There are no shortage of innovation programmes for startup businesses that focus on development, from ideation through to a viable product, but once they are ready to grow to the next level, opportunities diminish. PwC and SwiftScale believe this juncture between startup and scale-up is a crucial point of a company’s growth cycle.

For corporates, the sheer quantity of startups and innovation providers presents its own challenge. How do you identify quality when time, resources and budget are limited?

PwC and SwiftScale have partnered to deliver a series of unique scale-up programmes that facilitate collaboration between corporates and startups. Over a period of 90 days, 12 enterprise ready startups with proven technology are connected to decision makers from some of the world’s largest brands and enterprises. Off the back of the last programme, more than 300 new business relationships were generated, 40+ pilots confirmed, and a number of the cohort received further investment.

Abigail Rappaport, managing director of Emoquo (Winter ‘16 Cohort), commented:

“We have been given access to some of the biggest and best companies in the world through PwC and the SwiftScale contacts and connections. We’ve been welcomed in and we’ve been pushing on open doors which has been absolutely phenomenal.”

Last night, May 23rd 2017, PwC and SwiftScale – in association with Sage and Edelman – introduced their second cohort to a carefully curated audience of over 100 senior executives from PwC, the FTSE 250 and other multinational companies at PwC’s London offices.

Nigel Howlett, UK digital private business leader at PwC, said:

“Helping growth businesses scale-up is mutually beneficial to small and big businesses. Engaging with established scale-ups offers corporates the opportunity to invest in a tangible product, service or cutting edge technology. The scale-ups can benefit from big businesses’ experience and connections, to hone their offering and ultimately, source customers and investment.

“At PwC we believe interacting with startups and scale-ups is at the heart of successful innovation. Our work with SwiftScale combines our respective experiences and client networks to create a programme which can help more high potential businesses successfully scale-up.”

Alex Sainty, Director & Co-founder of SwiftScale, commented:

“The SwiftScale agenda is simple, to take great scale-ups stratospheric. Our partnership with PwC is the foundation on which we have built this programme; not only is it an incredible opportunity for the participants, it is also a direct affirmation of the power of effective startup-corporate collaboration.

“Looking at the quality of the Spring ’17 cohort, it is clear they all have the potential to achieve market leadership at a global scale. The team and I are delighted to continue working alongside PwC as we support the scale-ups achieve this outcome.”

Introducing the Spring ‘17 cohort:

Attest is the complete platform for consumer insight. Attest gives you bespoke insights and answers in real-time, so you can make consumer focused decisions with speed and confidence, whenever you need to.

BugFinders provides the next generation of testing: high speed, on demand, global testing software solutions across digital devices to ensure applications are secure, work correctly and are usable by customers.

Cloudhouse containers free enterprises from running unsupported Windows and Citrix platforms by making otherwise incompatible applications fully portable to the newest platforms.

Glisser shares presentation slides in real-time, using audience interaction to improve the delegate experience and provide useful, but digestible, event analytics.

Idea Drop offers smart and intuitive idea management software to capture and action the best ideas from your people to grow your business.

Keboola provides a cloud platform to combine, enhance and publish data for internal analytics projects and data products.

Preservica has created active digital preservation software that ensures content is automatically translated into formats that can be used and read by future applications and technologies.

RotaGeek empowers large organisations to create data-optimised staff work patterns. By matching staff work preference to business demand, we increase operational efficiency, engage staff, improve customer experience and deliver savings of 2-4% of payroll.

SQR Systems has developed a secure communications platform for mobile and IoT, helping organisations meet regulations and optimise data in an encrypted form for end-to-end security and data quality.

StorMagic is a software-defined storage company, offering a robust, cost effective and flexible virtual SAN that removes the need for a traditional physical storage array.

Templafy represents the future of template management and document automation, empowering enterprises to govern the look, feel and critical content to solve the document anarchy

*Stealth company* that uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to enable businesses to cut through ever increasing volumes of information noise.