For a fair few years now, Brighton has been seen as a somewhat idyllic place for start-ups and businesses in the tech sector. Far from the grind-mentality of Silicon Valley in the US or even London’s business environment, Brighton offers a much more person-oriented approach that seems to be working well. Over the last few years, the city has been named the most entrepreneurial city in the country and the UK’s start-up capital.
Importantly, businesses established in ‘Silicon Seaside’ are developing key technologies and establishing hubs for businesses to power up in the UK and worldwide. These are some of those leading names in Brighton business helping to earn the city its newfound fame as a tech and start-up hub.
Making it easier for fellow start-ups
From Brighton-based Simon Ritchie and a team of industry tech veterans from the likes of Metapraxis, Blox is a SaaS start-up squarely focused on easing the process of decision-making for its fellow start-ups. The business planning platform is cloud-based, shifts the focus away from spreadsheets, and comes with a suite of pre-built models.
All in all, the Blox platform offers refined tools to speed up many business functions for start-ups, and as time is money – or sometimes, there isn’t the money for the time required with a start-up – it should prove incredibly useful. The initial launch grants free access with subscription tiers to come this year, so it’d be wise for interested small and medium businesses to check out the subscription revenue modelling, SaaS financial modelling, marketing planning, workforce planning, and other models during this ideal window.
Connecting businesses through immersive popular tech
If there’s one form of tech that you could point to as having exploded into relevancy over the last few years, it’s live streaming. Said to become a $2.6 billion worldwide industry by 2031, live streaming has become mainstream.
Most have become accustomed to video calls, many go to live stream platforms like Twitch for community engagement, and others make use of the tech to enhance products, as they do at the live casinos Ireland offers. Immersion and real-time action are key to the rise of live streaming. In live casino games, for example, people can use their smartphones to bet on the likes of roulette or Boom City at the moment and then see the results come in, all while a professional croupier or host runs the show. Already in Brighton, there are several specialists in live streaming helping out businesses, including Wild Stag Studio on North Road, Metway Studio on Canning Street, and Ironworks Studios on Cheapside. It’s clear that there’s a big market for live content now.
Exploring the next phase of quantum computing
One of the biggest-name start-ups in Brighton right now is Universal Quantum. They hit the headlines a couple of years back for being the Brighton-based firm to gain £3.6 million in early funding for their large-scale quantum computer project. It was later reported that a further £7.5 million grant from the government was given to Universal Quantum to create the first fully scalable quantum computer. Their core aim remains to build “a million qubit quantum computer,” which could solve problems that would take modern supercomputers billions of years.
Cloud-based business solutions, live streaming, and quantum computing are among the leading tech sectors showcasing their worth in Silicon Seaside right now, with even more advancements expected as more start-ups gravitate to Brighton.
