Liverpool City Region’s Ecosystem
Get to know the LCR ecosystem from someone who knows it inside out, Capital Enterprise's Jonny Clark.
- Pre-Seed
- Seed
- Series A
- Series B
Liverpool: the best place for a startup?
This article is for anybody thinking about starting or growing their business in Liverpool or its surrounding area – the official name of which is ‘Liverpool City Region’ – and I’m going to explain to you why it’s one of the best places in the country to startup right now.
Liverpool is best known for its rich sports, music and cultural heritage.🔗
When Sony departed from the region in 2012 it seemed as though any semblance of a tech economy the city had was gone. Fortunately, this turned out to be wholly untrue.
In fact, it was this departure which actually provided the inputs and catalyst for the ongoing tech renaissance the region is enjoying some 12 years later.
The Baltic Triangle
If you were to walk down Jamaica Street in the ‘Baltic Triangle’ area of the city, you would be forgiven for thinking you had been transported to some kind of iconic punk street from Berlin. A struggling, derelict area prior to the early 2010s, this is now the beating heart of the overlap of the local creative industries and the increasing, percolating influence that technology has upon them.
Knowledge Quarter
Ascending Liverpool’s river terraces up towards Hope Street, some ten minutes ‘up the road’ from the Baltic, you arrive at the Knowledge Quarter – a thriving nerve centre of innovation-led assets owned by the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine; And all of their peripheral gateways. A recent uptick in the number of spinouts – particularly within the health and life sciences sector – has fuelled the expansion of the Sciontech Liverpool footprint and brought a new breath of fresh air to an area that was previously struggling to maintain an urban identity in the face of organic sprawl.
Sci-Tech Daresbury
A 20 minute train ride out to Runcorn and a short car ride later, one arrives at Sci-Tech Daresbury – one of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s two national campuses – the other being Harwell in Oxfordshire. Here, over two hundred science-focussed companies share a premises with some of the foremost on-prem compute capability available in the UK.
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LCR’s appeal
This unique blend of grunge-esque counterculture and a bourgeoning swell of tech-infused, naturally ‘Type A’ entrepreneurs coming out of the local area have formed the basis for Liverpool and its neighbouring boroughs bucking many national trends over recent years since the pandemic, adding a huge amount of new tech startup roles and accolades at a time when most places were seeing a downturn.
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LCR’s appeal – a hub of activity
The pandemic lockdown period cast an underappreciated stroke of luck for Liverpool. The same phenomenon that led to social distancing bubbles, coffee walks, a surge in making banana bread, Zoom quizzes and ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ also spawned an ephemeral coming-together of the Combined Authority’s investment team, risk capital providers, entrepreneurs and the established local business base. Collectively, this resulted in the creation of a number of best-in-class initiatives to foster a new generation of technology-led companies that could attract equity investment and achieve scale at a rate and magnitude that companies here, historically, had struggled to hit.
Lyva Labs
Lyva Labs is a deep tech incubator geared towards supporting academic entrepreneurs from our local higher education institutions. It has backed a wide range of early stage ventures that require patient capital, grant writing support and a ‘halfway house’ between the worlds of academia and venture. Led by Lorna Green, a fantastic amount of IP that would have otherwise been locked up as research or journal papers across our universities has become the basis of internationally significant ventures here.
Baltic Ventures
Baltic Ventures gears up and funds early-stage teams to rapidly accelerate towards their next funding round, and successfully bag it. Claire, Mo, Becca, Rachel and their network of coaches are the go-to for founders looking to turn a side hustle into a serious business that generates consistent returns. The first batch from September 2023 all successfully raised follow-on investment and several have hit notable revenue or customer acquisition milestones since then.
Gateway Angels
Gateway Angels is the refreshed, revamped and revitalised local angel network – led by my friend and highly capable, longtime advocate for early-stage investment opportunities Katie Nicholson. In a place where the tech economy is a relatively new thing and most wealth has been created in property, hospitality and other industries, there is an artform to coaxing high net worth individuals into putting cash into new ventures in unfamiliar business models and environments.
Seed Funding
A seed fund, as of the time of writing this article, is currently being put out to tender for a fund manager to operate. This will provide vital capital to budding local startups at the pre-seed to seed stage.
An attractive proposition with a thriving founder community
Collectively, these new initiatives make this comparatively small city (having just over a half a million residents) an attractive proposition set against the other notable Northern settlements of England.
Community-wise, there are a multitude of small meetups and events as well as larger, more formal business occasions. Startup Grind Liverpool, which I co-direct with Joe Duckers, provides a super casual set of events every few weeks – such as ‘Pizza and Pitch’, some fireside chats and plenty of ‘let your hair down’ mixers. Once a year I also host “Liverpool Slush’D” – a one day conference where I try to bring big names in tech and venture to the city to get founders (and the people around them) thinking big.
The city offers a great deal in terms of quality of life and opportunities, relative to the cost of living here. Increasing numbers of digital nomads arrive and make the city a long term stay – and the local tech industry has shown resilience at a time when there is a lot of upheaval in the wider UK economy.
Notable sectors and institutions
There is a strong eCommerce corporate base in the region, with The Very Group, QVC and Matalan all based here. Jaguar Land Rover and Unilever also have a large presence and there is a strong track record of successful digital transformation in the local manufacturing and health & life sciences sectors which provides a great opportunity for rapid, direct market access to any tech startups developing solutions in that space.
With University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, Hope University and Edge Hil University all producing sizeable numbers of graduates across technical and business disciplines, in addition to over half a dozen highly rated local colleges, talent is on your doorstep.
Fun Fact
All of these institutes have lengthy track records in terms of successfully engaging with industry on publicly funded programmes, research projects and technology demonstrator initiatives that usually come with generous subsidies for participant businesses.
An insider’s take
As someone who spends a lot of time analysing dealflow, matching investors to startups and putting money into them myself – I have seen a progressive improvement in the volume and also quality coming out of the locale.
Having lived here pretty much all my life, but also having travelled extensively to a number of business and technology hotspots around the globe, I very much believe Liverpool is on the up and charting a new trajectory with its technology economy.
Everybody I speak to comments on the sense of energy and ‘buzz’ around the place.
Come and try it out – I think you’ll want to be a part of it…
