From the growing cluster of fintech firms around Leeds’ Northern Square Mile to healthtech businesses transforming care for patients, West Yorkshire has become a real hive of tech activity, even if some of its founders have been a bit too busy building to tell anyone about it.
But the numbers give a real sense of what’s happening. West Yorkshire Combined Authority puts the region’s digital, tech and AI ecosystem at around 9,700 businesses employing 50,000 people, with more than 43,000 graduates emerging each year from its seven universities.
Leeds alone has more than 3,500 digital and tech businesses, while the combined authority says West Yorkshire has more tech scale-ups than anywhere in the UK outside London and the South East.
You don’t have to look far for examples. Prolific North’s own Tech Scale-ups to Watch list earlier this year featured Leeds-based Optalysys, Boxphish and Vet-AI alongside Huddersfield’s Adventoris, spanning deeptech, cybersecurity, pet healthtech and software.
But what’s driving that growth? For this first feature in Prolific North’s Regional Tech Champions series on West Yorkshire, supported by leading accountancy firm BHP, we’ve spoken to the people building businesses and helping shape the ecosystem to find out.
Why here and why now?
A great starting point for a snapshot of what’s happened over the past decade is Stuart Clarke MBE, who has helped drive some of the region’s transformation. As founder and chair of Leeds Digital Festival, now in its 11th year, he also founded UK Tech Week, which heads to Leeds in March 2027. He’s also director of Paceline, helping tech start-ups and scale-ups tell their stories.
When he first set up the festival, he says he “probably could have named the number of start-ups on both hands”. Now, just as many are emerging each week.
In 2021, he first launched Leeds Tech Map to showcase the city’s tech businesses through a visual snapshot. Updated each year, it brings that growth to life, with the latest version showing just how much the sector has boomed.
The region’s strengths also have some fairly deep roots. Andy Haigh, partner at Translink Corporate Finance, says “the historical growth” of healthtech companies such as healthtech firms EMIS (now known as Enlivio Health) and TPP, Sky Betting & Gaming, Infinity Works and plenty of others have “laid a foundation of talented people with skills and appetite to continue the momentum”.
That experience matters when people move on to build something of their own, but so does having customers and potential partners nearby. And as Haigh explains, there’s a real sector density rather than a diffuse ‘tech scene’.
“Health-tech alone comprises over 300 businesses generating an estimated £3bn in annual revenue, with names ranging from global players like DePuy Synthes and Optum through to Leeds-grown firms such as Radar Healthcare and Aire Logic. Fintech sits on top of a £5.3bn regional financial services base and now counts over 100 firms, positioning the region as the UK’s second-largest fintech cluster outside London.”
Clarke from Leeds Digital agrees fintech is “really growing fast”, pointing to how homegrown firms are now joined by major businesses such as GoCardless and PEXA, which have chosen Leeds for new offices.
The region has also been recognised through the government’s High Potential Opportunities programme for data and AI, while the 10-year £160m Investment Zone for the healthtech sector in West Yorkshire has already secured £80m for the government, with plans to target up to £220m and the creation of 2,500 jobs, and is now funding “physical anchors” in Bradford, Huddersfield and Leeds.
But for one of the businesses growing within the region’s healthtech sector, the starting point was a rather different choice: healthcare or beer?
Gareth Rimmington and Alex Higgins, the co-founders behind Leeds-based digital health partner platform Vyne, met at Leeds Metropolitan University in the 2000s. While an early attempt to build a property empire wasn’t quite for them, it left them with money to invest elsewhere. With Higgins working in beer and Rimmington in healthcare, they settled on the latter over a round of golf.
“With the chunk of money we had at the time, we started thinking about how we can make a difference for patients. Even in those early days, we looked at bringing in products that would add value or have unique selling points for both patients and healthcare professionals,” says Higgins.
