The incubator launching Scotland’s next generation of tech: ‘We need to pull the bigger players into the Scottish market’

Scotland has quietly built one of the more interesting deeptech ecosystems in the UK, thanks largely to the universities strung along the Edinburgh-Glasgow corridor and the fact the country hosts two of the UK's five quantum hubs. The research is there. What's harder to find, according to Andrew Parfery, SVP Commercial & University Lead at CodeBase, is the commercial know-how needed to turn that research into a company. Persuading a leading academic to become an entrepreneur, he says, is rarely straightforward.

That gap is what the Venture Builder Incubator is meant to close. Run jointly by the University of Edinburgh, the Scottish government's Techscaler programme and CodeBase, the five-month course has backed 164 founders and businesses since 2021, and those companies have collectively pulled in £58m in grants and investment. Since 2024 Techscaler has widened the programme so researchers from any Scottish university can apply, not just Edinburgh's.

Shivoh Nandakumar's route into founding Ridescan AI started with a moment of doubt during his PhD, when he watched a robotic dog confidently report it had picked up a box — when it had actually grabbed a table. That mismatch between a robot's confidence and its accuracy became the basis for a company that independently monitors robots for safety and reliability once they're out in public spaces. He describes academia as its own bubble, and says building a company meant stepping into an entirely different one, something he couldn't have done from inside a university.

Eva Steele's path with Amytis, the AI biotech she cofounded, grew out of a similar realisation: wet lab researchers often lack the computational skills to use AI tools that could otherwise transform their work. Her company set out to build something more accessible for that audience. Techscaler's network turned out to be useful in an unexpectedly direct way — a newsletter mention led her to Bethnal Green Ventures, which matched a Smart Scotland grant Amytis had already secured, letting the company keep going at a moment that mattered.

Parfery says a lot of the incubator's actual work is unglamorous: teaching founders to pitch, to tell a customer-facing story, to understand what investors expect before they ask for money. He's blunt about correcting unrealistic expectations, like a founder wanting to raise a small amount at an inflated valuation. Nandakumar credits the programme with opening a relationship with the University of Edinburgh's venture arm that he says wouldn't have happened otherwise. Techscaler also runs trips to Singapore, Silicon Valley, New York, China and Japan, matched to whatever a founder needs next.

Parfery's bigger ambition is less about individual founders and more about reversing a pattern: Scottish talent and ideas leaving for investment elsewhere. He wants outside investors coming to Scotland instead, to see what its universities are producing firsthand. Applications for the next VBI cohort close July 20th.