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Scotland's tech ecosystem is full of founders making continous progress, and the earliest signs that a company is gathering tangible momentum tend to be quiet ones - like a customer moving from a letter of intent to a live pilot, a founder adding three people to the team, or a grant landing at the exact moment a prototype becomes a product.
The fourth edition of Ones to Watch (November 2026) brings together the companies where we're seeing those signs right now. It draws on the conversations we have with founders week in and week out through Techscaler, and on what our Entrepreneurs in Residence see from working alongside these teams, so everything in it reflects what's happening on the ground today.
This edition spans three areas where Scotland has deep expertise: life sciences, deep tech and sustainability. Across them you'll find a wearable that reads brain activity in real time, AI that has taught itself the visual language of tissue to speed up cancer triage, processors that run on light, positioning that works without GPS by following the magnetic fingerprint in the Earth's crust, and modular wind turbines built to be deployed at the speed projects demand. The report tells you who is behind each of them, why we're watching, and where they are in their fundraising journey.
Since the last edition, Northern Light Microscopy has closed an oversubscribed funding round, Touchlab has been selected for the Google DeepMind Accelerator: Robotics, and Weeteq has been awarded Best Paper in AI / HPC at OCP EMEA. They appear alongside RideScan AI, Neon Guard, Iniotech and Vidai in a section that catches up with the companies we featured before, with updates that range from first paid pilots to new conversations with investors. Seeing those stories together gives a good sense of how early signals turn into sustainable outcomes, and why we think the ones in this year's cohort deserve your attention.
Click to read case study on: Touchlab, Vidai, Neon Guard, Ridescan and Weeteq
What connects the companies this time around is a familiar set of strengths. They have teams with deep domain expertise, clear pull from the market, defensible IP, and in many cases a funding round that's open or about to be. For anyone looking to meet the next generation of Scotland's tech founders, that combination makes this report a solid place to start.
This edition has been curated by our Entrepreneurs in Residence:
- Allan Cannon has spent more than 20 years across defence, space and industrial tech, and co-founded Krucial before launching Deep Signal.
- Andrew McGinley founded Care Sourcer, the health tech marketplace that raised £9M and exited in April 2023.
- Claudia Freigang is a former neuroscience researcher who founded and scaled her own medtech startup.
- Hannah Mercer founded DragonflAI and built the business from CodeBase.
- Jessica Mullen co-founded CreateFuture, now runs HolisticShift, and sits on the board of angel syndicate Apollo Informal Investments.
- Matt Farrugia built and exited a software agency and has raised VC funding for startups across software, AI and deeptech.
- Steve Jeans co-founded Desana and scaled it into a global B2B business across more than 90 countries.
The report serves a valuable asset for different stakeholders of the ecosystem. Founders can see the milestones their peers are reaching and the rounds they're lining up next, investors can see which companies are opening their books over the coming months, and partners can find the names behind the technology they'd like to work with.
Download the full report using the form below, and if one of the companies catches your eye, James Trotman, VP Growth at CodeBase, can make the introduction.
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