Investment in Scotland

This was written for a West coast based American. It doesn't attempt a complete catalog. If you have corrections or additions, let me know and I'll update it.

General observation is that there are a lot of small scale startups, most of them with clue about their specific idea/feature, but not about how to run a business. There's an opportunity to do a 'collect smart people and ideas', and form them into scaled up development teams, with sales and product marketing based here on the West coast.

- Scottish Enterprise, a Scottish government funded group, has created this by making grants available against matching funds at small scale (up to $150,000) per startup - doled out in stages and audited with substantial overhead in time and cost for the startups. Lack of bank lending is another factor which contributes - small companies can't get bank loans for operating funds.

- There are a few VCs based in Edinburgh and Glasgow, with small funds compared to here. There are some angel investment groups too - they are slow and conservative.

- Areas of focus - cleantech gets government funding and attention. Because of the long history of exploration in the N Sea, there is a rich cluster of engineering firms at all scales who are innovative and are used to world wide operations.

- There is a noticable bio-tech cluster - the National Health Service is actually easier to work with and more supportive of new things than the US medical business.

- Dundee has a well established gaming cluster, rapidly adapting to free to play mobile games from the original large budget PC and console games development they used to do.

- Edinburgh has a set of B to B and B to C businesses - Hubdub (games for sports fans) is a sucessful exception.

Links for background and flavor ..

Small business lending statistics BoE http://blog.angelsden.co.uk/index.php/2011/06/triffling-case-25m/

Scottish startup scene
http://www.thesocialpenguinblog.com/2011/06/15/a-rallying-call-for-the-s...
http://startupcafe.co.uk/2011/06/24/no-more-excuses
http://startupcafe.co.uk/2011/06/24/counterpointing-to-no-more-excuses

Scottish Enterprise http://www.scottish-enterprise.com/

The London scene is hot, and tends to attract and absorb Scottish startups
http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/06/19/cheers-to-londons-tech-scene/?all=1

Cunning Systems is an investor in Musemantik (Edinburgh), currently raising a seed round.
Contact us at info@cunningsystems.com