 billion into over 650 UK and Irish businesses since launching in 2011, with 74% of that capital deployed outside London and the South East. Looking forward, BGF has also committed a further £3bn over the next five years, so when we’re thinking regional growth capital it’s one to have on the radar.

Over the past decade the fund has backed North East innovators including Recite Me, SaleCycle, Visualsoft, Ocucon, Geek Talent, Clixifix and Partnerize (in the earlier Performance Horizon trading days). If you’re considering post seed investment and interested in learning more about BGF, please give me a shout any time.

Elsewhere this week community group Women in Tech North East announced the appointment of three new board members, as the network aims to strengthen its position in the ecosystem. Well done to the brilliant Jo Larby, Jen Taylor and Laurie Stirling, CEPA who’ve all been appointed as non-executive directors. Read more about the work here.

Couple more headlines to peruse below but it seems the news is doing what you should all be doing… put your feet up, pet! It’s hot innit? You work hard, reader. Have a break man! So… there’ll be no Digest next week as I’ll be cycling/melting/likely dying on a hill somewhere along the North Pennines, when I take on the Coast 2 Coast challenge. Thanks again for all the support there!

Stay cool, tech fans. Catch you in two weeks time on the 24th. If you’re working on anything you’d like to share with the community, just drop me a line. Cheers, Jamie

This week’s news

BGF marks milestone as £5bn invested in regional firms since launch 15 years ago

Petards hails customer confidence as contracts worth £1.4m roll in

FinTech North returns to Newcastle

Post of the Week

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Yes we’re going all out chest-thumpin’, data-dumpin’ and I suspect, somewhere in West Gosforth, Tom Bunten is licking his lips…

What could a Burnham government mean for North East tech?

Or er… What might Britain look like if we stopped treating London as the default answer to every economic question?

It’s an interesting thought experiment for the North East…

For decades, Britain's economic model has tended to treat London's success as the engine of national prosperity. The capital attracts the investment, the headquarters, the talent and the attention. Regions are then left to compete for a share of what follows. Read Tom Forth’s analysis of this; it’s an excellent assessment of why the country is in the productivity mess we find ourselves in.

Burnham’s politics suggest something different. That productive regional economies aren’t a consequence of national prosperity; they’re a prerequisite for it. Success should be built in Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow, not merely redistributed from Westminster once it’s been created elsewhere.

For North East tech, that’s potentially significant.

A Burnham government would likely place greater emphasis on devolution, regional productivity and locally-led economic development. Good for us then, right? Yep, on paper, I reckon that should play to our strengths. We genuinely have world-class universities, established industrial sectors, growing technology density and a community that comes together to be greater than the sum of its parts.

So, the opportunity is obvious. More regional decision-making. Yay! Greater recognition of technology outside the South East. Yay! Public procurement that gives innovative companies a first customer. Yay! Longer-term investment in institutions rather than short-term programmes. Yay! Preach, Pastor! Preach!

Brother Hardesty bounded onto the stage in enough rhinestones to blind the front row. Channelling a Southern televangelist with the swagger of an Elvis impersonator he bellowed, "Can I get a hallelujah, tech bros?"

Wow wow wow, not so fast. Take off the shiny costume, bonny lad. There’s always a catch...

Yes, devolution rewards places that know what they want to build.

Giving regions more autonomy is only valuable if they have a coherent strategy for using it. More funding, more programmes and more announcements won’t, on their own, produce more successful technology companies. We’ve learnt that lesson already.

If I have to sit through another roundtable listening to someone catalogue everything that goes into the North East tech machine, rather than asking what actually comes out of it, I might just spontaneously combust.

In other words, we're remarkably good at cataloguing inputs: regional funding pots, accelerators we used to have, partnerships, events and announcements. We're far less rigorous about asking whether those inputs consistently produce more successful technology companies. As we’ve recently explored, the machine isn’t working.

Now I’m not saying the North East needs another tech strategy document gathering dust on a shelf. No. It needs an operating system: shared data, obvious touch points, agreed priorities, repeatable founder pathways and a common understanding of where companies succeed, where they stall and how the ecosystem should respond.

In reality, founders in this part of the world still navigate the journey through personal networks. Data on the ecosystem remains fragmented. Organisations often optimise for programme delivery rather than company outcomes.

Too often, conversations begin with solutions before we've properly diagnosed the problem. Should we launch another scale-up programme? A fintech hub? A healthtech incubator? Perhaps. But without understanding where companies are actually falling out of the system, we're optimising for activity rather than outcomes.

So what I’m saying is a more devolved Britain won’t solve those problems for us. In fact, it may expose them.

Devolution rewards places with the greatest capability. Regions that have built institutions, shared strategies and repeatable ways of turning ideas into successful companies will accelerate. Those that haven’t will simply make local decisions instead of national ones.

So, perhaps, that’s the veritable opportunity. Not that a Burnham government might finally back places like the North East but that it could remove one of our favourite excuses. If power increasingly sits with regions, success becomes harder to attribute to Whitehall and impossible to blame on it.

Governments can create the conditions for growth. They cannot manufacture it; that’s the responsibility of those institutions, investors, universities, founders and communities working towards the same outcome. And absolutely, a Burnham government might give regions like ours more agency. Whether that translates into more successful technology companies will depend entirely on what we choose to do with it.

Perhaps that’s actually our question folks, i.e. not whether Andy Burnham would be good for North East tech, but whether North East tech is organised enough to make the most of an Andy Burnham government.

Why confidence is growing across the region’s tech sector

You may remember in #Issue 337 I had a grumble (I know, doesn’t sound like me at all right?) about the region being overlooked in terms of tech sector coverage:

Kudos to Rachael Hesno, journalist at Prolific North, who called me up and wanted to talk about exploring North East tech at large. If you don’t know Rachael, you should. She’s one of few journalists who has consistently covered the NE tech scene in pan-northern and national coverage. She’s also a very good egg. If you want to share the progress you’re enjoying, I reckon she’d entertain it. As ever I’m happy to give ideas/drafts/releases a once-over before you send them.

Anyway, there are things which keep me optimistic about our North East tech future. We have both examples of success and positive shared intent about our direction of travel. Rachael’s piece unpicks this.

Titled ‘We’re making a bet on the North East’: Why confidence is growing across the region’s tech sector’, the article brings together voices from across the ecosystem and paints a picture that those of us working in it every day recognise: a region with successes to point to, stronger collaboration than many realise and, in some quarters, a growing confidence in its own identity. So yes, well done to Rachael and particularly James and the team at Leighton for pushing this.

It’s easy (and misguided) to forget how far we’ve come.

Twenty years ago, the North East’s technology sector looked very different. Today we have globally recognised companies, growing sub-sectors of competitive advantage, five excellent universities, founders with more experiences choosing to stay and build here and organisations that are increasingly working together rather than in isolation. There’s some awesome people quoted in this.

As I mention in the article, we’ve gone from around 1,200 digital technology businesses in 2005 to somewhere approaching 4,000 today. That’s real progress.

This doesn’t contradict anything I’ve written above. In fact, it reinforces it. Hear me out…

My argument has never been that the North East lacks talent or progress. We’ve proved we can produce exceptional companies and remarkable people. The challenge is turning those successes from brilliant individual stories into a repeatable system.

I’m a big believer in confidence being contagious. When founders see companies from their own region raising investment, exporting globally and creating great jobs, it expands what’s imaginable. Success raises attainment levels. It tells the next generation, ‘Hey people like me can build something here’.

So yes, celebrate the wins. Read the article. Share it. Be proud of what we’ve built.

Then let’s ask the obvious next question: how do we make those success stories less exceptional and far more common?

Stripe launches Newcastle community

One of the world’s most influential fintech companies is putting down roots in the city with the launch of Stripe Community Newcastle.

Yes, the inaugural Builder Café is designed as a practical co-working day for founders and builders, combining focused work, peer learning and networking rather than another traditional meetup.

It’s a welcome addition to the region’s support infrastructure, big thanks to Alex Lockey for pioneering this. The more opportunities founders have to spend time with other practitioners solving real problems, the stronger the ecosystem becomes.

Reserve your place here if you fancy coming along.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Thanks for reading, Jamie

This week’s news

‘We’re making a bet on the North East’: Why confidence is growing across the region’s tech sector

Atom Bank sale process fails to attract desired bids, report suggests

Cambridge office set to power OnPath’s growth

Rapid Fluidics achieves milestone accreditation

Purple CEO: Newcastle deal is ‘inflection point’ for business

Post of the Week

Rousseau is building Nucha, a Newcastle-based secondhand marketplace and charity donation platform that lets you buy, sell, and donate pre-loved items while supporting non-profits. You can list unwanted clothing and goods or shop second-hand, with a portion of proceeds directed toward causes like The Sunshine Fund.

That’s pretty awesome. This week Rousseau shared his story with folks at BBC Newcastle Tech Meetup. Love to see it.

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I’ve actually had a pretty inspiring week, so I’m going to chuck some good old fashioned Jamie Vibes™ at you instead. I’m thinking a lot about regional ambition right now, so allow this old goat to share a few anecdotes (anecgotes?). Maybe you can blame Paula for this - see our Post of the Week below - perhaps I’m feeling a little sentimental…

On Wednesday evening I did something I’ve wanted to do for ages: Startup Pub. Two of my good mates and I sat in our favourite pub, shared some problems / startup ideas and committed to prototyping one potential solution.

What’s interesting is that these two guys not only have completely different skillsets to me (one is a fullstack engineer, the other in the realms of product, UX and scrum) but we’ve also got totally different outlooks on building things and, I guess, life in general. We talked about nerdy things like AI integrations, search capabilities and API protocols but we actually ended up talking about all sorts of life-related things too. It was fun.

In a similar vein, I went for dinner last with two other greats folks I know through the ecosystem. Not that this is the Hardesty Social Life Digest (Friday night! Oho it’s Taggart on repeat, reader!) but I think there’s something pertinent here. We each do events and support communities, so we’re actively looking at a joint collaboration to make space for likeminded people to come together and build cool things. Again we talked about ‘work’ things but it was cool to just spend some time with good people.

Today has been particularly excellent, too. I held my first Friday Office Hours with founders for the first time in a month, now that I’ve got the tech festival out the way. Between 07.30 and 12.30 today I’ve sat down with five different founders, back to back, building five completely different businesses and at very different stages of life. The youngest was 25, the oldest… 75!

Each of them had a glint in their eye. The hustle. The belief. The magic! I absolutely love it. It’s an infectious optimism that’s difficult to fake. You see it when someone is obsessed enough with a problem that they’re willing to spend evenings, weekends and even years trying to solve it. I find that so admirable.

We spend a lot of time talking about ecosystems as though they’re made up of programmes, accelerators, funds, buildings and strategies. Sure, those things matter. Yet an ecosystem is ultimately just a collection of people who are compelled to build something that matters to them. I’m endlessly fascinated by that.

It’s also why I remain optimistic about the North East. There are some excellent people here.

Right, we best share some headlines! We’ll be back next week with the usual sobering analysis, hard hitting realism and typically hilarious puns I’m sure…

Have a good weekend. I’ll be cycling along the North East coastline as I prepare to take on my C2C summer challenge in a couple of weeks time. God help me.

Catch you next week my friends, Jamie

This week’s news

Festival founder launches ticket platform

Foreign direct investment into the North East drops to 10-year low, research shows

North East born leader of British Business Bank to step down

Filtronic wins new contract with US customer

Seriös Group to takes centre stage at Datalyst

Post of the Week

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So… forgive the impending grammatical errors, spelling miztakes and any rip-roaring, Classic Hardesty jokes which don’t actually land (if you’re thinking “nowt new then, Jamie?” you’d be grossly… correct!)

So TechNExt wraps up today and, as ever, it has provided a useful snapshot of where the North East tech finds itself.

I had the privilege of curating and hosting Startup Hub this week; a day focused on founders, operators and the often messy reality of building a company. The aim was simple. Less startup theatre. More practical insight. Founders learning from founders.

What pleased me most was seeing new faces in the room and on stage.

For all our talk of ‘connected’ or ‘inclusive’ ecosystems, they can become strangely repetitive places. Be that the same stories or the same networks or just the same people appearing on the same panels. Startup Hub felt different, to me at least.

I deliberately wanted to bring together founders from different parts of the region, different backgrounds, different stages of growth and different lived experiences. The result was a richer conversation and, I suspect, a more useful one. Most of my audience were people that I’ve never seen at a NE tech event before.

I’ve spent the best part of fifteen years around the North East technology sector.

First in the product/creative team at a startup turned exited-scaleup. Then as a journalist. Then in areas like research, data analytics, sector development, policymaking and growth strategy. Whatever hat I’ve been wearing, I’ve always found storytelling to be important. Writing about… all of this.

