From the creation of ‘digital humans’ where you’ll find an AI-powered DJ spinning the decks at M&S Bank Arena, to founders using tech to transform education, healthcare and even event safety, Liverpool City Region’s tech sector is ‘maturing’.
At least that’s the picture painted by the founders, investors and ecosystem leaders I’ve spoken to over the past month or so for Prolific North’s GRAFT Tech Regional Champions series, supported by MHA and Growth Platform.
But what stood out most from those conversations wasn’t just the technology being developed. It was how often people talked about collaboration and a growing ecosystem where the lines between creativity and technology are becoming increasingly blurred.
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Now home to more than 6,500 digital and creative businesses employing over 51,000 people, the region has become a melting pot of businesses operating across immersive tech, health and life sciences, advanced manufacturing and AI.
“There’s a hell of a lot to be said for having a globally renowned city the size of a village,” says Tom Reynolds, founder of edtech start-up EdenFiftyOne.
“You can walk from one side of Liverpool city centre to the other in less than 20 minutes and that makes a real difference in terms of networking, businesses knowing each other and people backing one another.”
That “village feel” came up repeatedly throughout my chats with leaders across the region.
For founders like Chelsea Slater, it has been fundamental to turning ideas into businesses. “I don’t think we could’ve started anywhere else as a community organisation,” explains Slater, founder of social enterprise InnovateHer.
Since 2017, InnovateHer has helped young people develop tech and digital skills while improving diversity in the sector, working closely with schools and organisations including Liverpool Football Club and PlayStation.
“People are so supportive and loyal and they want to get behind each other. There’s not as much competitiveness here as elsewhere — which could either be seen as a positive or a negative depending on how you look at it. But you never feel alone.”
A city built on collaboration
In the Baltic Triangle, it’s not just the vibrant street art like the iconic ‘Liver Bird Wings’ wrapped around revamped red brick warehouses that brings the area to life. This corner of the city now houses a growing number of digital agencies, creative studios, game developers and tech start-ups working side by side..
While a collaborative ecosystem isn’t exactly unique to Liverpool, several founders say these pockets of supportive activity in places like the Baltic Triangle are one of the key reasons why they have chosen to return home after years spent living away elsewhere.
One of those founders is Cathy Long, founder of Aposto. Liverpool is her hometown, and the “shock” of the Hillsborough disaster shaped much of her career, leading her to spend the past 20 years working with football clubs across the UK and Europe to campaign for and improve crowd safety and the fan experience.
Now, she’s channelled those lessons into Aposto, a platform designed to improve staffing and safety management across large-scale events.
“I always felt like part of what we want to do is to create a crowd or event safety tech hub. And for me, there’s nowhere event safety is more important than Liverpool because of Hillsborough,” she explains. After 11 years living in London, she joined the Baltic Ventures accelerator programme last year and quickly realised how much the city had transformed. Now, she’s planning to relocate back to Liverpool for good.
“When I grew up here, people had to leave and go down to London. Now that’s really not the case. I hadn’t lived here for about 11 years and what I’ve noticed is just how vibrant it is and how much there is going on.
“It didn’t feel like coming home. It felt like I was going to this new, exciting, incredible city that was also very familiar. Being in the city centre in the Baltic Triangle really made me see that vibe and I started to see the city through other people’s eyes.”
22-year-old founder Charlie Murphy has had a similar experience. His edtech platform Lotu Education, which supports teachers working with children with additional learning needs, is currently part of the Exchange accelerator in Manchester.
But Murphy says Liverpool’s early-stage grants and support, university links, and “heavy focus” on healthtech and life sciences, have all helped convince him to keep the business in the city.
“Although we get great support from Manchester, we want to stay in Liverpool. It comes down to the personal aspect of it. I’ve seen the issue I’m trying to address firsthand in Liverpool and I want the impact to be in Liverpool,” he explains.
Elsewhere, Jennifer Fenner, founder of design and manufacturing studio Defproc Engineering, is helping other founders in the critical early stages of product development to turn their ideas into market-ready products.
She set up DefProc Engineering alongside her husband Patrick Fenner out of their spare bedroom back in 2013 and now has a team of five based at Sciontech’s innovation hub Central Tech, which opened up a year ago.
