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Britain faces a trillion-dollar tech challenge

The UK produces some of the world’s most exciting businesses – now it’s time we kept them

Trillion-dollar

Recently techUK and TheCityUK co-hosted a summit on a crucial issue – how UK-based tech firms can expand their access to capital markets.

Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby emphasised the importance of tech firms choosing not just to start in the UK, but also to scale and stay in this country.

The UK has a strong track record of founding industry-leading, world-beating businesses, from high-tech companies such as Arm, Darktrace and DeepMind, to B2B giants like Sage and consumer platforms such as Deliveroo.

But this summit emphasised that we still have further to go to “secure the UK’s first trillion-dollar technology business” by 2035, the ambitious objective set out in the Industrial Strategy.

Scaling a company to a trillion-dollar valuation will require an influx of investment into the UK that is almost unprecedented, and not just into a single business, but into an entire field of startups and scaleups, ‘thoroughbreds’ and unicorns, to first create more companies with valuations in the tens and hundreds of billions....