For the past thirteen years, KPMG’s Tech Innovator awards have uncovered some of the most exciting and innovative tech-based scale-ups and start-ups the UK has to offer. This year, could that be you?
Every year, the sheer variety and breadth of ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive on display is remarkable – from last year’s winner, Inicio AI, a female-founded business whose virtual agent gives a more sympathetic and constructive ear to customers with affordability problems, to previous winners that include Halocycle, a cleantech start-up offering plastic recycling solutions and HiirROC, a Hull based scaleup with its own proprietary process for developing affordable clean hydrogen.
As with Inicio in 2025, increasing numbers of entries are from AI-related businesses. That’s exciting because it shows the AI hype is not just hype – it’s real and is inspiring more and more entrepreneurs and innovators to reimagine how things can be done in pursuit of smarter insights, greater productivity and better outcomes for people and businesses.
What makes the Tech Innovator competition so powerful is that we receive entries from a complete spread of sectors and all regions of the country. The UK awards attract upwards of 200 entries every year, with around half of those usually coming from London and the South East and the rest spread around the UK’s other big cities and regions. That’s a pattern that broadly reflects the overall demographics of the UK’s scale-up enterprise market: London leading the way but other cities including Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds thriving as hotspots.