I’ve actually lost count (praise be to AI automation in Airtable!) of the now thousands of articles, interviews, reports and newsletters I’ve written. I’ve covered startup launches, funding rounds, exits, ecosystem initiatives, policy announcements, grand plans, failed plans and the occasional genuinely transformative idea. As a result people like to throw labels at me. ‘Oh Jamie knows everyone’ or ‘Talk to Jamie he’s an expert’. This honestly makes me cringe.

I’ve always resisted the idea of expertise.

Partly because the more people insist they are experts, the more suspicious I become that they probably aren’t! There’s a cultural identity play here too, the North East retains a healthy allergy to self-importance, rightt? Plus I’m also a big believer that the longer you spend studying something, the more aware you become of how much remains uncertain. Or indeed, how much there still remains to know.

While reluctance remains, I’m accepting that the observations and knowledge I’ve accumulated do in fact amount to something useful.

See, you begin to recognise patterns. You remember what came before. You understand that today’s exciting new debate is often yesterday’s debate wearing a different jacket. You acquire context.

The thing I’ve been wrestling with recently is that observation alone eventually feels insufficient. It’s actually why I left full-time journalism. Sure, writing about ecosystems has value. Analysing them has value. Critiquing them certainly has value. But if you’ve spent years identifying problems, there comes a responsibility to help solve them too. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy working in the capacity I do. Trying to do something about challenges.

Strategy matters. Delivery matters too.

So that was probably what I enjoyed most about the Startup Hub, creating a space for founders to learn from founders. For years I’ve written about broadening participation in the ecosystem. This week I got to influence who was in the room and whose stories were heard. It wasn’t perfect but I’m confident it had merit.

For years I’ve argued that practical experience matters more than startup mythology. This week I got to spend a day drawing lessons from people who have actually built businesses.

One moment stayed with me and I seriously hope this isn’t too self-indulgent, reader. I interviewed Dr Arnab Basu, CEO of Kromek. He's raised $120m and scaled from... Sedgefield.

The first time I wrote about Kromek was more than a decade ago. At the time, I was a young (and pretty poor to be truthful) journalist trying to understand what the hell this company was actually doing. I’ve wanted to do a live Q&A with him for a long, long time. Some kids get Disneyland, others get a front row seat to radiation detection technology!

Essentially, we discussed innovation, leadership and company building in front of a room full of founders. It really served as a reminder of distance travelled. Both for me personally but the ecosystem, collectively, too.

The young founders I once interviewed now employ hundreds of people. Companies that once felt like ambitious startups have become established regional success stories. Founders who once sat in the audience now take to the stage to share their experiences.

The older I get, the less interested I become in declarations that the North East is either booming or doomed and the more interested I become in what is actually happening underneath the headlines.

This isn’t a ‘Hey reader my Startup Hub was perfect, look at the inspirational change instigated’ post. The North East has a plethora of active challenges. We still create too few startups. We still attract too little investment. We still struggle to consistently turn capability into scale. But it’s important to share how I see things that I find truly encouraging.

On wednesday this week, I saw serious founders building serious companies. I saw experience being shared openly. I saw ambition, resilience and capability distributed throughout a room that looked more representative of the North East than many ecosystem events I’ve attended over the years. Many of these people I have grown to love. I trust them. I respect them. Hell, I want to learn from them and be like them.

After fifteen years of writing about North East technology, that’s probably the conclusion I’ve become most confident making. We have great people. Talent exists. How we show up for each other matters.

If you can open a door for someone else, do it.

Right folks! Here’s your news from across the week, I hope you’ve had a great one whatever you’ve been up to. If I can help with your NE tech related endeavours, just holla. I’m super behind on inbox messages but will be catching up next week - just give me a nudge if you’ve not heard from me. Have a lovely weekend, Jamie

This week’s news

Former hedgehog lab bosses join forces to launch rival venture

Peter Bull covers TechNExt day by day in Rogue Planetoid

Healthtech spin-out launches mobility platform

Small business profits rising despite challenges in the economy, Sage survey says

Stephen Mitchell on the SQCDP journey

Executive coaching firm lands Mercia Ventures investment

Technology enabled care leader awarded OBE

HTG to showcase AI security technology

Post of the Week

Fair to say I write a few controversial things about socioeconomic growth in our fair region. But my word, if there’s one thing that riles you lot up it’s who gets Post of the Week! Anyway here’s someone looking for a new role, save your scathing emails you savages! Please engage and help Lisa our, below, if you can.

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“Did you bring a train pillow, Jamie? I've forgot mine!”, “have we got time to pop into Marksies for some fruit snacks?'“ and of course “they’ve apparently got this app thingy now you know. You scan a code and they bring the drinks to you! To your seat!”

Yes when Masahiro Hara invented the Quick Response code back in ‘94, I imagined he dreamt of use cases like this…

Anyway! Enough Hardesty nonsense. Where we at, tech friends?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a lot about capability. The North East has plenty of it. Smart people. Strong universities. Corporate players. Good work hubs. Dedicated support organisations. A community that increasingly shows up. None of that is in doubt. But, as we know, capability isn’t the same thing as performance.

Having assets and converting those assets into growth are two very different things. Nobody hands out prizes for possessing ingredients (imagine that episode of The GBBO! “You’re all winners” laughed Mary Berry, malevolently, knowing she only had ten minutes of filming to do before sneaking off for a cheeky half before lunch). Yes, the scoreboard that really matters is companies built, jobs created, investment attracted and lives improved.

That’s why I’ve spent much of the past month exploring questions that seems to have struck a chord with many readers: is the North East genuinely progressing, standing still, or slipping relative to other places? How do we become better at converting capability into company creation, scale-up growth, jobs and economic impact? How does substance match style?

The reality is that many of the challenges facing our ecosystem are not new. We’ve been discussing the likes of founder density, commercialisation, talent retention, capital and scale-up growth for, well, years.

That’s not necessarily a criticism. Perhaps it’s a sign of a sector that is maturing. Hear me out…

The conversation is gradually moving beyond identifying problems and towards something more important, from determining who is best placed to solve them, to how they should be solved and where collective effort can create the greatest impact.

This week’s stories caught my attention because they point towards that shift.

Spinout Inspo

Close to home, we’re seeing universities collaborate around commercialisation and spinout activity. This is important. The launch of the North East Spinout Inspire Fund seems to have got a strong show in the media rounds this week; it’s great to see this from the North East Strategic Mayoral Authority (Spare a thought for poor Dan in marketing who ordered those 1000 ‘NECA’ branded pencils last month).

The Spinout Inspire Fund will sit alongside the wider £90m Access to Finance infrastructure, deployed by the North East Fund and sponsored by the North East MSA, helping to fund university spinout pathways. We first saw the fund announced 18 months ago, it’s great that it’s already done three deals. We recently reported on the £1.1m into Gnosis Health and the £1.5m into H2CHP.

I actually really liked Andy Long’s comments, Chair of Universities for NE England. He said, ‘I am genuinely optimistic. Not because the problems are solved, but because for the first time in my experience, the right people around the table have agreed to take a risk together. In a sector that is sometimes better at analysing collective problems than solving them, that is worth noting.’

That last sentence is exactly the aforementioned ‘shift’ that I’m getting at; the step beyond problem-identification. Of course we need more of this.

Elsewhere, next week, TechNExt will bring together thousands of people from across the region’s technology community, creating opportunities for founders, investors, educators, corporates and policymakers to connect around shared ambitions. It was born as a direct response to the region lacking an ingredient that seemed to work for other UK tech ecosystems. Another potentially good thing.

Meanwhile, further afield in the North, regions such as West Yorkshire demonstrate what can happen when innovation, skills, business support and economic development are connected through a clear and consistent strategy. We’ve seen similar initiatives start to work in Northern England, Liverpool’s Mayoral Authority has had a Chief AI Officer (and office) in place for almost a year. We, in my honest opinion, still don’t talk about the collective northern tech ecosystem anywhere near enough.

Granted, none of these developments, on their own, create economic impact. But they should help create the conditions for it. In my best Mark Corrigan impression (yes reader, we need more Peep Show references in the Digest), chance would be a fine thing!

Ecosystems are not built by individual organisations acting alone. Rather, when institutions align around a common purpose and focus their resources on the challenges that matter most, the dial can shift. A common Northstar is welcome.

A few years ago, while working on the North of Tyne digital economy evidence base, we established a set of shared outcomes for the region’s technology sector: creating 1,300 new tech businesses, increasing revenues by £425m and supporting 10,000 people into technology careers.

The targets themselves weren’t perfect but valuable in the sense that they provided direction and a common reference point, focused on what should come out of the machine. They gave policymakers, universities, support organisations, investors and businesses a common understanding of what success looked like.

Ecosystems are complex. Hundreds of organisations make thousands of decisions every year. Without a shared destination, even well-intentioned activity can become fragmented. With one, individual interventions have a better chance of reinforcing one another. Collaboration is great to point to, what’s greater is being able to translate it into companies, jobs and economic impact out the other end.

The region still has much work to do here but it’s reassuring to document system strengtheners coupled with breakthroughs, developments and successes in the North East.

Notes from the Road

Moving away from the macro, indulge me reader as I tell you about my week. Well, before me ma chewed my ear off.

First up it’s Caroline Williamson’s last day at Software City today. Caroline is an outstanding human being and i’ve profiled her work to better our tech skills landscape in the Digest a few times before. I’ve watched Caroline mentor junior developers, help folks land jobs and match talent with industry in many pilot experience schemes. Wishing her the very best as she joins Accenture Newcastle.

Elsewhere I attended the Athena Labs demo day at The Catalyst, Newcastle. What stood out wasn’t a parade of venture-backed tech startups but a diverse group of emerging founders harnessing tech to tackle problems across education, health, construction and wellbeing. Most of the women pitching have entered this domain for the first time. All of this is new. Many had never been on stage before. Seriously, this isn’t easy. Sincere kudos to those giving it a go and sharing their stories.

Not every business needs to be a technology platform or raise investment to be valuable; we know this. I’d imagine some will explore their solution/business model further and find scale isn’t actually the right path for them. That’s completely fine.

Moreover, we know the very harsh and real truth of this world is that most startups fail. What I always enjoy, however, is seeing passionate people committed to solving genuine problems for customers. I was especially pleased to see some of the startups already revenue generating and in profit.

Right mates, apparently the QR codes aren’t working! Looks like your mans hobbling up to the food cart…

Have a belter weekend, hope to see some of your smiling faces at TechNExt next week. There’s many readers I've not met in person, feel free to grab me and let me know how I can help. Cheers, Jamie

PS On Sunday I completed the 2nd of my 3 summer endurance challenges to raise money for Mountain Rescue. Sincere thanks to all of you for your support!

This week’s news

WiFi is a bit patchy. If links don’t work copy and paste the headline into your search engine. Yep, grannies sucking eggs and all that…

£22m fund launched for NE spinouts

NE startups named on Northern PraeSeed programme

Newcastle to host landmark cyber summit

NE BIC CEO to step down

Cleantech leaders form new Teesside venture

Post of the Week

In last week’s issue we documented concerns relating to the region’s performance and capability as a place for tech startup success. Today we explore potential solutions.

It’s relatively easy to pull together data and discuss metrics like rankings, investment figures and related ecosystem weaknesses. It’s perhaps even easier to accidentally convince ourselves that the situation is hopeless! I don’t think that’s true.

The region can point towards talented founders, technical capability and ambitious people. You read examples of such in this newsletter most weeks. What we lack is density. Too many founders are building in isolation. Too few have access to experienced peers, early-stage capital or large organisations willing to become customers.

What I find encouraging is that most of the solutions are not particularly mysterious. In other words, this isn’t a problem we don’t know how to solve.

Plus, evidence and good intent also exists in some areas already. We need more founders spending time with founders, we see this in time-bound Software City events and programmes. Moreover we see it in supportive networks like Tech Builders Newcastle and Silicon Mingle. Furthermore I see it in ad hoc introductions on a weekly basis, where help is exchanged and knowledge transferred. Brilliant!

Yet we need more experienced operators and successful entrepreneurs recycling their knowledge back into the next generation. Similarly, we need more local angel investors willing to back ambitious teams earlier. And yes, we also need expertise from outside the region having a formal means to feed in too. Systems thinking is required.

Now, generic ‘business support’ bundles won’t cut it here. Emerging high potential tech companies need stronger pathways into customers, particularly across corporates, universities and the public sector. The operating models of such companies vastly differ from that of digitally enabled firms; conflation here isn’t helpful.

And complementary to engineering change, we need to get better at measuring and telling our own story, so that progress is visible and success compounds. None of this will happen overnight but ecosystems are ultimately built through thousands of small connections between people. Micro and macro movements matter (phwoar stick that on a tote bag, reader).

If we can increase the frequency and quality of those connections over the next few years, many of the metrics we worry about today will begin to look after themselves. Sure, public sector organisations have a role to play and should absolutely be part of the conversation. However, I don't think this is a challenge that can be solved through grants and programmes alone.

