While London startups dominate the UK funding market, there are tech clusters tempting investors all over the country.
So far this year, startups based outside of the British capital have picked up €2.1bn, according to Sifted data — more than any country in Europe aside from France, Germany and the Netherlands.
That might be a way off London’s tally of €8.6bn in VC funding in 2025, but there have been big money rounds for UK startups that aren’t based in the capital.
Medtech OrganOx raised $160m in February, EV charging company Gridserve picked up £100m in July and robotic surgery startup CMR Surgical raised $120m in May.
But which non-London-based startups have investors got their eyes on right now? Sifted spoke to VCs at Praetura, JamJar Investments, Octopus Ventures, Dawn Capital and Ada Ventures to find out.
All companies nominated were non-portfolio.
Jess Jackson, investment manager at Praetura
LiNa Energy — Lancaster
LiNa Energy is a solar energy storage startup building innovative ceramic battery technology. Unlike traditional lithium batteries, LiNa’s solution is non-flammable and ideal for equatorial regions where overheating is a risk. The company has expanded its production capabilities with a new facility near its Lancaster site. LiNa is now actively pursuing international partnerships to commercialise its tech and scale impact globally.
ArCube — Manchester
ArCube is building a customer loyalty platform for airlines. With partnerships already underway with Etihad Airways, ArCube is now targeting major players in aviation.
Silveray — Stockport
Silveray is building X-ray technology which enables high-resolution, real-time imaging across curved and confined surfaces — ideal for sectors like aerospace, energy and healthcare. With applications ranging from turbine blade inspection to wearable skull caps for treatment monitoring, Silveray is readying its first product to launch this year.
Summize — Manchester
Summize is building a contract management platform for enterprises, and reported a doubling of ARR and customer base for the fourth consecutive year in 2024. Its contract lifecycle management platform allows non-legal professionals in a business to perform contract requests themselves whilst minimising potential risk. Its AI-powered legal workflows directly integrate into existing tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Shamillah Bankiya, principal at Dawn
Firenze — Manchester
Firenze is a fintech building a lending platform for Lombard loans — a type of credit which is secured against investment portfolios. The startup enables firms to provide fast lending decisions and transparent pricing, under their own brand.
Cloudsmith — Belfast
Cloudsmith is a cloud-native, online storage platform for software developers, with over 1,000 customers including Shopify and PagerDuty. As software supply chain integrity becomes increasingly critical, Cloudsmith is positioned as a core dependency in modern DevOps workflows.
Vsim — Manchester
Vsim is building the operating system for robotic simulation and training. Founded by former Nvidia engineers, it’s developed a high-performance, multi-physics engine designed to power real-time robotics and reinforcement learning. Vsim enables AI teams to simulate faster, more accurately and at scale. Its high-fidelity, scalable simulation unlocks faster iteration for embodied AI teams, a major bottleneck in robotics development today.
Chemify — Glasgow
Chemify is building a platform to synthesise new molecules to be reproduced at scale. A spinout from the University of Glasgow, by turning chemistry into a programmable domain, Chemify opens the door to faster breakthroughs in drug discovery and advanced materials.
Adam Said, principal at Octopus Ventures
Mindtrace — Manchester
Mindtrace is building a computer vision platform for environments like factories or autonomous vehicles. Unlike most vision AI that needs constant retraining, Mindtrace’s can adjust in real time. It’s early, but the technology is genuinely differentiated and could have broad impact in safety-critical industries.
Sonrai Analytics — Belfast
Sonrai helps pharma and research teams make sense of complex medical and genetic data. Its platform pulls everything into one place, makes it easy to explore and uses AI to spot patterns quickly. The startup is already working with global drug companies. What makes it stand out is how it turns messy, high-stakes data into clear insights that speed up better, more personalised treatments.
Check Warner, partner at Ada Ventures
Ochre Bio — Oxford
Ochre Bio is tackling one of the world’s top 10 causes of death: chronic liver disease. It’s a deadly condition on the rise, yet treatment options remain remarkably limited beyond transplants. Ochre is developing novel RNA therapies using genomic deep phenotyping and testing in real human donor livers. Headquartered in Oxford, with research labs in New York and Taiwan, the company already has two major partnerships underway with GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim and is a powerful example of UK science leading the world in tackling underserved diseases. The Ochre Bio team are genuinely pushing the limits of healthcare and life sciences research and paving the way to a cure for chronic liver disease one day.
Bit.bio — Cambridge
Bit.bio is one of a cluster of revolutionary biotechs to come out of Cambridge in recent years. Its patented cell programming technology allows it to turn stem cells into specific types of human cells at speed and scale. This could have a transformational impact on the worlds of drug discovery and disease modelling. Bit.bio gives scientists the power to test new therapies on the exact human cells they’re designed to treat, while also improving our understanding of how some of the most widespread and devastating diseases work.
Wordsmith AI – Edinburgh
Wordsmith AI is helping in-house legal teams deploy fleets of AI agents to speed up every aspect of the day-to-day. With big-name clients like Deliveroo and Trustpilot already on its roster, Wordsmith’s growth is symbolic of the wider trend we’re seeing of AI transforming legal operations across sectors.
Kirsty Macdonald, principal at JamJar Investments
Love To Visit — Cardiff
Love To Visit is a marketplace for discovering and booking family days out. The startup has built a platform for consumers and powerful tools for operators, driving both repeat bookings and loyalty. Love To Visit is scaling fast and proving there’s huge demand for a modern way to plan leisure time beyond theme parks and big-name venues.
Higlo — Edinburgh
Higlo is building a webcam-like device which connects to a TV for families and friends. Users can build interactive stories, games and whiteboards. The product is pre-launch but has a fast-growing waitlist.
Epetome — Leeds
Epetome is a gut health brand built around a daily supplement. Riding the wave of interest in supplements, Epetome has the potential to lead in Europe. With strong early traction it’s on track to own the microbiome conversation in the UK and beyond.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/uk-startups-not-from-london/
