A Milestone Month: Tech Zero, the Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit and 100 UK Tech Unicorns!

As ever, the past month has been full of exciting events, projects and commitments from some of the UK’s most incredible tech companies. 

Just yesterday, the UK hit a milestone of 100 tech unicorns, cementing our position as one of the world’s greatest tech hubs. To name just a couple more of this week’s highlights, we’ve seen the launch of two crucially important initiatives over the past few days; the launch of the Tech Zero Taskforce’s Tech Zero Pledge and Tech Nation’s Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit for scaling UK tech businesses.

The Tech Zero pledge has launched!

In the run up to COP26, we as a tech sector must innovate to address one of the greatest global challenges of all: reducing our carbon footprint and ensuring a sustainable future for our planet. 

This week, I had the honour of helping UK tech take a huge step in that direction. On Monday, I launched the Tech Zero Pledge at CogX Festival alongside some of the Tech Zero Taskforce’s inspiring founding members: OLIO’s Tessa Clarke, Bulb’s Hayden Wood, MoneySuperMarket’s Peter Duffy, Wise’s Taavet Hinrikus, GoCardless’ Hiroki Takeuchi and RT Hon Oliver Dowden CBE MP. 

Tech Zero is a group of fast-growing UK tech companies, working together to tackle the climate crisis and make the UK the number one destination for green investment. Reaching net zero is not only a global priority; it is essential for the UK's ongoing inclusive and competitive economic growth trajectory, and will be a critical factor in any scaleup’s journey moving forward. The Tech Zero Pledge asks tech companies to commit to measuring their scope 1-3 emissions and set an ambitious net zero target by the end of 2021.

On Wednesday, I was also delighted to discuss this topic further at Founders Forum’s Tech Zero session on ‘How to achieve Tech Zero: three of the UK’s leading founders share their experience’, alongside members of the Tech Zero Taskforce, where we explored how we can achieve ‘Tech Zero’ together, innovate to reduce carbon emissions and create a more sustainable digital economy. 

I’m proud to say that Tech Nation is leading by example, having launched our first public sustainability report this week. This report marks the beginning of an exciting journey in showing real climate leadership and becoming a net zero organisation well before 2030. Our next steps will be to set rigorous science based targets, to ensure we are setting targets which are in line with best practice science and to continue measuring and reducing our emissions across our operations. 

We’ve also now completed our inaugural Net Zero programme, and will soon launch Net Zero 2.0; continuing our work to scale the tech companies who are innovating to create a more sustainable future for us all. In fact, the World Economic Forum has suggested that digital technology could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 15% by 2030. That’s why supporting climate tech companies to grow is at the core of our mission at Tech Nation, and we’re excited to encourage hundreds more companies to join us in addressing climate change.

Introducing the Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit

In addition to helping tackle rising carbon emissions, tech has a vital role to play in strengthening the diversity and inclusivity of the UK’s economy and society. Diversity and inclusion are vital for nurturing an innovative, caring, and high-performing business culture, and at such a pivotal stage of growth, UK tech needs to lead in setting the pace of change. For instance, the tech sector is responsible for a staggering 1 in 10 UK job vacancies, and reached record investment heights this year. This places us in prime position to boost job creation, strengthen the economy and close gender and ethnicity diversity gaps. 

Over the past few months, Tech Nation’s Fintech Delivery Panel and the Insurtech Board have been running a series of free Diversity & Inclusion workshops, delivered by award-winning diversity consultancy The Unmistakables, to equip fintech companies with the information and actions they can take to improve D&I within their organisations. The next workshop in the series will take place on 23rd June (sign up here!), and will focus on diverse recruitment; exploring how to create inclusive job descriptions, de-bias your recruitment process, and top tips on attracting diverse talent.

This week, we were delighted to take another step towards diversifying the tech sector at large, with the launch of our new Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit; an important resource to help tech companies’ founders and employees build more diverse and inclusive businesses. Created from interviews conducted with UK tech leaders, each section of the toolkit contains checklists, links to tools and resources, and case studies highlighting examples of companies who have enacted positive change. The toolkit will be continually updated, reflecting the changing tech landscape and new D&I initiatives that emerge. 

Our COO Rowena Knapp launched the D&I Toolkit on Wednesday while moderating a fascinating and inspiring CogX Festival session on ‘How to build an inclusive workplace’, alongside Foundervine’s Managing Director Izzy Obeng, futureproof’s Head of Client Services Claudia Cohen, and Creative Entrepreneur Nikhil Shah. These inspiring individuals discussed how founders can use Tech Nation’s new D&I Toolkit to make their growing businesses more inclusive, the best way to talk with colleagues about D&I, and how to use data to build an inclusive workplace across departments.