Strong startup ecosystems emerge when founders, investors, corporates, universities and experienced operators all contribute to a shared environment where ambitious companies have a better chance of succeeding. We absolutely can come together collaboratively to drive this agenda and mould the conditions that allow more North East founders to build, scale and stay here.

H2 2026: An open sourced agenda to building a better tech startup ecosystem

It’s important to be honest about our challenges but critique without contribution isn’t particularly useful. So here’s my attempt to be transparent about where I intend to focus my own time and energy during the second half of 2026.

These aren’t definitive answers, they’re also deliberately pragmatic given time and resource (before I’m called too unambitious by some emailers…). Yes, here are simply some areas where I think we can make meaningful progress, working across different ecosystem touch points, especially if enough people decide they’re worth supporting.

This is by no means ‘Jamie telling everyone else what to do’; so think less manifesto and more ya man’s open-source to-do list. If you think you can help me, let’s talk!

1. Free bimonthly founder masterclass and peer meets

My research indicates that 10-15% of the region’s wider, near-4000 strong digital-technology stock display traits pertaining to high-potential growth.

If perhaps 100 founders building technology products can assemble every couple of months, I’ll happily bring out of region investors, scaleups or key operators into region for a focal Q and A exchange.

I think this would not only bring founders together (it surprises me just how many of our established founders don’t actually know each other) but gaining insights and connections can certainly add value to one’s startup journey.

As Paul Smith has long argued, this doesn’t need to be formal or massively budget-backed. I could do with a bit of help from local tech companies in covering a space and some drinks, I’ll do the logistics. My question to you reader: would you come along?

Success metric: Three active founder events by year-end, 300 founders assembled.

2. A customer access programme

I believe good incubators and accelerators have a role to play in developing the region’s tech ecosystem, particularly when we think about access and maturity. Though I repeatedly see issues attached to some programmes of that ilk.

Most people will tell you the main issue, heck the only issue, is funding. I think that’s rubbish. Instead I think we should be considering custom and access to markets much more than we institutionally seem to in this part of the world.

I honestly believe a structured innovation programme matching startups with the likes of local authorities, NHS trusts, universities, housing associations, corporate partners etc. Yep, I’m talking about expediting the often laborious time lost searching for relevant decision makers, product testers and potential buyers.

Really I’m getting at heading towards venture clienting and moving away from the classic North East approach of… grants. To be clear, I’m not advocating displacing well-run acceleration (the region needs that) but a dedicated custom focus would be a pilot I’d like to see. Engineering this would look like a public/private collab.

Success metric: If ten startups land meaningful pilot contracts before Christmas, that’s more arguably valuable than another cohort programme.

3. Growing the North East angel pipeline

There are hundreds of successful founders, executives and business owners across the region who have never written an angel cheque. You don’t need £50m; even fifty people writing £10k-£25k cheques would go a long way.

I understand formal activity exists around corralling people and, in some cases, educating them and demystifying the subject matter. I’d argue this activity does lack prominence though. We have a distinct pre-seed problem in the North East, objective evidence attests to that.

Perhaps I can help here more through facilitation and storytelling, as opposed to architecture. If you’re in this space, I’m here to complement not compete.

Success metric: 15-30 new active angels by December.

4. Publish a Live Startup Ecosystem Dashboard

This was a recommendation I formally made in regards to the region’s AIGZ but there’s much merit when we consider the region’s wider tech growth strategy, beyond AI alone. We absolutely should be operationalising tracking and open data; certianly before any regional strategy is bandied around. How can we know what to do when we don’t know what needs to be fixed?

Most ecosystem conversations are driven by anecdotes. To few of us are tracking or are even aware of things like: New startups, Investment raised, Founder diversity, Startup jobs, Exits and acquisitions. I’ve actually been documenting demand for my office hours and associated founder sentiment, rich data which can help inform direction. I’d happily open it up and feed it into something bigger. A shared source of truth, if you will. This, I believe, is a public responsibility.

Success metric: Dashboard publicly available and referenced regularly by ecosystem stakeholders.

5. Founder talent advance

One of the region’s biggest weaknesses is startup experience density. The answer doesn’t lie in importing people who’ve had success selling used cars into running or mentoring the next generation of founder-led startups.

Rather, we can mould programmatic activity to to match teachings with operational value from experienced leaders. Even one day a month where scale-up operators, experienced founders, product leaders or technical leaders can exchange knowledge would be a real boon.

The strongest ecosystems recycle talent repeatedly through new ventures. Talent concentration and operational experience are repeatedly identified as key differentiators in successful places.

Success metric: 50 mentor-founder matches. I’ve started some of this via office hours but would welcome conversation on formal means across regional geographies.

6. Tell 50 Founder Stories Relentlessly

As recently highlighted, the North East is often absent from national startup narratives despite genuine success stories. We can’t wait for others.

Between July and Christmas, I’ll try to profile one case study a week in the Digest and amalgamate them into a bespoke publication by end of year. I’ll use this to pitch and position the region’s talent.

Success metric: 50 founder stories published and measurable increases in national coverage, following content referrals.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate some of this naturally extends into the day job I’m lucky to have in the ecosystem. Equally, much of it does not. Hopefully this is insightful and the spirit of collaboration comes across. Of course, I welcome any healthy challenge too.

To paraphrase Paul, too often do we see the ecosystem’s limitations reduced to an ‘access to funding’ obscurity. Rather, I think if we three attack the ecosystem's most immediate bottlenecks: founder density, revenue generation and market access, we then shift the dial. It’s not on the public sector to fix all of this and change won’t happen overnight; I’ll report back on progress and learnings.

Always happy to talk more if you’re interested. Cheers, Jamie

This week’s news

£1.1m investment for Newcastle spin-out to scale Parkinson’s technology

KLIK unlocks community platform access

Magpies score with AI fan experience platform

Teesside gaming company hails US trade mission

Cybersecurity firm marks milestone with warning

NEMSA (formerly NECA) to take founders to Climb26

Post of the Week

Newcastle startup Aircards is taking North East innovation onto the global stage through a partnership with Lenovo, Intel and Newcastle United, using AI and computer vision technology to transform fan engagement while creating opportunities in international sports markets.

Check out Paul’s post below to learn more!

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If you’re a regular Digest reader, or you’ve followed my work for some time now, you’ll appreciate I believe that two things can be true simultaneously: there are good things happening in the North East tech scene & there are things we drastically need to improve.

I appreciate it’s important to ‘talk up’ our tech industry (you’ll see me do that in rooms like this or in the media publicly like this) but I think I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t also share evidence-based concerns. That’s fair and normal, right? Hence recent Digests extensively looking at diversity problems or AI concerns or growth barriers in areas like startup investment.

In today’s issue I’m exploring technology capability and startup ecosystem performance. The two are related but they’re not the same.

Sobering coverage

It’s no secret that I like number-based reports. They give us evidence in objective form. I find them useful. Tech sector coverage, things like power lists, puff pieces and glitzy exposés, is a little different. This stuff is often subjective and limited, though I will concede it can have some use too. It’s true the best researchers value both quantitative and qualitative data.

It bugs me when our region is overlooked in national or pan-northern coverage. Ok, the North East is a small place relative to other UK regions. Though our challenge lies beyond spatial density alone; factors like us not being the best at promoting ourselves or those writing pieces not looking hard enough come into play too.

Now I signed off last week’s issue with a worrying nod to recent reports and tech sector coverage, which felt pretty sobering for the North East. Right now the region’s tech scene is faring poorly in both objective and subjective reporting.

I’ll actually start with the latter. In the last fortnight, industry coverage and UK tech storytelling has barely taken us into account. The latest Tech Nation Breakout 50 featured just three North East firms. The recent Barclays Eagle Labs AI report featured one North East company. Prolific North’s Northern Tech Scaleups gave only one inclusion from our region. In short, poor visibility.

While not great, that’s not too uncommon. It’s actually the hard data, the objective reporting, that I’m more bothered about…

Startup Blink last week ranked Newcastle as 182nd on its 2026 Global Index. The city fell three places from its 2025 rank, after falling seven places the year prior. The Blink is a recognised annual ‘barometer’ resource. It ranks startup and innovation environments of over 1,000 cities and 100 countries worldwide; it’s possible Newcastle will fall out of the top 200 in the next couple of years on current trajectory.

Now this week, Dealroom published its new Global Tech Ecosystem Index 2026. Again this is an industry-leading resource which ranks more than 300 startup and technology ecosystems around the world.

Newcastle’s position caught my eye. The city sits at #240 globally, down 14 places from last year’s ranking. My instant reaction? Another drop.

So what does this actually mean?

These rankings aren’t measuring how many networking events happened last year, how busy coworking spaces feel or how many startup support programmes exist. Rather, Dealroom’s methodology looks at a much broader set of factors including venture capital investment, startup enterprise value, scale-up success, university spinouts, talent, research activity and ultimately… ecosystem momentum.

In simple terms, the work identifies which places consistently create companies that grow, scale and generate economic value. If you’re still with me, this is important because it shifts the conversation from activity to outcomes.

Punching above our weight?

Seeing Newcastle’s decline has left me thinking about a phrase I’ve heard throughout my entire career in regional tech:

“The North East punches above its weight.”

The more I look at the data, the more I think the answer depends entirely on what we’re measuring.

If we’re talking about technology capability, then I think the argument is compelling.

For a region of around 2.7 million people, we have a pretty extraordinary collection of assets. Sage remains one of Britain’s most successful software companies. Atom Bank helped pioneer digital banking. We have five universities producing talent and research. National centres of excellence. A growing AI capability. Significant data centre investment. Strengths in software, gaming, advanced manufacturing, data and increasingly AI. Viewed through that lens, Newcastle and the wider North East compare favourably with many places of a similar size.

But there is another conversation and it’s one we don’t always separate clearly enough. The startup ecosystem.

When I look at Dealroom, StartupBlink, venture investment data, seed-stage activity and the composition of national growth rankings, I find it much harder to argue that we punch above our weight there. In truth, we struggle.

In 2024, the North East accounted for roughly 81 of more than 4,000 UK venture deals and around 33 of nearly 2,000 seed-stage deals. Tiny.

Increasingly, I think there are two North East tech stories unfolding at the same time.

The first is the story of a region that has built significant technology capability. The second is the story of a startup ecosystem that has yet to convert enough of that capability into a critical mass of high-growth companies. As someone passionate about local tech startups, this scares me.

The challenge facing us has never really been whether smart people exist here. They do. Nor whether good companies exist here. They do. Nor whether important infrastructure exists here. It does.

The challenge is conversion. I’m talking… turning more talent into founders. Turning more founders into scale-ups. Turning more scale-ups into the next generation of founders, operators and investors.

The ecosystems pulling away globally have become self-sustaining systems. Success recycles. Experienced operators become founders. Founders become angels. Angels back the next wave. Capital, knowledge and ambition circulate often enough that growth stops feeling exceptional and starts feeling expected. That is what ecosystem density actually looks like.

It’s why I pay attention to things like Dealroom and StartupBlink, even when they make for uncomfortable reading.

I actually think in many NE circles we talk loudly about our propensity for innovation and we giddily point to the assets feeding into the system. Things go quieter when someone mentions what comes out the other end. We should be far more cognisant of how our place converts talent, research, capital and capability into companies of consequence.

And this is why I bang the drum so much for community and for startups. Why I want the private, public and academia forces to come together and drive this agenda. Why we need more activity. We have to do more.

If you’d like to learn more about the North East’s tech startup capability, notable breakthroughs and how we go about strengthening what we have, please join me for a day dedicated to exactly this in Durham next month. I’ll even let you in for free!

Thanks, Jamie

This week’s news

Local tech giants get behind North East-wide TechNExt 2026

New products drive revenue growth for rebranded Gateshead edtech

Kani Payments named on Prolific North ‘Tech Scaleups to Watch’ list

Metro control room gets £8.8m digital-tech upgrade

Smart traffic tech slashes wait times in Tees Valley

Newcastle University’s pitch to businesses and investors with new ways to access expertise

Newcastle life sciences firm SkinBioTherapeutics completes investigation into former CEO

The Training MarketPlace named AI in Learning award finalist

Post of the Week

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Aye. It’s Bank Holiday Weekend, the sun’s oot, Newcastle is forecast to hit a tropical 26 degrees and here you are reader… stuck in an office opening a newsletter about regional technology. Not quite the American Dream. Or even the Geordie Dream. Queue the deeply melancholy music!

But don’t you worry, reader. We’re in this together. It’ll be 5pm soon. Down with the keyboards and LinkedIn replies; up with the Stella and SPF15 baaaby!

Until then, allow me and my trusty bag of tech news to keep you company in the trenches. Hey I’m practically a modern John Steinbeck at this point; it’s a struggle but it’s a struggle we’re sharing, reader.

