Regional winners of Rising Stars contest for tech start-ups unveiled.

From AI to pharma, farming to fintech, a nationwide initiative is casting a spotlight on the hottest tech startups.

Now in its fourth edition, Tech Nation’s Rising Stars competition aims to identify and support the UK’s most disruptive tech upstarts.

And after months of entries and judging, it’s begun announcing the regional winners for the latest contest.

Top innovators in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the North West have already been announced, with the rest unveiled in a “12 days of scale-ups” campaign. Winners for one region will be revealed each weekday until 15 December.

What is Rising Stars 4.0?

Rising Stars is an annual competition to find the UK’s tech superstars of tomorrow.

Companies must be between one and three years old, hit certain funding/revenue benchmarks, and be able to demonstrate “market traction”, with the most promising picked by an expert judging panel.

Previous winners have included Startups 100 companies Opportuni and Vet-AI, so it’s got a pretty good track record at spotting firms that are going places.

The full list of regional winners will be whittled down to a shortlist of 20 companies, and then finally to 10 winners, who benefit from publicity, pitch training and networking opportunities.

Who’s made the hotlist so far?

To date, 20 regional winners  have been announced – five each from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and the North West of England.

Scotland

In Scotland, Know-it is helping SMEs to stay on top of their unpaid invoices, Gigged.AI is using artificial intelligence to revolutionise recruitment for digital projects, Kythera AI is working to improve AI in video games, , Letting Cloud is pioneering a new approach to matching people and property, and PolyDigi Tech is developing innovative authentication solutions to protect the data of companies and individuals.

The full version of this article can be found at startups.co.uk