Fenner describes Liverpool as the “friendliest city”, while Andrew Matthews, partner at MHA, who advises businesses across a range of growth stages in the region, says many business leaders still refer to Liverpool as a “village” because of how connected the ecosystem is — a quality he believes makes the city a unique place to do business.
“From a place to work perspective, Liverpool has the right setup. We’ve got good shared spaces, collaborative hubs and areas like the Baltic Triangle, the science parks, the medtech cluster around the universities, the financial businesses down on the waterfront and the games sector as well. There is collaboration happening, but there could definitely be more of it.”
He says that connectivity extends beyond the city’s physical hubs, with universities, education providers and established businesses all playing a role in supporting the next generation of companies.
“With so many universities in such a concentrated area, from Liverpool John Moores to the University of Liverpool, alongside excellent further education colleges and apprenticeship providers, we’re seeing a strong pipeline of tech spin-offs supported by start-up and growth hubs — which has been really positive.”
The (not so) long and winding road between tech and creative
Several leaders tell me they believe the region’s reputation as a creative and cultural powerhouse has also become one of its biggest advantages in tech.
“There’s still a massive draw around music here,” says Rob Sims, co-founder of AI start-up Sum Vivas. He launched Sum Vivas alongside Denise Harris in 2022, with the business growing into a seven-person team developing AI-powered ‘digital humans’.
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That includes ‘DJ Dex’, an AI-powered DJ who has become a regular feature at music events, fashion weeks and festivals, alongside an AI assistant called Jimmy, who is gearing up to welcome visitors to The Open Championship in Southport this summer.
“When we first introduced Dex, which was the first avatar we created, it was snapped up and embraced by the region as it hits two of the things they’re pushing, from the wider music scene that’s still very active and the push towards technology.”
And that crossover between music, creativity and technology has been years in the making.
Home to more than 1,400 music businesses, Liverpool City Region secured £6.75m from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) for MusicFutures, a programme bringing together industry, creatives and researchers to explore new products and experiences using technologies including AI, VR and AR.
“Music crosses every sector. In Liverpool, there’s a really strong gaming community, so it’s really important to create that connection between music and games. It’s driving some of the biggest things in the world from those big gigs in the Vegas sphere to Abba Voyage,” explains Pete Woodbridge, a creative technologist and R&D Innovation Lead at MusicFutures.
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For Chelsea Slater, those increasingly blurred lines between creativity and technology are central to Liverpool’s identity.
“The creativity of the city is just inspiring. A lot of the time that might come from music, art, football, whatever it is you relate to, but you also see a lot of spin outs from that. Whether it’s music technology, gaming or health tech, those three are probably the most powerful industries we have – and they all revolve around creativity, innovation and even care. It’s a very caring city.”
Rob March, who works across investment and internationalisation as a cluster lead for digital and creative industries at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, believes that “natural crossover” between industries is becoming one of the region’s key strengths.
“You go to an area like the Baltic Triangle and it’s just tech business on top of tech business. Everything is very close together and all the sectors overlap.”
“It is one of our unique assets”
You can’t talk about tech in the region without mentioning Sci-Tech Daresbury. Home to more than 150 businesses, you’ll find supercomputers, university spinouts like Spotlight Pathology working on blood cancer diagnostic tools and the likes of PsiQuantum with its quantum computing lab.
“Tech cuts across absolutely everything and is never going to be an isolated cluster. But I think the physical infrastructure and computational power available at Sci-Tech Daresbury is one of our unique assets,” explains Rob March.
“They’ve built this really strong peer-to-peer network where they can knowledge transfer easily and they’ve created a really strong community. There are plans for Sci-Tech Daresbury to expand its footprint and the area will be getting its own dedicated train station – so, suddenly, that will make that site a lot more accessible, even though it’s only a short drive from the city centre.”
After recently returning from Hamburg, he says Sci-Tech Daresbury was one of the “key drivers” behind a “landmark” Memorandum of Understanding recently being signed between the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and the Artificial Intelligence Center Hamburg (ARIC) to develop a trans-European AI supercluster.
The move follows a broader push around AI across the region, including the appointment of Tiffany St James as a dedicated Chief AI Officer last year to help shape how the technology is adopted across public services and industry.