It was at this moment Jamie somehow… stopped writing about startup investment patterns. He looked out of the office window and dreamed of a life… outside. A better place. A place where dreams are made…

The Grapes of Radge

By half past ten the heat had already taken hold of Newcastle and the Quayside Wetherspoons had responded in the only way it truly knows how: by treating a mild glimpse of Mediterranean weather as both civic holiday and medical emergency.

Jim-Joad sat in the beer garden amongst the pale sons of the northern knowledge economy. Startup lads and lasses roasted gently in the morning sun like Greggs sausage rolls forgotten under the heat lamp. Shirts abandoned. Sunglasses deployed prematurely. Steve Cole ensured pints arrived at tables with the frequency and seriousness of intravenous fluids.

Around them drifted the language of the modern tech scene.

“Runway.”
“Product-market fit.”
“Pre-seed.”
“Distribution.”
“Jony Ive studied at Northumbria, ya na mate.”

An affluent, middle-aged man, wearing an intoxicating amount of Joop, explained “the future of agentic workflows” to someone visibly just trying to enjoy her oat milk iced matcha latte. Another refreshed LinkedIn every ten seconds hoping somebody from London had validated his existence overnight. Somewhere down the beer garden, a founder from an award-winning company was explaining he’d “basically not slept all week” while ordering his third Madri before 11am.

And still, the city glittered around them.

The recruiters. The designers. The SaaS founders. The lads “just doing a bit of consultancy at the minute, y’know”. Somewhere in the middle of it all you suspected Dylan McKee was probably pushing code, training for a run and networking simultaneously, while the rest of the region slowly dissolved into Nivea and imported lager.

A vape cloud rolled across the Tyne and hung over the river like the ghost of heavy industry returning in infinitely more annoying form.

There was something strangely beautiful in it all though.

Beneath the buzzwords and personal branding (and £150 Patagonia gilets) sat the same old North East story: people trying to build decent lives from shifting ground. Hoping the thing they’re making matters. Hoping this region matters. Hoping that maybe this time opportunity won’t always belong to somewhere further south.

No polished conference stage would recognise this as ecosystem building. But maybe it is. Semi-sunburnt founders and tech workers gathering beside the river, drinking pints before noon and convincing each other the future can still be built here.

Our people are good people; our people are kind people…

Wow I just had the strangest dream. Where were we? Ah yes, digestable technology updates! Before Newcastle fully transitions into a three-day outdoor pub, here’s this week’s news…

Great to see some official announcements do the rounds this week. We’re delighted to see Rightbrain’s raise generate a load of tech press coverage, while Friend of the Digest Ian Griffiths formally brings his startup Surff to market. I’m delighted both Pete from Rightbrain and Ian will be sharing their stories and insights at this year’s TechNExt festival too, which returns next month.

Stay cool folks, Jamie

This week’s news

Newcastle entrepreneur Ian Griffiths launches new online decision-tracking business

Rightbrain AI secures £3m investment to help other firms adopt latest models

Sage grows revenues and profits on cloud products as more customers adopt AI

Newcastle University launches Newcastle Innovations

Features

TechNExt Startup Hub

North East global tech success story to close TechNExt festival Startup Hub

Join me in Durham next month at the TechNExt Startup Hub! We’ve pulled together a number of founders at different stages, building right here in the region. Complementary to our founder story track is a series of practical workshops. See you there!?

Sector inclusivity

At the start of this year we committed to scrutinising ecosystem efforts pertaining to inclusivity. We’ve done much in H1 so far, particularly focusing on the challenges facing female tech startup founders. If you’re interested in catching up on what we’ve explored, the following bygone Digests may be of interest:

#321 - Addressing our D&I problem

#322 - Sector discourse a prevailing problem

#324 - NE AI overwhelmingly pale, male & stale

#327 - Beyond the 2%, actioning positive change

One of the more interesting reads this week came via KLIK SaaS founder Kelly Whitfield, reflecting on joining a delegation of North East female founders at Downing Street. You can read it below:

The real reason so few female founders secure funding

At the centre of Kelly’s piece is the statistic that less than 2% of UK venture capital funding goes to female founders. It’s a figure we know has barely shifted in a decade and, frankly, should make the industry squirm (at the very least).

Kelly’s argument is compelling because it moves beyond the generic ‘investors should do better’ rhetoric and into the reality of what building a company actually looks like as a woman, particularly outside London. Individual testimonies from those building, and therefore having lived experience, matters.

Kelly writes openly about building profitable businesses around raising children, deliberately slowing growth because family came first and only now, approaching 50, feeling able to fully commit to a venture-scale company.

This is relevant because it exposes something the startup ecosystem often avoids admitting: the modern venture-backed founder archetype was largely built around the assumption somebody else is handling the domestic load. Historically, that ‘somebody else’ has overwhelmingly been women, right?

But there’s also a wider conversation here that the ecosystem still struggles to have honestly.

Too much regional debate collapses everything into ‘access to finance’, as though funding itself is the root cause of weak startup outcomes. It’s an argument Newcastle-ecosystem architect Paul Smith overtly challenged last month.

Paul’s core point is uncomfortable for many but important: investment-readiness is downstream of deeper structural issues we rarely discuss properly. Founder density. Ambition. Technical capability. Community. Visible role models. Early experimentation. Ecosystem conditioning. The willingness, and ability, to repeatedly engage investors over months-long fundraising campaigns. Many people in this sphere, even with good intentions, miss this.

In other words, the issue may not simply be that female founders, or North East founders more broadly, cannot access capital. It may also be that too few people are being structurally enabled, encouraged and supported to build venture-backable companies in the first place.

To be clear, I’m not saying this invalidates Kelly’s argument. If anything, it strengthens it. Once we move beyond the simplistic ‘investors = bad’ framing, we begin asking the harder and more useful questions...

• How many talented women never attempt high-growth startups because the personal risk is too high?

• How many deliberately build smaller, safer businesses around childcare or financial stability?

• How many never see people like themselves represented in the ecosystem at all?

• How many women, building businesses relevant to the 2% venture figure, are thrown in and serviced with any business in search of funding?

• How many founders (male or female) actually understand what venture-scale company building really is or demands?

Sure, the North East absolutely has capital gaps. It also has a founder pipeline gap, a role model gap, an ecosystem density gap and, arguably, an ambition gap formed over generations of economic and cultural conditioning. Throwing another fund at all this won’t solve the problem.

Building communities, confidence, capability and visible pathways into dedicated tech entrepreneurship… that’s probably the smarter bet.

Reports

And last but not least today, one for the nerds. I see you.

Startup Blink: Global Ecosystem Index 2026

Tech Nation: The Breakout 50

Barclays Eagle Labs: UK AI 100 Ones to Watch

Here’s a post I did this week qualifying and contextualising the above, through the NE lens.

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So, for one, I’m finding myself blissfully staring at said fencing. Perhaps this is confirmation I’ve officially reached Old Man status? But I’m Happy Old Man, not Grumpy Old Man for a change so that’s nice, innit?

Two, the tech hubs of the region need to vastly UP their game in workplace discourse, that’s for damn sure. Overheard in my back garden this week we’ve had:

• Still don’t think 100 men would chin that gorilla (see here, reader)

• I ate a full jar of Nutella before bed last night

• Is a baboon a chimpanzee?

I bet you don’t get that in the Sage boardroom or along the halls of Durham Uni’s supercomputing campus, eh? Do better tech bros, do better.

Anyway that’s enough hominidae existentialism for today (Listen you try and keep a regional technology newsletter interesting for 300 issues and you’ll lose the plot too), let’s have a gander at what’s been happenin’ in the North East tech ecosystem this week.

Sovly Sovly, Catchy Monkey

More than 50 North East AI founders, investors and ecosystem leaders gathered at Atom bank’s Newcastle HQ this week for the launch of the region’s AI Growth Zone Prospectus and a visit from the UK Government’s new Sovereign AI Unit.

The event showcased growing national interest in the region’s AI capabilities, with discussions spanning investment, adoption, infrastructure and how the North East turns early momentum into long-term economic value.

Hopes for 5,000 North East jobs in AI are the ‘absolute minimum’, regional leader says

There’s been much speculation as to what the region’s AI future will look like. It’s true that hype has somewhat dialled down since Trump’s UK tech mission last year, where he was accompanied by the likes of Google, Nvidia and OpenAI. Though to be fair to Donald, I suppose he’s busy Macaque-ing America Great Again (I acknowledge that was bad even for me).

Point being, I think this week felt like the start of something. Building on foundations of policy, research, research and insights, we should soon see the Growth Zone mobilise and manifest into ways in which North East individuals and organisations can benefit from. I see real talent in the North East. It’s time to break down barriers and look at how we can responsibly steer this technology and its potential for our benefit.

Access Given

You’ve no idea how close I came to writing gibbon instead of given there, reader.

Anyway! Also making waves in the region this week was the return of Newcastle digital accessibility conference and community initiative, Access Given.

The brainchild of Ellen Forster and Michelle O'Conor, the event focused on making websites, products and digital experiences more inclusive by design, bringing together practitioners, advocates and organisations to treat accessibility as a core part of good digital practice. I heard it was excellent, well done ladies. Important work.

This week’s news

For anyone paying attention in last week’s Digest, I told you there’d be a Kromek story this week!. I need to go and interview these guys or get them on stage. I don’t think there’s been a North East tech company to have more news releases in the last ten years. Read about their latest below.

Elsewhere, check out Tech Nation’s Breakout 50 report. I’ve only just had a chance to skim it, I think I can see two North East companies there. When we look at the tech sector collectively in region, we do punch above our weight.

However, we don’t when it comes to tech startups. It’s good to see a couple of our firms highlighted in national initiatives like this but we need more of it. More importantly, we need more activity.

Finally I’m pleased to report that Friend of the Digest Atif Syed has revealed that Wootzano is is “back” after previously being wound up. Read all about it below.

Wootzano robotics firm is back after winding up

County Durham tech firm Kromek seals £8.8m in new orders amid global demand

Kinewell celebrates double contract win

North East AI Growth Zone drives skills boost

Cyber security specialist secures funding for expansion plans

Workforce technology provider eyes growth with new Sunderland office

Female founder initiative launches Newcastle board

hedgehog lab strengthens leadership team with promotions

Managed services provider joins newly formed PE-backed tech group

Charlie Hoult to speak at Insider’s North East 42 under 42 drinks event

Ineos co-founder tops North East rich list with wealth of £4.74bn

From the Community

I was expecting it to be a slow news week, reader, so I’ve written an article on Community this morning, you can read it in our Features section below if you like. However there’s been a good bit to get through today.

We’ll end on opportunities flagged by folks working across the tech scene:

• Justin Souter highlights free training for tech enthusiasts in the region, hoping to bolster their skills in emerging tech and startup insights.

• Sharon McKee reminds us that the TDC Startup Comp takes places next wednesday at Grainger Hub

• Russell Mills is running free vibecoding workshops fortnightly over the summer at Flok coworking space in Middlesbrough

• TechNExt Startup Hub will take place in just over a month. I’ll be releasing the details next week. For now, you can secure your place for free.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone. We’ve had a fair few new subscribers join us this week. I should have said, welcome! If you’re wondering if things are always this good content-wise, the answer is: no. This is the best issue we’ve ever done or likely will do.

We’ll be back and going bananas for regional tech prowess next Friday, folks. Cheers, Jamie

Features

Tech communities need more than cheerleading

Something I’ve alluded to a number of times in the Digest is the difference between championing and challenge. I think both are important when it comes to growing tech ecosystems. Rarely, however, do I see places get the balance right.

On Championing

Championing is easy to understand, right? From backing and encouraging people, to going the extra mile of opening doors and making introductions… that’s the bedrock of what many good folks do in the normal, day to day actions we enjoy across the ecosystem. I benefit from others doing it for me and vice-versa. I think we all should take responsibility to strengthen our communities that way at a micro level. We don’t need to make a super song and dance about it either. As I say, the norm.

Then there’s the more overt championing. The public belief. Loudly and consistently in the media, or on social media or in person at events. There’s a role to play here in terms of macro direction of travel or strategy for the region. I recognise that too.

Sometimes I see that loud championing in a hollow fashion. A bit too much style and not enough substance. Or worse, as the substitute for more concrete action or intervention. A papering over the cracks, so to speak.

However, when we really consider our messages, the channels by which we’re delivering them and of course, the audience we’re trying to permeate… then that stuff has huge potential for serious value-add. We certainly have amazing assets, companies and people to champion here.

On Challenge

Challenge is different.

Challenge is the difficult conversation. On a micro level, it can be the uncomfortable feedback. The ‘I think you’re capable of more than this’ or ‘this is good activity but it misses X, Y or Z’. The refusal to let people settle for easy answers, lazy thinking or self-imposed ceilings is perennially difficult to both give and receive.

