It's one thing to have a strong product and early traction. It's another to walk into a room with investors and make them believe what you already know: that this company is worth backing. That's a gap most founders hit at some point, and it's exactly why Techscaler built Raise Track. A bespoke, advanced support track for founders who are serious about raising early-stage capital and ready to do the work to get there.
Within Techscaler's broader offering, Raise sits at the more advanced end. It's designed specifically for founders who are aiming to raise significant early-stage capital to accelerate growth, and acceptance is based on ambition, traction, and how well the business model aligns with a funding strategy.
Techscaler's third Raise Track (part of the Catalyst spring cohort) launched on 21 April 2026. Twelve companies made the cut from 29 applications. They're a varied group, spanning health and medicine, energy and sustainability, agritech, data analytics, real estate, and more. What connects them is where they are in their journey: past the idea stage, past early validation, and actively thinking about their first or next raise.
Meet some of the cohort
Here's a look at some of the founders and companies making up Techscaler's third Raise Track cohort.
- Bluecrest Lab — Tomasz Stupnicki is building an end-to-end disruption management platform for airlines, taking affected passengers from rerouting and accommodation through to instant compensation and proactive communication, all within a single automated workflow.
- PartnerBridge —Jon Mead is helping growth-stage SaaS companies scale by turning integrations into high-impact partner programmes, powered by precision insights and data-backed results.
- Novavireo —Sergey Popov is automating micropropagation at an industrial scale, eliminating the need for purpose-built sterile labs and significantly reducing the manual labour costs that make seedling production so capital-intensive.
- Bilayer — Michael Nessis developing a software platform and contract research organisation that measures and predicts how well drug molecules enter and accumulate inside bacteria, using high-throughput experimental assays and AI-driven software to give researchers faster, more reliable answers earlier in the drug development process.
- Striped Hare — is building LinkXG, a B2B SaaS platform that enables organisations to share and reuse product-level supply chain data across value chains without exposing sensitive commercial information.
- Fesuitibaru —Alan Mathieson is developing an AI-driven platform that converts complex Excel spreadsheets into dual content management systems, helping small and medium-sized businesses move away from fragmented manual processes and into scalable, customised digital infrastructure. Click here to read a case study on Alan’s journey.
- GreenFlip —is building an AI-powered platform that helps housing teams, social landlords, and investors identify which homes have the highest potential for low-carbon retrofits, combining solar, heat loss, and energy modelling to deliver tailored investment cases that improve portfolio performance and tenant wellbeing.
- LabMethodIQ — Antoine Giton is building a platform that helps life science teams reduce failed experiments and accelerate R&D, analysing protocols to surface missing information, hidden assumptions, and ambiguous steps before they turn into costly errors in the lab.
What it actually takes
Over three sessions, founders worked through growth strategy and funding preparation before facing the real test: a live investor bootcamp where a panel of early-stage investors shared what actually moves them to back a company. Every founder then took their pitch into a breakout session, presenting to the panel and fielding the kind of probing follow-up questions that investors actually ask. No softballs. The goal was to stress-test the proposition in a setting that mirrors the real thing as closely as possible, so founders leave knowing exactly where their pitch holds and where it needs work.
That's what Raise Track is really about.
The ideas were already there. The ambition was already there. This is the structured, honest support that helps founders close the gap between having a great business and being able to communicate why it's worth backing. For founders at this stage, that work is rarely straightforward. It rarely feels tidy in the moment. But it matters enormously.
Interested in future programmes? Join Techscaler today to access opportunities like this and connect with Scotland's most ambitious tech community.
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