Innovate UK is the UK government’s innovation agency and the primary channel through which it supports business-led technology innovation via a range of programmes, including funding for research and development across technology sectors.

More than 8,000 companies have been supported this way, so to showcase some of the most exciting young companies we have used our VentureRadar scoring methodology to rank all the start-ups and scale-ups to find the top ones (see full methodology below).

The companies span a broad range of disciplines, including synthetic media, self-driving vehicle software, indoor farming, healthcare services, security, smart energy systems, IoT, sustainable personal care, conversational intelligence solutions, robotics, and insurance.

Below you can find out more about the Top 18 companies in our ranking.

Synthesia is a software company founded in 2017 by a team of researchers and entrepreneurs from UCL, Stanford, TUM and Cambridge. The company has developed AI-driven that generate audiovisual content from text, allowing users to create professional-looking AI videos in minutes. Without film crews, studios, actors or cameras customers are able to easily make hundreds of videos, saving on production cost and complexity.

Factmata is developing contextual understanding algorithms to provide customers a better understanding of content and help reduce misinformation and abusive content from the internet. Founded in 2017, company has developed a patent-pending technology to provide a real time quality, safety and credibility score to any piece of content on the web. The company provices solutions for PR agencies, governments, brands, and platforms.

Founded in 2015, Globechain helps enterprises reduce waste by providing a reuse marketplace to redistribute items to charities, small businesses and individuals. According to the company, in 2019 five million kilos were diverted from landfills by being redistributed through Globechain’s 10,000 members.

Founded in 2016, Five is developing self-driving software and development platforms. The company plans to license its technology — starting with software to help test and measure the accuracy of a vehicle’s driving systems — that will be sold either to other carmakers or those building services catering to the autonomous industry.

LettUs Grow was founded in 2015 to help indoor farms, of any size, to reach profitability that would not have been previously viable. The company designs modular, aeroponic irrigation and intelligent control technology to improve the efficiency, sustainability and ROI of indoor farming. According to the company the patent-pending system reduces the operational cost of indoor agriculture whilst delivering an average of a 70% increase in growth rate across a range of crop species compared to hydroponics.

Swytch Technology has developed an electric bike conversion kit that turns a regular bike into an electric bike. The universal e-bike conversion kit is designed to simplify the installation process – doing away with all the complex parts and wiring involved with other eBike kits. Since launching in 2017 the company says it has have reached more than 20,000 customers, across 50 countries.

Humanising Autonomy is building human-centred tools that define how autonomous systems interact with people through better understanding of human behaviour. The company has built a human intent prediction application that is able to recognise and predict human behaviour from visual camera footage. The company wants to help urban mobility systems become more agile, and enable safer, smoother and more efficient journeys for AVs and cars equipped with ADAS systems.

Founded in 2015, Healthera operates a healthcare marketplace that provides patients with medicines, healthcare services and products through the largest digital platform of pharmacies and GPs in the UK, including national chains and independent providers. The company’s technology allows patients to access faster medicine delivery and personalised medical care local to them.

Calipsa was founded in 2016 by a team from Cambridge, UCL and Imperial Universities. The company has built a cloud-based platform that uses machine learning technology to reduce CCTV false alarms by more than 85%, lowering the burden that false alarms place on the security industry. With clients in six different countries worldwide the company says it is making a real difference to crime prevention.

Digital Fineprint provides data insights for the commercial insurance industry in the form of a data sourcing API which provides granular insights on SMEs that would otherwise find difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to acquire. DFP’s technology leverages open and proprietary data helping insurance professionals to view real-time risk profiles. The technology has been used by Hiscox, QBE, Euler Hermes and other leading insurers according to the company.

Electron is harnessing new blockchain technologies to design more efficient, resilient and flexible systems for the energy sector. The company develops platforms and services that are designed to enable the energy industry to address the challenges and maximise the potential of new technologies such as distributed renewable generation and storage capacity, the smart grid and connected devices.

SLAMcore develops algorithms that help robots and drones understand where they are and what’s around them, in an affordable way. As robots and drones operate in less constrained, more dynamic environments, high quality spatial understanding will become increasingly necessary for reliable operation and intelligent behaviour. Typical use cases for the technology are in warehouse robots, delivery robots, inspection drones, and service robots.

Hummingbird Technologies is a remote sensing and artificial intelligence company for the agriculture industry. The company gathers imagery of arable fields from satellites, planes and UAVs and then analyses it using machine learning techniques. From this, it creates detailed insights that are crop specific, and application maps that provide actionable information to farmers and agronomists, enabling targeted applications within 24 hours.

Flock has developed a digital underwriting platform that enables a range of data-driven insurance and risk management products in the drone industry, from an on-demand insurance app for micro-SMEs, to an exposure based enterprise product for the world’s largest drone fleets. The company says it already helps thousands of drone customers, and now aims to expand further and become the go-to insurer for the entire connected and autonomous world.

Re:infer was founded in 2015 as a spin-out from UCL with the aim of solving the challenge of understanding human to human communications data – which involves context, shorthand vernacular, and often references client specific terminology and phrasing. By automating the interpretation of this unstructured communications data Re:infer is able to offer conversational intelligence solutions across industries such as Asset Management, Capital Markets, E-commerce, Insurance, and Telecommunications.

accuRx builds tools that allow GPs and other healthcare providers to communicate more efficiently with their patients and with each other in order to deliver top quality care. Founded in 2016, the company says that more than 95% of NHS GP practices now rely on it to communicate with their patients.

Founded in 2017, IOTech Systems aims is to be a leader in the global Edge/Fog IoT platform market. Its open edge platform solutions are designed to enable workloads to be processed at the IoT edge to enhance security, enable real-time decision-making and reduce IoT data storage and transport requirements. There are a broad range of industrial and commercial IoT use cases across industries such as retail, building automation, manufacturing, Oil & Gas, telecommunications, and smart energy.

DAME is a sustainable personal care brand with a focus on making periods positive for women and the planet. The company’s mission revolves around tackling the challenges of plastic waste, toxic chemicals and period shame. DAME has already launched the world’s first reusable tampon applicator, along with their own range of 100% organic cotton tampons.