Scotland’s capital city has been turning into one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech hubs. The combination of international talent, top educational institutions and a thriving startup community makes Edinburgh a hotbed for startups and innovation. Today we’re presenting you Edinburgh’s 10 finest startups to watch in 2020 and beyond.
Boundary is a smart home alarm venture established by entrepreneurs Robin Knox and Paul Walton in 2018, hoping to disrupt the home security market. They have introduced an innovative home security system controlled via mobile devices, which according to them, brings neighbourhood watches into the 21st century. Features include break-in notification, mobile phone alerts to friends or family living in the area, compatibility with other smart home systems, remote monitoring and more. The startup has also successfully raised £2.2 million so far.
Care sourcer provides a tech platform to match care seekers with care providers. The platform offers comparison and matching for elderly care based on price, rating, specialisms, and more. Besides that, it enables users to make enquiries and receive offers from care providers who have immediate availability. The promising startup was founded in 2015 and has raised about $14.5 million in funding till date.
Casta Spes Technologies is a developer of robotic security vehicles for autonomous patrols, threat classification and license plate recognition. Their flagship product, Ziva, is a patent-pending, dual-wheeled, multi-terrain robotic vehicle able to travel to various terrains, with a battery life of up to 14 hours, and built-in sensing capabilities, as well as two-way communication modalities. CST was founded in 2017.
Criton – Established in June 2016, Criton is a traveltech startup which has developed an app for the hospitality sector to inform hotel guests about their own facilities as well as what is on in the local area. The app combines destination guides, guest and property management information as well as additional features: geo-fencing, or location based offers and promotions, and in-stay or in-app messaging. The company secured £5 million in funding to help hotels provide an unforgettable hotel experience.
Current Health – The heart of Current Health is its AI-powered remote patient monitoring solution. The wearable, which is worn on the upper arm, collects vital signs in real-time and then feeds this real-time data to the cloud where it is analysed by the company’s proprietary algorithms to help better determine health trajectory and allow clinicians to intervene earlier. Four years after establishment, the startup has raised $11.7 million in funding and has transferred to the Bay area.
Invizius – The University of Edinburgh spin-off Invizius aims to improve the lives of millions of dialysis patients, with the help of its H-Guard Priming Solution. Designed to reduce the symptoms and complications as a result of patient’s immune response to extracorporeal circuit, this protein coating acts as an “invisibility cloak” for the filter, effectively hiding it from the immune system. The company is preparing to enter clinical trials now, following the latest investment of £2.8 million in September, 2019.
Machines with Vision are developing very accurate positioning technology for transportation applications. Founded in 2016, the startup has already offered its “precise positioning to within a couple of centimetres by fingerprinting and mapping the ground surface beneath a vehicle” to all Deutsche Bahn metering trains. Their RailLoc solution uses event cameras to detect changes and objects in the track bed in real time and simplify maintenance efforts.
Wootzano – Robots cannot really feel objects the way humans do. Or they can? Wootzano has the answer. They have developed Wootzkin, an electronic skin designed to allow robots to complete tasks requiring greater dexterity. Made of a specially-modified elastomer with metal electrodes deposited on top using photolithograph, Wootzkin would give robots a human-like sense of ‘touch’. From fresh produce handling to offshore turbines inspection, the application scope is limitless.
TravelNest – Founded in 2015, TravelNest is reinventing the way owners market their holiday rental properties. They offer a central platform for holiday rental hosts to manage all of their advertising in one place, providing a dashboard on the ads’ data and the property’s performance on all of the major channels like Booking.com, Airbnb, TripAdvisor and HomeAway in order to maximise occupancy. The startup has so far raised $5.3 million to build the future of holiday rentals advertising.
Prodsight is enabling businesses to gain insight from customer support conversation data. Their app makes this easy by automatically analysing conversations for topics and sentiment and producing a continuously updated report on the most common user issues. This allows data-driven decisions to be made quickly and efficiently, helping product teams to rapidly identify problems, education issues and prioritise fixes and improvements. Founded in 2017, the startup has been backed so far by Scottish angel investors and Techstart Ventures.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