It’s even harder at a macro level. Ok, it’s easy to performatively point the finger in a direction via LinkedIn to whip up the masses but to do it in a way that holds power to account and is earnest in engineering change… that’s a real skill.

I think we often frame championing and challenge as opposites when they’re actually partners. They can work in symbion and propel the needs of places.

Achieving balance

Championing without challenge can become hollow cheerleading. Everybody claps but nowt… grows. Equally, challenge without championing just feels like criticism. People shut down because they don’t feel seen, understood or supported enough to hear it. Let me be clear, I have and continue to make mistakes when it comes to a healthy balance. Just ask my emailers…

The people who have had the biggest impact on my life have done both. They backed me publicly and corrected me privately. They encouraged ambition whilst grounding ego. We all have an ego or a belief system; we all look at the world through our individual lenses. So yeah, I’m fortunate to have people who’ve made me feel capable whilst also refusing to let me drift into complacency or off-piste directions altogether.

It’s particularly tough to get the balance right in leadership. Certainly in growing communities. Especially in ecosystems where relationships matter and where people understandably want positivity, momentum and encouragement (and sometimes even easy lives).

But if you genuinely care about people, organisations or places, I don’t think your job is simply to applaud. I think it’s to help people become better versions of themselves, even when that occasionally creates discomfort.

Some of the hardest moments in my own life and career have ultimately become defining ones because somebody challenged me honestly instead of simply telling me what I wanted to hear.

Equally, some of the moments where I found belief again came because somebody chose to champion me when I’d lost confidence in myself. So yes, I think both matter. And all of this rests on actually giving a damn in the first place.

If you’ve stuck with me today I’m basically saying: Ecosystems need support, they also need stretching. The rare people who can do both well are usually the ones who leave the deepest mark on us. I can think of 5 people off the top of my head who do this for me; I hope you can point towards your own examples too.

I’ve previously been pretty unhappy when working in other parts of the UK. What I cherish, truly, about the North East is the fact that most people, the majority in fact, want other people in this region to succeed. I want that. And I think it’s ok to have optimism accompanied by realism.

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Anyway! Enough about my technical prowess. Let’s hoy some news down your necks.

First up we have good news for a long-established regional innovator. Subsea engineering tech specialist SMD has seen further growth in revenue and profits, as its chairman says it’s on track towards £100m revenue. We’ve previously contextualised SMD’s role in the ecosystem back in Issue #293. Check it oot here if you fancy a refresher.

Elsewhere it’s been interesting to read about a handful of North East businesses which were named among those in the UK to be handed the King's Awards for Enterprise. While that sounds like a load of made-up nonsense, it’s probably fair to recognise that the awards pay tribute to ‘outstanding businesses from across the UK and Channel Islands for their contribution to economic growth and improving lives’.

Flippancy aside, that’s important. I’m genuinely a fan of firms which are generating real, tangible value that support our socioeconomic conditions here in the North East. Tech firms named as part of this include North Shields-based audit software business Inflo Group, Prudhoe-based drone capture tech creator Openworks Engineering and IT specialist Forfusion, based at Cobalt Park. Nifty!

Have a good weekend, gang. Cheers, Jamie

P.S. It’s the first of my three summer endurance challenges tomorrow. I’ll be hiking up a mountain in the Lakes. I will of course try my hardest not to plummet to an untimely death. After all, there’s probably a Kromek shareholder story that needs to be circulated next Friday and heaven forbid you miss out on that, reader! Thanks for the ongoing fundraiser support, it means a lot. Cheers.

This week’s news

Subsea innovator SMD on track towards £100m revenue following strong year

Five North East companies celebrate prestigious King’s Awards for Enterprise

NEBIC to run trio of Sunderland business centres

Sunderland tech boss welcomes Heathrow expansion plans

Coaching firm agrees Sage partnership

Teesside driverless freight plans move forward

Startup Spotlight

I’ve not done too many startup spotlights of late. With news-flow somewhat slowing down as we approach the summer, I’ll likely be dedicating space to shout about some of the early stage tech businesses emerging on our regional stage. Please keep an eye out for updates and if you/your network can add value, please do lend your support.

Introducing… Skillora

Skillora is an AI-driven grassroots sports platform focused on improving youth engagement, retention, wellbeing and soft skills development through personalised AI experiences, gamification and team-based progression.

Founder Josh Robson has been working with Innovate UK and is currently piloting/refining the platform with grassroots football focus initially. Josh has developed an AI coaching tool, part of Skillora’s MVP, that takes parent coaches 30 seconds to create their session compared to the usual 45 minute industry average.

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I’m somewhere off the A68 this morning, on route to Kielder Forest. Ooo Jamie, are you off to see some disruptive agritech startups revolutionising everything from how we grow food to how we flush our toilets or something, mate? Well no, not quite. I’m actually just taking a day off and going for a cycle. However! If I do bump into some untamed techies in the wilderness, I’ll be sure to report back...

So what IS actually happening in the North East tech scene, I hear you cry! Well, Newcastle’s iamproperty is creating new jobs. The company, which has modernised house selling with a series of tech solutions, says it plans to grow its auction department to more than 200 employees by next year. Good stuff!

Elsewhere it’s been reported that North East robotics innovator Wootzano had a ‘crucial’ insolvency hearing this month, the latest in a saga with Innovate UK. You may remember founder Atif Syed going public on the situation, with the company facing shutdown after a court order initiated by Innovate UK Loans froze its bank accounts for months despite an order book of £237m. Hopefully we’ve more clarity on Wootzano’s future in the coming weeks.

To leave you with something positive today, I am delighted to share that a North East technology conference is set to return later this year, bringing together industry experts to explore the future of cloud computing.

Yes, the AWS North Community Conference, powered by digital product engineering firm Leighton, will take place at The Baltic in Gateshead, on Thursday, October 15.

The one-day event aims to support the region’s growing tech sector by connecting professionals, innovators and global thought leaders within the AWS ecosystem. This is a big deal for the region as it demonstrates both community and connectivity with our ecosystem, with participants travelling from across the world to engage.

Have a lovely sunny weekend, folks. Cheers, Jamie

P.S. Thank you for continuing to support and share my summer endurance challenge fundraiser. We’ve got Challenge #1 a week tomorrow; send thoughts, prayers and cans of Guinness please pals.

This week’s news

New jobs created as Newcastle’s iamproperty grows auction department

Autonomous vehicles project at port puts region at forefront of technology

Wootzano set for crucial insolvency hearing this morning

Vianet Group names new CEO following solid year of growth

Northern Gritstone announces £20m rolling close

Features

Immersive Van Gogh show heads to Newcastle this summer

Annerin Productions has reported record UK ticket sales for Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience ahead of its run at Utilita Arena Newcastle from July 12 to August 9.

Such installations, i.e. turning static art into multi-sensory, tech-driven experiences, seem to have a real audience nowadays.

Esteemed Digest purists might think otherwise but I’m not sure there’s a better way to appreciate art than to turn it into a massive screensaver, call it ‘immersive’ and charge £25 a head, reader.

The internet is splitting in two

The internet is splitting into two worlds, writes Paul Smith. On one hand we’ve AI and bots doing things for us (searching, booking, answering), meaning we barely visit websites anymore, and another where people move deliberately to have real, human experiences online.

So instead of one ‘web’, we’ve now got a functional, invisible layer that just gets stuff done, and a smaller, more intentional space where people actually spend time, connect, and care about what they’re consuming. Check out Paul’s piece exploring this in more detail.

Ireland Needs More Great Startups, Not More Startup Theatre

I like this piece from Joe Lennon in Ireland. He argues that Ireland needs to stop rewarding startup ‘theatre’, i.e. success emphasised as events, hype and optics, and instead focus its energy on building and backing real companies solving real problems that can actually scale. To be blunt, we can empathise with this in the North East.

Last week I wrote about growing our tech ecosystem via corralling more people into the sector and encouraging experimentation and failure. Though encouraging failure only works if people are actually… trying to build something. That should be a given!

How AI can complement the communications discipline

I gave a talk to CIPR NE, a regional comms professional forum, last week, exploring both the North East’s AI ecosystem and the impact of the mainstream AI boom on the communications profession.

Helen Fox has written up the session if you’re interested. As ever, happy share slides and notes from the session. Or if you’re in a comms-related role/needing help with comms in your business and need a sounding board, feel free to give me a shout.

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Oh god, so what’s he going to talk about? Oh no… please, no… is he reaching for his… graphs and data charts… holy sh-

Fear not, dear reader! While I am the little tech-tubbster who ate aaaall the pie charts, I’m actually just going to chuck some anecdotes at you today.

Since returning to Software City I reintroduced office hours 3 weeks ago today. Coupled with a few jaunts I’ve had across the region, I’ve done 20 to 25 one to ones with founders or folks considering starting up in the region. As you might guess, I’ve really loved this. I’ve met some wonderful people.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Brave new world

First, it’s been interesting to consider who is actually turning up and how far their starting point sits, certainly from where the ecosystem often judges value to reside.

A good number of people I’ve met are completely new to this world. Not even ‘early-stage founders’ with something to show. Rather, they’re just… normal people. Carers, baristas, career-switchers, people with ideas rooted in lived experience rather than frameworks or ‘knowledge-economy’ touch points. And such people talk to me without any real exposure to the language we take for granted in the industry.

I’ve had conversations where MVP, validation, even basic customer discovery are landing for the first time. My purpose isn’t to tell them what to do but it’s fun to see the shift happening in front of you as someone moves from ‘I’ve got an idea’ to ‘Oh ok I actually need to be able to learn how to test this properly’.

To many of you reading you’ll rightly think, well duh. Yet not everyone comes from the same world, with the same experiences and privilege, as what can be taken for granted in our tech bubble. That’s ok.

If I try to be really earnest… it’s a useful reminder of how much of the tech world operates as a closed loop, speaking to itself in a language that isn’t nearly as universal as we like to think. And inside that loop, it’s easy to drift into snobbery. I’ve definitely been guilty of that in the past. Too impatient. Too judging of ideas. Too dismissive.

Of course, it’s sensible to make calls based on evidence but we should be open-minded aboutt what credibility looks like. It shouldn’t always resemble something we are already preconditioned to recognise. Another well duh but this rings so true in a region like ours.

Not every tech business will be venture-backable. Not every founder is building for exit. Not every idea will work. But, I guess what I’m saying is that doesn’t make them unworthy of time or a proper attempt.

If we want a stronger pipeline, we have to let people in before they know how to perform within it. Patiently give folks space to test, to learn, to get things wrong without being written off. Yes reader - more failure!

I hear the counter argument, by the way. ‘You’re accepting lowered standards, Jamie’. Hmm, possibly. But I think we’ve a responsibility in this part of the world to apply judgement very much with context. For many of the people I’ve met, getting from idea to first validation represents progress on product but also in confidence and self-actualisation too. One young lad even put on a suit to meet me! Can you imagine? I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’m just some tit who writes a blog.

I talk a lot about ‘pipeline’ in policy environments or rooms wherein decision-making power sits. If those entering the ecosystem/at the start of the pipeline, especially for the first time without the comfort of privilege, are too quickly dismissed… they’ll disappear. I don’t think the NE can afford that.

Women building high-growth tech

I’ve a custom-built tracker of active female-founded (or where a female is named as a Director) tech businesses in the region. I’ve been updating it recently and there are 92 businesses in my database. I spoke to three women last week, of varying ages and operating in completely different subsectors, who said things which were consistent with what I’ve been hearing for a long time now.

One founder described her experience in the North East as ‘bitterly disappointing’, despite having raised successfully twice out of region. Another, who has experience as both a service and product-builder, has been trying to identify and connect with women operating beyond £1m ARR, i.e. people she can learn from at her level. Instead, what she keeps finding is entry-level support repackaged in different ways.

More commonly has there been comments relating to visibility. Bluntly put, events, particularly in areas like AI, still default to the same profiles on stage, often men, and not always builders, which raises a fairly obvious question about who gets seen and heard.

Taken individually, we may well dismiss the insights as isolated frustrations. However, collectively, I think they compound into something more hardcoded about how our ecosystem functions. Ambition and capability may be modest, certainly comparative to other geographies with greater populations and talent density, yet they do exist. However, I’d argue gaps exist in how we surface, support and connect the people already doing the work at a high level is one of many shortcomings we have in region.

Keeping it up

Perhaps a bit of optimism to end on. I am genuinely wowed by some of the smart cookies we have in the region.

I’ve spoken to a good few people still at university or only just into their first job, who aren’t waiting around to be told how this world works but are already building, testing, shipping things etc generally in their spare time. Think less ‘aspiring founders’ and more early operators thrashing stuff out informally, in real time.