They set up Optimum Medical in 2008, later launching Vyne in 2021 to help clinicians and patients manage bladder and bowel care. Entirely self-funded, the wider business now has around 150 staff and sales of more than £30m, with plans to reach 200 staff by the end of the year.
The people behind the growth
For Clarke over at Leeds Digital, one of the biggest changes has been how many students choose to stay in the region. Stronger university links and graduate programmes at businesses such as Sky Bet have helped make that possible.
“It’s really important as there are talent shortages everywhere. The more we bring homegrown talent up, and the more we keep the talent that’s decided to come to university here, the better.”
Haigh from Translink Corporate Finance highlights how that talent supply is a “genuine competitive advantage”.
“The region’s seven universities produce somewhere in the region of 34,000 to 43,000 graduates a year, the University of Leeds ranks in the UK’s top 10 for spinouts, and government has designated the area a “High Potential Opportunity” location specifically for data and AI,” he explains.
Vyne’s founders have also benefited from that talent pipeline, tapping into experienced hires such as CTO Tom Bailey, who previously worked at Ocado Technology, and building ties with the nearby “mega universities” for early-stage talent.
“When it comes to attracting talent, we feel very fortunate. We’re in the process of recruiting several more programmers to come into the business – we haven’t had any issues with attracting people. They really feel like they are contributing to modernising and helping the NHS, which we all love.”
The duo also highlight how Leeds is a “hotbed” for medtech, thanks to NHS Digital as an anchor with its big footprint in the city, and revealed plans for their own growth with a move into a larger office later in the year.
At Leeds-based cloud and cybersecurity provider virtualDCS, CEO Alex Wilmot says university placements have become a route into the business too.
“We have just taken on a third-year computer science student at Leeds University for a year on his year out. It’s a well-trodden path for us. Over the years, 50% of our operational team have come from that angle, and it’s the best way for us to home grow that talent.”
His own connection to the company goes back much further. Wilmot took over from co-founder Richard May last year, following MonacoSol’s majority investment in 2025, but the pair had worked together long before that.
“I’ve actually known Richard for 25 years. And he was my manager for 24 hours! It was a make-or-break period in both our careers,” he explains.
Wilmot had just joined May’s team at ICM Computer Group when, on his first day, May left with John Murray and Dan Nichols to establish virtualDCS. That left Wilmot with 32 salespeople needing technical support and a team to build. Years later, he is running the business May left to start.
“Everybody knows everybody, when you look across the IT industry and pick people out in various businesses whether they’re a scale-up, start-up or established, usually there’s someone there you know who was doing a similar thing to you,” he explains.
“People tend to spread and then take their experiences elsewhere, but the circles don’t, they continue on.”
Reflecting more widely on just how far the region has transformed over the past decade, he says it has “massively evolved” and the North is becoming “more prolific” for businesses to scale across regions like West Yorkshire.
“The North was always known as the steel capital, home to the manufacturing capitals, but it was never really the business capital. The investment in places from the likes of HMRC and Channel 4 have been momentous because it brings talent and investment.”
Those connections are helping other businesses in the region grow too. At Leeds-based AI and technology consultancy Enablis, part of Fruition Group, founder and CEO Sarah Pawson has been bringing in senior talent across delivery and engineering, alongside investment in AI skills.
The business recently expanded into London with the opening of a new office and two senior hires, which marks another milestone in Enablis’ rapid growth.
“Leeds has some great, awesome technology professionals that live and work here. We’ve really benefited from there being a real tech hub of businesses here, with some huge technology organisations in the city. We’ve been super smart in how we’ve hired, we’ve really utilised our networks,” she explains.
“We ultimately cannot grow this business without investing in talent. We’re able to hire talent really well because that’s what Fruition has spent the last 18 to 19 years doing.”
It’s a theme that stretches well beyond Leeds. Over in Halifax, Motorhome Pig co-founder Lewis Cheetham was initially worried about whether the business could attract the people it needed. Having lived in Manchester and taken part in an entrepreneur programme with GM Business Growth Hub, he wondered whether that might be a better base.
