Tech Nation, the UK network for tech entrepreneurs, has today announced the 10 early-stage scaleup winners of its nationwide competition, Rising Stars.

Designed to showcase the most exciting companies at seed to pre-Series A funding from all areas of the country, the competition's winners were required to pitch to a panel of industry leading judges, in front of an audience of over 200 of the top venture capitalists, founders and corporates in the UK.

The judging panel included techUK president Jacqueline de Rojas, PrettyLittleThing co-founder Adam Kamani, and managing director of Microsoft for Startups UK Amali de Alwis.

In its second year, the competition received almost 400 applications in total, a 39 per cent rise from 2018 and attracted a diverse group of founders - 30 per cent of the original applicants have at least one female founder, and 90 per cent of companies who entered the final are from outside of London.

The competition’s prize package has been built in response to the challenges which are faced by companies at this stage of growth, for instance, access to networks and platforms for promotion. It includes one-to-one support, introductions to potential investors and support from the programme partners BDO Drive, Microsoft Advertising, Soldo, Talent Works International and TLT.

The Rising Stars winners were:

• Shopper.com - a Birmingham-based community-driven global marketplace for online and offline voucher codes, covering thousands of e-commerce sites.

• Foundries.io - a Cambridge-based self-service cloud solution that provides turnkey services to develop, secure, deploy and maintain embedded Internet of Things compute products.

• We Build Bots - a Cardiff-based public sector automation platform helping organisations deliver better, faster and cheaper citizen services.

• Neatebox - an Edinburgh-based 'weclome platform' which removes barriers and promotes empathetic relationships between consumers and customer service teams.

• Talking Medicines - a Glasgow-based firm which captures the digital voice of the patient, aggregating it into patterns of behaviours and commercialising it to brand managers in pharmaceutical companies through subscription access.

• CoGrammar - a London-based coding education provider which sources, selects, trains and integrates full-time code reviewers from African tech talent.

• ClearGlass - a London-based digital intermediary between asset managers and pension funds which collects underlying costs and performance data to help decide which is the best fund to invest in.

• tootoot - a Manchester-based software firm that supports the psychological safety and wellbeing of individuals within education, sport and the workplace.

• Sparkbox - a Southampton-based company using machine learning to reduce stock, improve profitability, and prevent over-discounting by optimising prices.

• Codices Interactive - a Truro-based interactive video platform, enabling any broadcaster to create interactive shows.

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