Building now doesn’t look like it did five years ago, never mind ten. This isn’t a revelation but in days gone by, access to tools, talent and distribution created a much narrower gateway. That gateway has, for the most part, eroded. I’ve touched on this in a few Digests of late…

You no longer need a technical co-founder to get something live, you no longer need capital to test an idea and you certainly don’t need permission, which means the distance between ‘I’ve got an idea’ and ‘hey look, this exists’ has collapsed to the point where starting is no longer the hard part. Difficulty still exists of course but I’d say pinch points have shifted.

I encourage that playing with tools like Claude enables everyone/anyone to build but that does mean the bar for being taken seriously shifts upwards! What follows is a far noisier, more competitive landscape in which early traction is assumed, distinction is really hard-fought and raising capital becomes less about promise and more about proof. The technically skilled among you can breathe a sigh of relief ;-).

So it’s cool we’ve more people entering the system than ever before but it’s even harder, in my opinion, to then truly break through. What I do know, and this isn’t me punching down or being attritional, is that the surrounding system must respond to the times. The role of the tech enablement ecosystem needs to mature too.

The worst thing we can be doing is sleepily cajole people to be in certain rooms on certain days forced to cram ideas on certain canvases. The North East’s emerging tech challenge is no longer simply getting people to start. We have to be better. We have to recognise who is already building and give them a reason, and route, to keep going. Indeed some teachings and approaches endure but if the North East’s offer to its tech stock defaults to ‘the way we’ve always done it’ then pffft, things won’t get better.

If you’re interested in connecting with and learning from tech founders in the region, I’ll be hosting a startup summit in Durham in June as part of TechNExt. I’d love to see you there and will be releasing details pretty soon. For now you can take a peak at how the festival is shaping up by clicking here.

Features

Pete Daykin: Back by popular demand

Power BI is Marmite. Chat GPT won’t help

Have you read CX Corner? No? Phwoar, reader, are you in for a treat! Friend of the Digest, and founding member of Cambridge rock group Sexual Chocolate, Peter Daykin writes a fantastic fortnightly blog, don’t you know!

This week Pete talks about organising data properly, allowing AI to give consistent, trustworthy answers instead of confident guesses that might be wrong. It’s excellent. Check it out!

This week in AI Slop…

Final one from me today is another AI ethics related post.

This week I gave a talk to the lovely folks at CIPR, sharing insights into the region’s AI ecosystem and potential. I rounded off the event, however, by demonstrating enduring generative AI pitfalls. You may remember I touched on this theme in previous issues like Digest #325.

Though perhaps a more striking case regarding the dark side of AI comes from North East creative, Ann Winter. I don’t Ann but we chatted this week about model programming, political bias and education. Ann was left horrified when she used a GenAI tool to complete a basic photo request. You’ll see why…

In this post she describes how ChatGPT generated a composite image that automatically ‘normalised’ (eurgh) a child by removing visible down syndrome features, then refused to restore them, repeatedly citing ‘guardrails around acceptable depictions of teens and children’ as justification, despite the request being to represent her accurately.

Point being… here we have an AI output that combined confident output with incoherent policy logic, producing a biased result first, then hiding behind generic safety messaging, instead of transparently explaining or correcting the mistake.

I demonstrated something similar in my talk this week. See if you can spot the issue:

I’m really loving playing around and building with different AI tools right now. Yet I wouldn’t want my giddiness to be taken in absolute terms. Whether you’re using AI to generate words, pictures or code, I’d simply say one thing: scrutinise your returns.

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Matty is one of NE tech’s good guys. He’s always candid about what he’s building, what works well, what’s tricky etc. You can follow him and his Vennio journey by clicking the image below. Go Matty!

Digest promotion

If you’ve an event, company or programme to promote, we do have a modest promotional fee. Please email in and I’ll send further details.

Have a good weekend, Jamie

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TechNExt

First up from me is I am pulling together content for TechNExt’s - the annual North East tech festival taking place in June - Startup Hub. My theme this year is intentionally simple (Hey keep those jokes to yourself, reader!):

‘What’s it actually like to grow a tech startup in North East England?”

I’ll be doing live interviews with founders at varying maturity levels, hailing from varying backgrounds and real, different walks of life. We’ll also have practical workshops throughout the day too.

For more info on the wider TechNExt programme click here, or drop me a line if you fancy getting involved.

Introducing Conker Ventures

Popular members of the NE Tech Community Jo York, Kev Price and Jo Montgomery have launched a new business. Woohoo!

Conker Ventures is a venture studio that partners with founders to build product-led tech startups hands-on, providing a full team of experienced operators to turn ideas into scalable businesses quickly, without founders needing to hire everything themselves upfront. Congrats folks, good luck!

TDC Startup Comp

The Thinking Digital Conference (TDC) is inviting early-stage tech businesses to compete in its annual Startup Competition. This event returns to TusPark Newcastle Eagle Labs on the 20th May, where ten startups are invited to pitch for a chance to win prizes. Deadline to apply is next Friday (24/4), folks.

WiTNE Board Opportunity

Women in Tech North East, a North East CIC, is looking to appoint new voluntary Non-Executive Directors to support the team as it moves forward.

The organisation exists to make the North East tech scene more inclusive by connecting, supporting, and championing women in the industry through regular meets, best practice sharing and supportive advice to help overcome barriers to growth within the industry.

The community welcomes women, women-identifying individuals, non-binary people and gender non-conforming people to the network. It’s not requisite, however, to identify as a woman to fill the new NXD positions.

Finally I want to say a sincere thank you to readers for responding to and supporting my summer endurance challenge fundraising for the Ogwin Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation. The backing means a lot! We’re progressing!

Have a great weekend, Jamie

This week’s news

Newcastle biotech pioneer Atelerix strikes Saudi deal

Durham tech firm unveils major North East expansion plans

Gateshead’s Petards hails rising revenues in full year results

Minimum commercial mortgage loan size reduced by Atom Bank

VMA Systems acquires ICT North

Teesside sends gaming delegation to San Fran’s GDC

NBS leaves Old Post Office for Trinity Gardens

Features

What is National shorthand for?

This week I’ve found myself writing about two familiar things: artificial intelligence and regional disparity.

The UK government officially launched its £500 million national 'Sovereign AI' investment unit this week. Within this, Sovereign AI startups and scaleups backed as the vanguard of the new fund have been revealed.

So, in a nutshell, what we have here is the UK government acting like a venture capitalist, putting half a billion behind promising British AI startups to help them start, scale, and stay in the UK.

Capital is welcome but it’s not just about cash. Thee state is bundling funding with things startups usually struggle to access (supercomputing power, fast-track visas, data, and procurement routes) to give UK firms a real shot at competing globally and keeping the economic and strategic value of AI at home. Sounds brill, right?

Ahead of the launch, I spent some time speculating that developments may be too London centric. I don’t depreciate London but I feel its important to set the right tone, especially in the current climate. Remember, Central Gov has repeatedly committed to a UK-wide strategy for pursuing sovereign AI prowess. Sovereign London, this is not.

Upon further scrutiny I can confirm that the launch has a vanguard cohort. Where do they hail from Jamie, you ask? All 7 companies are London-based. Well, one is basically in California but I’ll let others juggle the optics there.

Sure, I didn’t expect to see Hexham, for instance, at the forefront (despite Trig’s launch this week, see Post below) but I did hope for something more inclusive and therefore inspiring.

Why does this happen, Jamie? What’s the problem? Are you just an angry northerner with an axe to grind?

I try to avoid the Digest being political but politics, optics and signals inevitably come into play here. Why? Because this happens a lot. A UK-wide or National initiative launches and time after time the beneficiaries are all concentrated in London. It sets the tone.

It’s people who make decisions. People with networks. People with priorities. People with deadlines. People with things to get on with. And you know what? People tend to reach for what they know.

Yes, the fund is effectively managed by the UK government through the Sovereign AI Unit. That’s true. Yet it’s being run like a venture capital fund led by experienced investors, notably James Wise and Joséphine Kant. Where do you reckon their networks mostly reside?

I’m not begrudging London inclusion, by the way. But these 7 companies don’t neccessarily equate to ‘the best of UK AI’. They’re at different stages. One of them has only raised $1.4m so far; they’re not all hyper-scalers.

UK’s Sovereign AI Fund names 7 startups it’s supporting in its first batch

We could have launched this differently. Hell, we could have had these 7 companies doing their thing in this guise WHILST having another track, comprised of regional innovators. That may have felt a bit more… national. The kick in the teeth for me is it’s an example of defaulting to type. Many will say: headline is capital subsidy with no second order advantage.

So what yee deein’ then, whinging in your little newsletter?

I understand there’s now intent from Gov to come out to the regions and popularise the Unit, Fund and associated opportunities. I’m happy to help put credible northern and north eastern AI innovators in rooms but it has to be done with intent. With integrity. Not box ticking. Moreover, as ever, I’ll channel the issue in the appropriate channels privately. I appreciate we need to be pragmatic. Though, man, it’s tiring.

I’ll leave you with this, today. I think two things can be true:

• we can continue to ensure London thrives

• we can help regions thrive (not at the expense of London!)

But we need to give a damn in the first place.

OpenAI decision a wake-up call for our tech plans

Regional leader Laura Richards has shared views on OpenAI’s decision to pause its Stargate UK project. Laura believes it exposes the North East AI Growth Zone as more of a political announcement than a grounded industrial strategy, with big investment headlines but limited guaranteed local benefit.

Richards continues to say that opportunity isn’t los, but making it work will require a shift to tying investment to regional strengths through energy integration, local procurement and meaningful collaboration with the existing tech and research ecosystem.

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Anyway… I think we’re here for tech news, aren’t we? Let’s get to it!

Top story this week: OpenAI has ‘paused’ its multibillion-pound data centre investment plans, which, notably for us, impacts the North East AI Growth Zone. The stated reasons are high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty. I’ll come back to that.

By way of refresher, this project, part of the wider Stargate initiative, was intended to significantly expand the UK’s AI compute capacity (i.e. the physical infrastructure underpinning advanced AI systems) and had been positioned as a major vote of confidence in the UK’s AI ambitions.

At a macro level, this is fairly reflective of modern AI reality. Large-scale infrastructure depends on a small number of critical inputs: long-term energy costs, policy clarity, and regulatory stability.

Data centres require vast amounts of power and capital, and firms like OpenAI are making globally competitive decisions about where to deploy that investment. If the economics or policy environment don’t stack up, projects stall or shift. That’s the game.

To be clear, this isn’t a dead duck. OpenAI has said it will proceed when conditions improve. But it’s worth going beyond the press release.

At this scale, investment and policy are intertwined. A pause like this can also act as leverage, a way of signalling to government: improve the conditions and the capital follows. A slightly more cynical read, and I know some of you will share it, is that this is as much about shaping the environment as reacting to it, particularly when you factor in rising global energy volatility. Phwoar the edits I did on that paragraph to get it passed the lawyers!

What I will say, genuinely, is this doesn’t mean the UK’s AI sector is in retreat. We remain strong in research, talent, and startup activity, and continue to attract significant investment, particularly in the Golden Triangle. So too does the North East have modest AI credentials that were never dependent on data centres.

Yet at a macro level it does highlight a growing divide in the AI economy, as in between places that can support infrastructure at scale and those that are stronger in application, talent, and innovation. The North East needs to carve an identity and this is why I’ve been especially interested in trying to go beyond the hype that announcements bring. We need an ecosystem.

Some of you will know I recently spent time working with the Combined Authority on the region’s AI Growth Zone approach. Formal comms will follow from them but it’s worth sharing one framing: the strategy deliberately separates Land (infrastructure) and Expand (how AI diffuses across the economy through skills, adoption, and innovation). People, cough LinkedIn cough, will misunderstand what’s going on here.

Infrastructure is important, no doubt. Yet we must remember it’s not the whole story, and heck it’s never been entirely within our control, right? Other parts of the story are.

The opportunity for the region is to ensure that, regardless of the pace of large-scale investment, we are building something that compounds locally, stronger adoption pathways, clearer skills pipelines and more businesses actually using and benefiting from AI.

That’s the bit we can control. And ultimately, that’s the bit that determines whether the Growth Zone delivers lasting value.

Anyway I am back in the day job once again and I have a stacked in-tray of startup folks looking for a bit of help. While I spend a lot of time moving across the region, I also do office hours at The Catalyst in Newcastle on Friday mornings. You can catch me in person or online. Here’s a bit about how I can help you (or put you in touch with lovely folks who are far smarter than I).

Have a lovely weekend, Jamie

P.S. If you ever want to hear the tale about how a good mate of mind ended up having a wild night at Sam Altman’s brother’s house, buy me a pint reader. It involves a Truffle Pig.

This week’s news

OpenAI holds back major investment in North East

Maven reinvests in Kani Payments

Aspire Technology Solutions moves into Scotland with new acquisition

VMA Systems acquires ICT North

Stockton’s Circle Cloud set for recruitment drive

Intasite to quadruple office footprint

Aspire Technology Solutions moves into Scotland with new acquisition

Personal Update

As you may know, it’s been four years since I broke my back. This summer I am taking on a three-part endurance challenge to raise money for the Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation. And reader, I need ya help!