An exciting week at CogX

In addition to launching the D&I Toolkit and the Tech Zero Pledge, we at Tech Nation were privileged to be involved in several of the inspiring panels and discussions at CogX Festival this year. 

To name just a couple of highlights, on Monday, our Chair, Stephen Kelly, launched the CreaTech Report 2021, commissioned by the Creative Industries Council, which shines light on the new cultural, growth and investment possibilities CreaTech opens up for the UK. Our Head of Insights George Windsor explored its encouraging findings shortly afterwards, and discussed CreaTech’s impact on UK employment, job roles and skills. For example, UK CreaTech companies raised nearly ￡1bn in venture capital investment in 2020, up 22% on 2019, and ahead of the ￡846mn raised by Energy Tech in the same period. With world-class creative industries contributing ￡116bn in annual GVA to the UK economy (pre-pandemic), it’s clear that the UK is at the forefront of the CreaTech revolution.

On Tuesday, our Head of Programmes, Parveen Dhanda, also took to the Edtech stage to moderate a panel on ‘Follow the money: Why edtech is booming’. This talk explored the future of the edtech sector, which has seen an unbelievable 72% growth in the last 12 months - and which is set to see even more growth in the months and years to come. 

For those of you who were also able to join - either in-person or virtually - I’m sure you’ll agree CogX was a fantastic opportunity to hear from some of the nation’s greatest thought leaders about important topics ranging from climate tech and healthtech to the future of work. The three-day event was a brilliant reminder of the power we have as a sector to shape the future of not just our own country but the world - and the responsibility this brings to be truly mindful, sustainable and inclusive in our approach. 

UK tech goes global

On 2nd June, I enjoyed speaking at the Plug and Play APAC Summit. We are thrilled to have worked in partnership with Plug and Play on our new International Growth Programme in Singapore (as part of the UK Government Digital Trade Network) to help more UK tech companies export to exciting new markets - such as those in Asia Pacific. 

At the summit, we heard from an esteemed group of business leaders from across the APAC region, as well as from the first cohort of 12 of Tech Nation’s best alumni (Seed Legals, Wazoku, Wondrwall, Assuria, Cambridge Intelligence, Topolytics, Dataswift, Firefly, Dynamify, Flexciton, BankBI, and Everledger). It’s an honour to help these incredible companies access new overseas opportunities, and forge new international partnerships in Singapore and the wider southeast Asia region, as part of our ongoing mission to take UK tech across international borders.

Looking to the future of finance

Last but not least, on 8th June, the Fintech Delivery Panel hosted their second roundtable of their series on Emerging Tech & Future Finance, co-hosted with the Bank of England, on the theme of ‘Big Tech and the Future of Finance’. It was a fascinating session, facilitated by the FDP’s Chair Eileen Burbidge, in which we heard from thought leaders from across the UK fintech ecosystem. The session brought together representatives from financial institutions, policymakers, academia, civic society, third sector and other industry bodies. We heard from Rich Radley (Google’s Head of Customer Engineering), Kate Rosenshine (Director at Microsoft), Edward Bowles (Facebook’s Global Director for Public Policy), Irina Mnohoghitnei (Fintech Hub, Bank of England) and Jon Williams (Professor of Banking Regulation at Bangor University).

Together, they discussed some of the hottest topics of the moment; such as the fintech sector’s opportunity to facilitate financial inclusion, increase competition in the market, and - of course - the importance of friendly co-opetition between bigtech, fintech companies and banks to ensure we are driving positive outcomes for consumers. 

The work is ongoing

The work we have done this month in launching the Tech Zero pledge and the D&I Toolkit is exciting, inspiring and motivating. But this is only the beginning. As UK tech continues to scale, we must work together to create a more diverse and sustainable digital economy, to ensure the UK tech sector becomes the best place to work for everyone aspiring to work in tech - for decades to come.

As a final reminder, the deadline for applications to one of our Tech Nation growth programmes (Net Zero, Fintech, Applied AI, Libra, Upscale and Future Fifty) is 30th June. Whether you’re an early-stage founder navigating the challenge of starting a new tech company, or a late-stage CEO steering a much bigger ship, we’re excited to meet you, and help you scale and thrive. Click here to apply now!