INSIGHTS / Blog

This year’s Investment Showcase, taking place on 1 December at Church House, Westminster, is set to be the biggest and best to date. Not only will we celebrate SETsquared’s 20^th year, but we will also bring you more high-quality companies all seeking investments.

As well as the latest crop of high-tech, high-growth start-ups and spin-outs from across SETsquared’s ecosystem, investors will have the opportunity to see some early-stage student-led ventures.

We’ll also have an exciting line-up of soon-to-be-announced keynote speakers, so early registration for this bumper event is advised. Register your place here

The companies that pitch at the event, represent the cream of the crop of SETsquared-backed companies. They go through an intensive investor readiness programme prior to the event, so that investors can be assured of seeing quality deal flow on the day. Since it began in 2002, SETsquared has helped its member companies raise £3.8bn investment.

It’s always good to see companies that have showcased at these events go on to do great things. Already this year, we’ve seen three previous showcase attendees raise significant investments and funding:

• Bike Club
  Children’s bike and scooter subscription service Bike Club has raised £16.75m in a Series B funding round led by Circularity Capital, with the funds to fuel national and European expansion. Bike Club has plans to move to France and Germany in the next one to two years. It currently has a network of 40,000 bikes but with the new capital plans to grow to 220,000. They pitched at the 2019 Investment Showcase and have been supported by the University of Exeter as a student entrepreneur and SETsquared Exeter.
• CanSense
  This health tech company is delivering an accurate, non-invasive, inexpensive blood test for the early detection of bowel cancer and has received £1.2m from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), to further develop the blood test use across Wales. CanSense pitched at the 2021 Investment Showcase and is supported by SETsquared Southampton.
• iNOVA Design Solutions
  This SETsquared Surrey alumnus has secured an additional £1.5m investment from Lakeland Industries to increase the manufacturing momentum and operations of its safety monitoring platform, Bodytrack. iNOVA Design pitched at the 2014 & 2015 Investment Showcases.

At the end of 2021, the government reported that the UK’s tech sector attracted record levels of investment – £29.4bn – which is 2.3x the amount in 2020. And this is a trend which is strongly mirrored across SETsquared’s ecosystem of spin-outs, start-ups and scale-ups and shows no sign of slowing down.

Investment in UK tech is at an all-time high and for the opportunity to see some of the leading start-ups from across the South of England, register your place now for this celebration of tech talent.