I'll be climbing a mountain, racing in a triathlon and taking on the Coast 2 Coast cycle. Except, if you see me hobbling between tech events in the toon, you'll know I'm not exactly much of a walker. Or hiker. Or runner. Or swimmer. Or cyclist. But...

Where there's a will, there's a way!

Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation is made up entirely of volunteers. They turn up in extreme conditions, at any time of day, for people having the worst day of their lives. They did that for me. If you Google them, you'll see they did it for others last Easter weekend too.

This fundraiser is about making sure they can keep doing it for the next person. There was a version of me that didn’t think I’d get here. Didn’t think I’d walk again, let alone take something like this on and give back.

Here’s my fundraising page. If you can donate, thank you. It genuinely means so, so much. If you can’t, sharing this page helps more than you might think. Cheers, Jamie

Post of the Week

We love to champion good people in the Digest and celebrate their success. Go Marco!

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I write to you from… a Costa just off the A1. Proof, if ever it were needed, that the North East tech scene is alive with sex, drugs and rock n roll, ladies and gents.

As I’m zig-zagging between Northumberland, Newcastle and Sunderland meeting founders today, I’ve been thinking about something that sounds far more pretentious than it is: ecosystem clustering. Stick with me.

What I mean is simple. Where firms are. How ideas move. Where value practically shows up on the map.

The North East has pockets of this. We all have a sense of what goes on at Newcastle Helix, Cobalt, NETPark etc. But if you look at more mature UK ecosystems, they’re far better at making innovation visible and, crucially in my opinion, usable. You can see it. You can navigate it. You can plug into it. We’re not quite there yet.

That’s not a dig. There are people actively aggregating in this space and improving conditions. Moreover, we do have substance. Founders building credible businesses from spare rooms, industrial estates, market towns. Some quietly or even deliberately under the radar. All real nonetheless. I actually think a problem is the system around them.

When activity isn’t visible, it’s hard to understand. Harder to corral and support. And when it comes to trade missions or national showcases, we don’t always put the best of the region forward. Not through malice; through incomplete sight.

To be clear, this isn’t about telling founders to shout louder or play the LinkedIn game. Keep building, keep your head down, keep doing what works for you - absolutely.

But the system needs to get better at surfacing what’s actually happening. More signal. Less guesswork. Less distortion, especially.

I think it’s brilliant we want to create opportunities to showcase the region, be that in trade missions or profile visits, though it’s sometimes confusing to understand why we do things in the manner in which we do.

It also brings me back to something we touched on in Issue 327. The language we use is getting sloppy. ‘High-growth startup’, ‘founders’, ‘scalable’, ‘investment-ready’... they’re being applied far too loosely. There’s a real difference between a venture-backable tech or life sciences company designed to scale rapidly and a solid, well-run lifestyle business. Both matter. Both create value. Both have roles to play in our region and indeed the global economy! Yet they are not the same thing and pretending they are doesn’t help. Not really.

You see this play out in moments where the region tries to ‘show up’. Take trade missions or out of region flying the flag opportunities/investment delegations. On the surface, great. More visibility, more representation, more exposure. But scratch a little deeper and we have to ask: who are we putting forward and most importantly why? If the narrative is about unlocking venture investment, then we should be taking businesses that actually fit that model. Not every business needs VC. Most don’t. They might need funding, support, customers, better margins… but not venture capital. This is where the wires get crossed. And if it’s not about VC - that is more than fine! - but let’s not badge it up as such.

We talk about the ‘2% problem’ extensively in the UK, the pitiful tiny proportion of VC funding going to female founders, it’s a massively important problem and one we shouldn’t neglect. Yet we then conflate that with a much broader group of businesses that were never seeking, or suited to, venture in the first place.

The result is muddled storytelling and missed opportunities. We end up sending yoga studios and interior design fitters into rooms designed for high-growth, high-risk capital conversations, while some of the region’s most credible, scalable tech founders remain under the radar.

Again, this isn’t a criticism of the founders themselves. It’s a system issue. We need to get sharper on definitions, more honest about pathways and far more intentional about who we platform in which context. It’s not about leaving anyone behind; I’m not advocating staunch trickle down economics and exclusivity. Rather I’m simply pointing at… horses for courses.

Truth be told, I’m not too fussed about regional PR. I’ve rarely seen it done with success metrics and legacy in mind. So too am I all for nurturing communities, carving entry pathways and helping people feel more confident. Of course participation matters. Though we should be able to do that and simultaneously mould a system that provides value for its nuanced, constituent parts. Right now I fear we’re actively making it harder for the right businesses to get in front of the right capital.

One story you’ll see break properly around Easter is Newcastle’s Rightbrain securing £2.6m in seed funding. We’ve featured them before. They’re based out of Gosforth’s Regent Centre and have been quietly building for a few years now. I know the founder pretty well now and it was eye-opening to hear him talk about just how difficult raising has been (and this is a guy with two tech successes on his CV) recently. I also think it’s a proper example of where things, tech development wise, are heading.

Rightbrain sits in that growing category of companies bridging cutting-edge AI and real-world business use. I’m talking tools that plug into existing systems and change how work gets done. Think: agents, workflows, natural language interfaces. What massively interests me is what it says about where the market is now.

Vibecoding has lowered the barrier to entry. You can spin something up quickly. Call yourself a founder by the end of the weekend if you fancy it. But raising? That’s gone the other way.

With more ‘startups’ in the market than ever, capital has got pickier. A decent team and a good idea isn’t always enough anymore. Investors want proof. Traction. Recurring revenue. Something real to grab onto.

In short… easier to start, harder to convince. Which, in the long run, maybe isn’t a bad thing. It could be dramatically bad for the North East though, especially if the system isn’t as well oiled as it really should be.

Anyway… Not too much news today, folks. I’ve stuck some stuff in that I’ve been reading a bit more widely and give a nod to tech developments out of region too.

You may be aware that Scotland has published its AI strategy for the next five years. I think this is welcome although it’s interesting to see feedback and reaction from its ecosystem. I think there’s much synergy with where the North East is at. I’d definitely encourage reading John Nolan’s reaction on ambition and capability. And for my fellow geeks, the latest from the Data City on investment league tables is excellent too.

Spring has sprung. Enjoy the sun! I hope you have a great weekend whatever you end up doing. I’ll soon be doing office hours again, now that my NECA secondment has come to an end. If I can support your work or lend an ear, please do reach out. Cheers, Jamie

This week’s news

Rightbrain Ai Secures £2.6m Seed Funding at £12.7m Valuation

Momentum continues at Filtronic as it secures $8m contract

Sunderland tech company Moralbox rebrands to Workprove

Northstar investor subscriptions open for the third tranche of EIS Growth Fund

First phase of Durham development constructed by robots nears completion

New images unveiled of British Esports’ major Sunderland arena

What else I’ve been reading

Which sectors came top of the 2025 investment league table?

Scotland’s Artificial Intelligence strategy 2026-2031

Scotland’s AI Strategy: Why Delivery and Capability Matter More Than Ambition

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Yes my wife took me to Tenerife for my 35h birthday. Nice to go at this time of year. Lots of grandads and grandmas soaking up the warm daylight, recovering from hip and knee ops apparently. Sure I basked in the sun but also in the glory of being the fastest geezer in the room for once. Take that, elderly holidayers.

And much like like my new found speed, it seems like the NE tech sector has been gan at a canter this past fortnight! See what I did there? Let’s dive in to some jolly news!

Today we’ve a broad range of stories to report. That’s everything from business launches and raises, to infrastructure developments and events. Strap yourself in, pet. First up, let’s talk new ventures.

New biz

Four local entrepreneurs have joined forces to launch a new North East telecoms and outdoor digital display group. Robert Webster, Anthony Ford, David Forrester and James Hart have created Newcastle based Future Vision Group, backing up the firm with a six-figure investment committed by each of the directors.

Elsewhere Lucy Batley and Jon Holden have launched Mother. As Lucy explains, this is an AI infrastructure company focused on secure AI architecture at the intersection of AI, cyber security and sovereign data design. If you want to know more, you can read Lucy’s post about the new company here. Good luck both!

Investment

Next, raises. Sales coaching platform MySalesCoach, launched three years by tech entrepreneur Kevin Beales and co-founder Mark Ackers, has landed a £1.5m investment to grow.

The company, matching teams in need of training with sales coaches (Ahh, I’d always wondered why they called it that), will now evolve its platform as it embarks on the next stage of growth. Well, that’s their story anyway. Some say Beales just keeps going to keep up appearances in coveted technology newsletters…

Meanwhile windfarm software and consultancy firm Kinewell has raised £1m of investment, including the first sum from the new North East Accelerate Fund, which is managed by Mercia Ventures.

Kinewell will now almost double in size within the next six months as it hopes to create 10 new jobs. I met founder Andrew Jenkins recently and it’s exciting to learn about what he’s doing with AI and where the firm can go.

I’ll also flag that well-known digital consultancy hedgehog lab, which is now backed by BGF, has named its new chief executive. We previously reported on founder Sarat Pediredla leaving the company. Malcom Seagrave has taken up the new CEO position, following an initial 18 months as managing director.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure headlines next, folks. Lockheed Martin announced a strategic investment of more than £100 million in the United Kingdom’s space sector, centered on a massive expansion in the North East region.

The investment is headlined by the proposed construction of an £85 million satellite manufacturing facility at the NETPark science park in County Durham and the official launch phase of a world-class technology centre in Newcastle.

Elsewhere do be sure to read about Darlington continue to push ahead with its plans for a STEM campus, too. The hub hopes to provide clear pathways from school to industry, so local people can access high-value careers in science and tech!

Community

Events wise this week, last night saw both the Dynamo Tech Charity Dinner take place and startup meetup Silicon Mingle enjoyed its third birthday bash. I think both communities play important roles in the North East tech sector, focusing on different parts of the ecosystem’s makeup.

What’s the difference, you might ask? Well it’s a bit like factions in the sixth form common room, innit? On one hand you’ve got the straight laced swots and on the other you’ve got the misfits and the dreamers. I’ll let you work out which is which, reader. All I’m saying is I bet the Charity Dinner didn’t feature tales of peacock-tattooed shamen offering affordable healing provisions to handsome gentlemen with mobility challenges. Best we leave that one there, reader.

As well as this week’s bumper edition of North East headlines, I’ve shared some features and insights pieces that might be worth your time this weekend too. Or if you’re feeling particularly daring you can read HM Treasury’s Northern Growth Strategy here. Pages 40 - 42 cover the North East.

I don’t want to sound like a naysayer but it doesn’t make for all too novel reading… points largely relate to improving transport links between cities and towns, quickening big developments in cities and supporting economic growth sectors. For our region clean energy, AI and advanced manufacturing are flagged. I’m sure that policy bloke in a lesser loved regional newsletter will be providing sharper analysis…

Well, wasn’t all that worth waiting an extra week for? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you lot are spoilt rotten. Have a lovely weekend, Jamie

This week’s (and last week’s!) news

Tyneside tech platform MySalesCoach secures £1.5m investment

Windfarm tech innovator Kinewell secures £1m investment to fuel expansion

BGF-backed hedgehog lab appoints new CEO to accelerate growth and job creation

Four North East entrepreneurs launch new tech hardware venture with six-figure backing

Barclays and Sage partnership aims to cut time spent on financial admin

IoT consultancy moves from Durham to Sunderland

Scrumconnect to create jobs in Newcastle

Plans for Darlington STEM Park steaming ahead

SkinBioTherapeutics shares to be suspended from April until board investigation is complete

NETPark Durham to benefit from major Lockheed Martin investment

What I’ve been reading this week

I was delayed flying back into Newcastle earlier this week (guess the oldies had the last laugh) so I’ve had the chance to read a bunch of good stuff this week and do some writing of my own. Hopefully some of the below interests you.

“More must be done to create inclusive entrepreneurship” - BGF partner sets out advice for Northern female powered businesses

BGF Northern investor and leader, Jill Williams

Female founders are driving growth but remain massively underfunded, meaning real progress requires not just capital but better networks, visibility and systemic change in investment practices.

Albania and Wales. What their startup ecosystems can learn from each other...

Welsh startup leader, Neil Cocker

Startup ecosystems succeed not through size or funding alone, but through mindset, coordination and how well people work together to turn potential into progress.

It’s Time To Take Your Creativity To Work

North East AI and creative leader, Des Kennedy

Most people underestimate their creativity but real value today comes from applying everyday, problem-solving creativity within organisations, not waiting to be a ‘genius’.