“I said to my dad: ‘maybe we’re better off setting up in Manchester or somewhere that’s growing really fast and attracting talent’. Long-term, I was worried about it, but it was probably the best decision because Halifax is home for us.”
Instead, the business has since found passionate young people locally who might otherwise struggled to commute to work for a start-up in bigger cities.
“It’s just blown me away the amount of talent we actually have locally. It’s probably the best decision we could’ve made, sticking in Halifax.”
Growing from the region
The ambitions of those businesses increasingly reach well beyond the region, whether they have raised investment or funded growth themselves.
Lewis Cheetham and his father Gary set up Motorhome Pig in 2025 after spotting a gap in a fragmented market to take on the “cowboys” running the industry. Neither came from a tech background, but Lewis has developed an AI-powered valuation platform with support from The King’s Trust, drawing on their experience running a motorbike dealership.
The bootstrapped business now has an 18-strong team in Halifax, while Lewis is currently over in Texas plotting the company’s US expansion.
“At the moment, we’re just putting the groundwork in place to bring what we’ve done in the UK over here to America. It’s a much bigger market so we’re just trying to slowly build out here,” he says.
Haigh has seen international interest from the other direction, after Translink Corporate Finance advised on US-based Cordance’s acquisition of AppsAnywhere, which delivers academic software to students at more than 250 universities across 22 countries.
“This notably was Cordance’s first investment outside the United States. More than half of AppsAnywhere’s revenue was already coming from US customers before the deal, which provides an indication of the ambition and reach businesses from West Yorkshire have,” he explains.
Then there’s Leeds-founded Optalysys, which Translink Corporate Finance also works with. The company is developing photonic chips that use light to move and process data, and raised a £23m Series A extension in January, led by Northern Gritstone. The funding will be used to support commercialisation and US expansion while keeping the company’s engineering base in Leeds.
“This deep-tech, IP-heavy hardware businesses working at the frontier of AI infrastructure is a good illustration of West Yorkshire’s broad tech strength,” he says.
For other businesses, acquisitions and private equity are helping fund the next stage. Enablis, founded in 2020 and backed by private equity in 2023, now has 45 employees and a wider pool of 120 contractors. It reported 33% revenue growth between 2024 and 2025 and has recently opened a London office as part of its rapid expansion.
“The thinking behind the private equity investment was to supercharge the growth of the consultancy business, which is now rebranded to Enablis, and to continue the growth of Fruition, which operates as the sales engine and the talent engine for Enablis. So the two businesses work very, very collaboratively together,” explains Pawson.
Alex Wilmot from virtualDCS is also seeing demand from traditional local manufacturers now adopting technology and automation, the transformation can be seen all around as you’ll now find robots on warehouse floors. Alongside that, consolidation is creating opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs), with virtualDCS now considering acquisitions that could add scale or complementary services in future.
“There are so many businesses at that start-up and pre-scale up level that there’s a lot of consolidation that’s going to take place. We see it week in, week out. Right now a number of MSPs are snapping up smaller MSPs and going on journeys together,” he says.
“Our opportunity and pipeline is based around the area. An early stage view, from an acquisition perspective, is that we’re looking in the area. We’re open to conversations anywhere as anyone would be, but we know a lot of businesses here, and that also means that we are more confident in those businesses because we’ve known the owners and people in it for a long time.”
But growth also brings some very practical challenges. Motorhome Pig’s team is still working from shipping containers, and finding a larger home in Halifax is proving difficult while Lewis Cheetham is also considering whether US expansion will eventually mean finding an investment partner.
“As the amount of customers that we’ve had has grown, we’ve been able to grow the team in lockstep with it and we’ve not run out of runway yet. Maybe for America I’ll have to try and find the right partner – but that’s probably a year or so down the line.”
Finding a way in
For all the familiar faces and success stories, knowing where to turn can still depend on who you happen to meet.
