Top tech companies to watch: Edition #1
View the blog on 5iveTech | Edition #2 | Edition #3
There are forever new startups popping up with incredible ideas; pushing the boundaries of technology and using it to solve problems we never knew we had. Connecting the world’s best tech minds with these tech companies is our opportunity to be a part of that. It’s why we exist.
The UK tech scene is booming. Investment in Britain’s tech sector soared by 44% to over £10 billion in 2019 – more than France and Germany combined. The same Tech Nation report revealed that UK tech employment grew by 40% in the last 2 years, with 2.93m jobs created.
There are some incredible startups and scaleups in the UK that are helping the tech scene reach new heights. We want to celebrate them. So, welcome to our monthly edition of top tech companies that are taking the world by storm.
Kicking us off are Smart, Attest, Grabyo, and PolyAI.
*Note: we’re not affiliated with these companies (unless otherwise stated). We just think they’re awesome.
#1 of our top tech companies to watch
Smart’s mission is to transform pensions, savings and financial well-being, across all generations, around the world.
In pursuit of this, they created a purpose-built platform, unique in the UK pension market, that simplified a big headache for employers – auto enrolment.
Auto enrolment is a government initiative that was introduced under the Pensions Act in 2008. It requires every employer to put their qualifying staff into a workplace pension scheme and to make contributions towards it.
Smart’s platform enables employers to enrol employees and get fully compliant within a matter of minutes, on a self-service basis that is free for employers to use. They use the investment strength of Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) to power the investment options available within their master trust.
Here are just some of the ways their platform makes employers’ lives easier:
Queries Duedil’s company lookup API so busy professionals don’t have to manually fill in all the required fields about their company.
Use of e-sigs so company owners don’t have to print, sign and send letters through the post, then wait to receive them back.
Integrations with a wide variety of payroll providers, some with one-click data submission.
Smart was founded in 2014. Today, they’ve evolved to become one of the largest workplace pension providers in the UK, with backing from global financial giants Legal & General Investment Management, J.P. Morgan and Link Group. They’re now growing internationally thanks to their impressive PaaS solutions.
We often source developers for Smart and they love working there. If you’re looking for a new role and you’re not already on our radar, get in touch!
For out more about Smart: www.smart.co
#2 of our top tech companies to watch
Great businesses put consumers and data at the heart of every decision. Attest’s mission is to empower anyone at every business to do this, all of the time.
A venture-capital-backed scaleup, Attest have created a market and brand intelligence platform. The platform enables users to craft surveys, select their exact target audience, and analyse complex results – all in one place.
Setting up surveys takes minutes; users can select pre-built templates (or start from scratch), preview as-they-go, whilst built-in platform guides help anyone to create actionable questions and answers.
Attest aggregates hundreds of different channels and uses different recruitment incentives to access a global audience of consumers. Interactive results then tell users the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and – perhaps most crucially – the ‘why’, to their survey queries.
It makes gathering quality consumer data and drawing actionable insights from it a lot easier – enabling brands to create better products and services.
Attest was founded in 2015. Today, it connects businesses like Uber, Deliveroo, and Twitter to a network of 100 million consumers across 80 different countries. They’re currently building out a Data Science function focusing on ML and NLP techniques to provide even greater insights to customers.
Find out more about Attest: www.askattest.com
#3 of our top tech companies to watch
Grabyo’s vision is to bring premium live sports, entertainment and news to audiences of billions, regardless of geography, media platform or device.
They’re doing this by helping customers produce videos and tell stories.
Grabyo has created a cloud-based platform that enables broadcasters, rights holders, publishers and brands to engage their audience through live streaming and real-time video editing. It removes the traditional complexities of professional video production and distribution.
The platform empowers users to deliver viral video content for vast digital audiences across websites, apps and social channels. It’s integrated with all the major social platforms and it’s also a preferred global partner for Facebook Live.
Grabyo supports multi-screen live streaming, real-time editing, live and video-on-demand distribution and monetisation. Better yet, the platform requires no technical skills, making it easy to deliver TV quality broadcasting.
Grabyo launched in 2013. Today, it works with over 60 premium rights holders, brands and publishers in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. AELTC Wimbledon, LaLiga, ITV, Global Radio and Sky Sports are just some of their customers.
They’re constantly innovating to provide cutting-edge tools for creating engaging, relevant content.
Find out more about Grabyo: www.grabyo.com
#4 of our top tech companies to watch
PolyAI aspires to lead the digital transformation of customer services through conversational AI technologies.
They build voice and text-based virtual customer service agents that understand what customers want, regardless of how a query is worded. The virtual agents are context-sensitive, flexible and provide the best responses at every turn of the conversation.
That’s because AI agents aren’t built on a decision-tree architecture, and the technology has already been pre-trained on billions of conversations. It only needs small amounts of in-domain data to train accurate virtual agents for brands.
The technology is also language agnostic, so virtual agents can communicate with users in their preferred languages – across all voice and text-based channels.
Founded in just 2017, PolyAI is a relatively new arrival to the scene, but it’s already a team of 30+ people. With conversational AI destined to take over the world, we’re excited to see where they go.
Find out more about PolyAi: www.polyai.com
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