Still a learner, finally a teacher

Daft lad from Jarrow, Jamie Hardesty

Leadership isn’t about having all the answers but about continuously learning, drawing from others and using that knowledge responsibly to guide and teach.

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I wanted to remind ourselves of the exciting breakthroughs and meaningful developments we’ve seen in the ecosystem so far this year, pertaining to women in tech. The first thing I want to do today, before I share an essay which will inevitably present some thorny reading, is champion some of the great work and people here in the North East.

Championing female tech prowess

One lady who I find inspiring is Caroline Williamson. Caroline works tirelessly with both regional tech companies and learners across the education system, doing everything from exposing young girls to STEM opportunities to coaching junior developers to plug skills shortages in the here and now. You can read our two part interview with her here and here in our opening two issues of the year.

Female inspirational tales we’ve seen in recent Digests include that of XR Therapeutics being only one of two North East startups to make the coveted Startups 100 List. COO Penny Day is a mate of mine, it’s excellent to see her pioneering in mental health and neurodivergent spaces.

Elsewhere, one of our most clicked stories of 2026 came by way of young entrepreneur Henrietta Newble. The Newcastle University student has launched an animal health tech start-up that has raised £40,000 in early stage funding.

Moreover, last week we profiled Hartlepool’s Kelly Whitfield. Kelly is the founder of KLIK SaaS, a startup which has secured £300k in investment as it prepares to take its community-building platform to market.

Inspiration comes in different forms. I’m convinced that there are many more examples of brilliant, cutting-edge, purpose-driven work happening across the ecosystem but are going under the radar. Untold stories. If you know of them, tell me. Let’s write about them!

It’s International Women’s Day on Sunday. Naturally for the tech media, IWD provides a topical/useful moment to focus attention. Equally, we know ecosystems change through consistent behaviour, not calendar moments alone. So it’s been great to see pillars of the region’s tech ecosystem, from growing employers to established networks, bring communities together in event-spaces to offer support this week, as they often do. Heck this cynic has even seen some lush stuff on LinkedIn!

To give you a flavour of important activity, Women in Tech North East were at Gateshead College. Monika Sharma, Dr Kirsten Crane and Ka Lok Liu were on hand to provide inspiration regarding ‘squiggly careers’ and getting into the tech industry. Meanwhile Sunderland Software City are today putting on a hands-on, practical skills and knowledge workshop around data science, led by female operators in the space.

When we zoom out and consider what’s happening on the world stage, I’m talking everything from the five year anniversary of Sarah Everard’s murder to the stripping of basic human rights in the Middle East, I appreciate it can feel almost trivial to talk about representation on tech panels or venture funding percentages, as I’m about to do.

The reality, however, is a bit more nuanced. We should acknowledge that gender inequality exists on a spectrum globally, absolutely. The UK tech sector’s issues are not the same as human rights crises, yet they still matter within our context. It’s a truth that we can care about both global injustice and local systemic improvement.

So today, I’m going to talk about the stat we all love to hate. Yup. We’re going big on the 2%. Today I am not talking about everything happening in the world, I am talking about female-led venture-building in North East England.

Beyond the 2%: Moving the dial for women‑led tech companies

Yes folks, International Women’s Day tends to bring a familiar statistic back into circulation: only around 2% of UK venture funding goes to women‑led businesses. This is a real number. It’s important. But it’s one I don’t want to simply blindly repeat to you today and say hey, we’ve got to do more.

If we genuinely want to improve outcomes for women building tech businesses, we need more precision. More system design. One of the wanky, pretentious phrases I tend to lean on in policy circles and in papers I write is ‘systemic change’. Hey reader, you give a hipster a keyboard…

What I mean by this is we give precedence to changing the underlying structures that shape outcomes, not just the visible symptoms. Now, we can do both simultaneously. We can champion and challenge. We can push forward with micro actions as well as macro. Ultimately though, change that is systemic is most meaningful. Of course, it’s also the most difficult to enact too.

My piece today is an attempt to face this difficulty. It probably won’t just annoy my ‘Jamie you’re giving too much air time to this stuff’ readers but also those of you passionate in this space with much experience, knowledge and ideas. This is a free newsletter. It’s not my intention to garner clicks or prestige or upset. I’m sharing with you how I see things, albeit from a very privileged position. This isn’t meant to offend but I do hope it provokes conversation and change.

First I think it’s necessary to slow the conversation down, de‑conflate different types of businesses, before we ask harder questions about where intervention actually makes a difference.

Not all women‑led tech businesses are the same

We do ourselves no favours by treating ‘women founders’ as a single, homogeneous group. Rather, in practice, there are at least two very different categories that often get collapsed into one:

1. High‑growth, equity‑backed tech businesses
Companies designed from day one to scale aggressively, raise external capital and pursue large exits.

2. Digitally enabled lifestyle businesses
Profitable, sustainable companies using technology as an enabler rather than the product. Such businesses are often services‑led, sometimes intentionally small, and are hopefully, frequently cash‑flow positive.

Both are valid. Both matter to a healthy regional economy. But they have different business models, different risk profiles and critically, require different kinds of support.

The tech sector can be difficult to define, as well as access. Breaking down barriers is a responsibility. So too, I feel, is understanding the sector’s discourse and meaning. Investment and grants aren’t interchangeable synonyms. Yet they’re often used as such. Similarly not every startup is a tech startup. Or not every digital growth programme is a high potential accelerator. This matters when we talk about what problems we’re trying to specifically solve.

When we quote venture funding statistics without making this distinction, we create confusion. Lifestyle businesses are not ‘failing’ because they don’t raise VC. Many never intend to. Meanwhile, scale‑ups do live or die by access to capital and that’s where our coveted 2% figure is most terrifying.

If we want to be serious, we have to be clear about which problem we’re trying to solve at any given moment.

The 2% problem is real but it’s not the whole story

I read this Bdaily article from my friend Nina Walton earlier this week. Nina and the people involved are great, I support their bid to drive use of data (whatup my fellow nerds), unlock innovation and combat gender divisions in business funding.

What interests me, on a macro level, is strategy. As I say, we are more than familiar with the recurring 2% headline. What we don’t have is alignment on the objective.

You and I will no doubt agree that the meagre 2% distribution is abysmal. It should be more. Though I do wonder what does ‘more’ really mean? Should women‑led businesses receive:

• 4% - double?

• 23% - in line with sector representation?

• 50% - in line with global demographic representation ?

Remember, I’m getting at systemic change. Systems operate with targets. And yet, in this space, too few seem willing to state what success actually looks like. It’s a challenge I have with the current piece of work I’m doing on the region’s AI ecosystem. People struggle (and give me wildly varying answers) as to what our national AI startup representation should be, for instance. All agree higher than the current 1.3% but that only takes us so far.

Without that clarity, initiatives drift. Boards are formed. Events are held. Panels are balanced. But nothing structural changes.

Is the funding gap the cause or the symptom?

Another reason the conversation stalls is that we often treat funding as the primary failure, rather than a downstream outcome. We recently shared Paul Smith’s excellent article ‘Access to finance, faster horses, and the North East’s startup problem’ where he explores the pipeline reasons as to why the North East has a tech startup problem. This bears relevance here.

Let’s take another look at the aforementioned bdaily article and the the regional data it cites:

• 71% of NE funded companies are male‑led

• 14% are evenly led

• 12% are women‑led

Clearly, that distribution doesn’t start at the investment committee. It reflects what flows into the system.

So we need to ask, honestly, where do constraints actually sit:

• Are fewer women starting tech businesses in the first place?

• Are women founders receiving less non‑financial support (mentoring, networks, visibility, sponsorship) at early stages?

• Does STEM participation, and therefore eligibility for large‑ticket, deep‑tech investment, skew the pipeline long before funding conversations begin?

• Is the VC industry itself too homogenous in background, pattern recognition, and risk appetite?

• Do cultural factors, confidence gaps, caring responsibilities, social conditioning, systematically penalise women in pitch‑led environments?

The answer, inconveniently, is all of the above. It’s noble to tackle any of the puzzle’s pieces. It wouldn’t be wrong, for instance, to spend your Saturday mornings mentoring young girls. Please don’t misinterpret me. But viewing the problem holistically, i.e. in pipeline thinking, is what’s needed.

Inevitability and pipeline

What I’m getting to isn’t tremendously novel but it’s what I don’t quite see enough of when I encounter the typical 2% articles and blogs that flood the internet in and around IWD. The lack of funding for women‑led tech businesses is a second‑order effect of there being too few inevitable companies overall.

Regions like ours do not yet have a deep, consistent pipeline of investment‑ready tech businesses, male or female. We have pockets of excellence, absolutely, but not volume.

If the total pool is shallow, representation debates become zero‑sum. Everyone competes for the same scarce attention. Slow progress, rising frustration and even, you guessed it reader, potential changemakers becoming disfranchised.

This brings me back to numbers, objectives and… strategy. System design. I have my own biases, I’m very goal-orientated as an individual, how I see the world isn’t necessarily the ‘right’ way but to me at least it makes sense, when aiming for a well‑functioning pipeline of investable tech companies, to declare what proportion should be women‑led and what needs to change upstream to make that true.

What would actually move the dial?

Here’s a few things which I’d like to see happen. There’s no silver bullets here or one off levers to pull, rather much of this is culture. Change can happen through osmosis.

1. Set explicit, public goals
As above. Actual targets, tied to timeframes, with accountability attached.

2. Invest earlier in the pipeline
More structured pre‑seed and pre‑investment support for women founders: customer access, technical validation, confidence‑building and founder‑level coaching. I am talking specific support for venture backed companies in immature ecosystems. That’s no shade on support for digitally enabled businesses getting acquainted with the foundations of running a business, rather it’s understanding bespoke needs of high-potential stock.

3. Treat non‑financial support as infrastructure
Networks for tech operators, peer groups, role models, and access are often framed as ‘nice to haves’. They compound over time and materially affect outcomes. We say this every week but community matters.

4. Stop conflating business types (especially in funded comms campaigns)
Celebrate profitable lifestyle businesses on their own terms. Don’t measure them against VC metrics they never opted into.

5. Champion the investor side too
Diversity in decision‑making bodies isn’t virtue signalling. It changes what gets funded.

6. Build volume
More founders! More experiments! More failures! Just… more shots on goal. Representation improves when ecosystems mature, the curve ain’t always linear but the more, the merrier right?

As I say, systemic change.

Listen to… women

Aaaaaand now to watch me drown in irony…

I’d encourage any national or local policy maker or ecosystem stakeholder to read this recent essay by Laura Richards, “A message to women founders: you’re not lucky to receive investment.”

Laura tells us that for years the conversation around women founders has often implied that the problem lies with women themselves: pitch better, be more confident, find a technical co‑founder, build a stronger network. Meanwhile the headline statistic barely moves. Hey what is it again? Roughly 2% of venture capital has gone to women‑led companies for more than a decade.

Laura then points out something that again isn’t always understood in the startup ecosystem: venture capital is a portfolio game. Investors spread their bets across many companies knowing most will fail. Founders do not have that luxury. For them the company is not one of ten bets, it’s their single shot. I’m talking everything… their reputation, finances, relationships and wellbeing are on the line.

That creates a strange dynamic in startup culture where founders are often encouraged to feel grateful for investment, even though investors are ultimately buying access to the upside of the founder’s risk and labour.

The research she cites is even more terrifying. Studies examining male and female co‑founders who built the same companies show that after failure, women are significantly less likely to secure funding for their next venture and raise less capital when they do. Men, by contrast, often raise more after failure. Even after successful exits, women still face worse odds in their next raise.

I’m hammering this home to death now but this is why we need to go beyond the shock factor of just repeating our persistent 2% figure! It doesn’t just reflect a pipeline issue, it suggests something deeper about how risk, credibility and pattern recognition operate inside venture capital.

Again, pre-empting angry emails, I’m not calling all investors villains. Venture capital is designed to work the way it does. But it does mean founders, particularly female, should feel empowered to treat investment as a partnership negotiation, not a favour being granted.

Here’s where I’m at

When I talk about this stuff I sometimes upset the people I want to help, as well as the people I want to take to task! I acknowledge differing efforts and I don’t have all the answers, nor do I have one iota of how YOU might feel being a woman trying to succeed in tech. Rather, here’s what I believe I know:

International Women’s Day, through the lens of tech ecosystems, shouldn’t only be about recycling statistics we already know. The 2% headline is important but as Laura argues, repeating it for ten years now doesn’t seem to be truly moving the dial. I think we need to be brave enough to interrogate the system.

If nobody is willing to dig into root causes, set real objectives, and design interventions that reflect how businesses actually grow, then maybe cynicism is a rational response. But if we are willing to do that work properly, then this isn’t a bleak story at all. It’s a story in motion and one we can redesign.

Thanks for reading today. We’ll be back with a ‘normal’ issue of news and nonsense two weeks today on Friday March 20th. Have a lovely weekend, Jamie

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