Haigh from Translink Corporate Finance says you can “feel the buzz and energy” among the region’s technology entrepreneurs.
“You can’t help but be impressed with the way the technology community collaborates and supports each other to bring out the best of what each other are doing,” he says.
Pawson from Enablis recognises that supportive network too, but feels it has become “less prominent” than before Covid, as businesses have had to focus on getting through difficult trading conditions.
“In the last couple of years, it has been a challenging time for a lot of businesses working in technology. People have just got their head down and had to batten down the hatches and get on with what they’re doing. People have had to become much more inwardly focused on their own businesses.”
Enablis has since launched Colab, an AI event series, and is planning support for people early in their technology careers next year. But for some of the founders just starting out though, finding those connections isn’t always straightforward.
Developer duo Mike Franklin and Nick Payne met at Sky Bet in 2009, became best mates, and officially launched their meeting transcription app Talat this year. It turns conversations into text on a user’s own computer, without needing to send audio and meeting data to external servers, and could be a game-changer for those handling confidential meetings and recordings, from journalists to agencies.
“It’s up to you what you do with the data, but it starts with you. And if you then want to send it to a cloud LLM fine, that’s up to you. But the relationship is yours, and the decision is yours,” says Payne.
The pair are bootstrapping the business, and Franklin says a chance meeting with former Panintelligence co-founder and CEO Zandra Moore has since led to her becoming a “huge help” with introductions and support.
“It’s definitely been a community that we’ve stepped into a little bit, where we’ve spoken to a bunch of people, and they’ve all just been brilliant, trying to offer us help and support,” he says.
Yet Payne describes meeting Moore at an event at Leeds Trinity as a “very fortuitous event”. He is less sure how he would navigate the ecosystem and what comes next without those personal introductions.
“If you ask me today. Nick, you need to go out and raise a million quid. I literally wouldn’t have a clue,” he says. “It’s that pre-support stage. Again, we just wouldn’t have a clue other than our local network. Is there anyone that you can sit down with objectively who does this sort of thing for a living? I don’t know.”
In Bradford, Olalekan Obisesan has found a more structured route into support. Now founder and CEO of tech start-up Helixus, Obisesan moved from Nigeria in 2022 and began exploring business ideas while on paternity leave, with the ultimate mission to use digital tools to “drive social impact”.
He formally set up Helixus in 2025 and has since launched Otiya, an AI-powered quiz and learning platform, into beta. It already has 800 users across four continents, with further development focused on learners with disabilities and special needs.
Looking for somewhere to work with a toddler at home led him to free workspace at a NatWest Accelerator, where he met other tech founders. The combined authority’s AD:VENTURE programme then helped him work through business goals, accounting and research and development.
“They have dedicated staff who would always meet with me, help me set goals, and through that I was presented with lots of different opportunities.”
With plans to introduce paying customers and eventually hire staff, he is “growing in confidence”. While his own experiences shows what that support can do once founders find it, Talat’s raises the question of how many others know where to look when it comes to investment or support.
That’s part of the task facing the newly established Tech West Yorkshire initiative, which Leeds Digital is developing with West Yorkshire Combined Authority. When it launches, Clarke from Leeds Digital wants to take what has been built in Leeds and help strengthen connections across the wider region.
“It takes what we’ve done in Leeds over the past 10 to 11 years to see how we can help other parts of Yorkshire, from Kirklees, Calderdale, Bradford and Wakefield. Some are more advanced, with Bradford Digital. Others less so. We want to map the ecosystem and look at what’s needed in terms of support.”
The businesses are there, from a healthtech company hiring programmers in Leeds to a motorhome start-up finding talent in Halifax and an edtech founder building in Bradford. Helping more people find their way into that activity, and the support to keep growing, is where the next opportunity lies.
As Haigh puts it: “Wherever you look, West Yorkshire seems to deliver success story after success story in the technology sector.”