It’s also aligned with a wider ambition to establish Liverpool City Region as a leader in ‘AI for good’, exploring how emerging technologies can be used to improve lives across everything from healthcare and education to public services.
And this probably goes back to some of the earlier points raised around Liverpool’s focus on community and collaboration, but another theme that surfaced through my conversations was how many businesses are building tech to tackle wider societal challenges.
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According to recent data from Tech Climbers, just under two-thirds (57%) of tech entrants reported they are operating in the ‘tech for good’ space, while 85% are using AI to solve challenges across health, accessibility and sustainability.
The region’s growing “tech for good” focus is particularly visible in the Knowledge Quarter, the heart of the region’s Life Sciences Innovation Zone, where more than 60 science and tech businesses sit alongside universities, hospitals and research centres and the likes of IBM, Unilever and AstraZeneca.
It’s also home to the Civic HealthTech Innovation Zone (CHI-Zone), developed by the University of Liverpool, serving as a hub for the use of AI and other emerging technologies to transform health and social care.
“There are all types of new inventions in that space where we’re using different technology to help people. That plays really well into the city region’s tech ecosystem as we have a big creative industries cluster with lots of immersive tech proponents, as well as expertise within the university,” says Dr Annemarie Naylor, director of HealthTech and Innovation Growth at the University of Liverpool.
Some of that work includes supporting the likes of Scenegraph Studios to develop an AI-driven avatar platform to help healthcare professionals practice complex mental health conversations, through to using immersive technologies and robotics to support people living with anxiety and stroke recovery.
Beyond the university, you’ll also find start-ups like Sum Vivas working with Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and Clatterbridge Cancer Centre on AI-powered support systems to reduce patient anxiety around hospital settings.
“We also work with The City of Liverpool College through its Digital Academy, where we talk to students and give them project-based work. That’s one thing that has been really important for both Denise and myself right from the outset – we of course want a commercially viable business, but we also want to be able to give something back,” says Rob Sims from Sum Vivas.
Students at The City of Liverpool College’s Digital Academy are getting plenty of that hands-on experience, actively working on immersive projects from virtual tours through hospital wards to building patient friendly databases for the NHS. And steering that activity is Chris Butler, project manager and partnership lead at the college’s Digital Academy.
“One of the biggest things I found about Liverpool is we make do, we problem solve, and we’re not afraid to give it a go. That attitude makes Liverpool unique to anywhere I’ve ever been before.”
‘The better the ecosystem and foundations, the more opportunities’
Liverpool’s tech ecosystem has “matured” significantly in recent years, says Dan Freed, partner at investment firm YFM Equity Partners. Now, like many regions outside of the London bubble based across the UK, the focus is turning towards how more of those early-stage success stories can continue their growth journey and scale.
“It’s maturing in a way, as there are more and more established people in and around the network, and there are success stories coming through as well. You’ve got incubators, early-stage funders, angels, River Capital and its AI fund, university support for spinouts, leading to lots of early-stage businesses.”
But he acknowledges that while those foundations are improving, access to later-stage growth support is still a challenge “wherever you are”.
“While there is early-stage funding available and those supportive people across the ecosystem, the better that the ecosystem and the foundations are, the more opportunities that will come through.”
At the same time, founders say there is still room for the ecosystem to evolve, whether that’s improving access to growth funding beyond the early stages — something we’ll delve into further in future pieces — strengthening collaboration with neighbouring cities, or doing more to showcase the rich mix of businesses operating across the region.
The next challenge for Liverpool’s tech sector is not simply creating more start-ups, but ensuring more of them have the right support, talent, investment and connections needed to scale into nationally and internationally significant businesses.
And for Chelsea Slater from InnovateHer, that means being bolder about what Liverpool represents.
“We’re known for music and football but why couldn’t we also become known for businesses doing things differently?”
And perhaps that’s really what makes Liverpool’s tech sector unique. Collaboration across sectors appears to be one of the region’s strengths, but the real test of the ecosystem’s maturity will be how effectively that connectivity helps ambitious businesses grow into success stories, which will be the focus of our next piece in this Regional Champions series over the coming months.
