7 Reasons Why Birmingham Is A Tech Start-Up Company’s Dream
We love this city, we’ve all grown up around the city and its home for us, but we’re biased at Love Finance, so we thought we’d show you why Birmingham is the place to be if you’re a new tech company wanting to make it in the industry.
Room to grow
The emergence of Birmingham as a technology hub is pretty recent, as is the technology itself. Therefore, there is still large chunks of land that are available across the city, usually old industrial zones that were once home to an industry of a different kind, the most famous one is probably the Custard Factory in Digbeth.
There is already tech roots in place for new businesses to hook up to
Room to grow, like we said, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that means Birmingham is a wilderness – oh no. The Birmingham tech community is a burgeoning one, one of the main hubs for this is Birmingham Science Park Aston. Within this, nearly 90 technology companies beaver away on anything from gaming to information services.
They are helped by Entrepreneurs for the Future who offer free office space, mentoring and general advice. Across the whole city, a number of tech businesses have reached 6,000, employing over 38,000 people.
Silicon Valley bosses have moved here
Yes, that’s right, a few of California’s big wigs have got fed up of near constant sunshine and relentless optimism and have opted to move to the slightly greyer, but no less cheery centre of Birmingham.
In 2014, Brian Donnelly upped sticks and moved to Birmingham to set up a new company, Synapse, located at the aforementioned Birmingham Science Park in Aston. Synapse, integrate spreadsheets for businesses using cloud-based computing.
Young guns on the rise in Birmingham
Birmingham is a young and vibrant city and more importantly, it’s a city full of people that have grown up through the technology age so the talent for tech companies is ripe. Of around the million or so people that live in Birmingham just under half of the residents (45.7%) are under the age of 30 – 10% or so above the national average (36.8%). It will come as no surprise to hear, then, that Birmingham is the youngest city in Europe.
Recently, there’s been an abandonment of the capital, and Birmingham has been the top choice for those young folk, more than 5,450 thirtysomethings moved here in 2013.
Birmingham is cool, properly cool
Had I said to you 15 years ago that Birmingham would one day be named as the most attractive regional city for quality of life, I’d have understood if you spend the next 10 minutes rolling around on the floor laughing. Birmingham back in the day was a bit of a concrete coffin painted beige.
However, this multicultural festival loving city has stepped out of the shadows and is a genuine cultural touchstone. One example is the £188 million library that was completed a few years back – love or hate the design of it, you can’t deny it’s changed the city.
The cost of living is very cheap
The low cost of living in Birmingham (this handy website breaks it down for you) is very cheap compared to the capital, a two bed flat here prices at around £665 versus a whopping £1,516 in London.
Don’t believe us? Listen to these guys
We asked some of the savviest tech heads in Brum and asked them why they think the second city is such a hotbed for tech heads (hey, that almost rhymed!).
Founder of activity management software company (that’s code for league tables that help incentivise and motivate sales teams using metrics that matter to a particular business) OneUp, Derry Holt is heartened by the amount on offer in the tech industry in Birmingham: “There’s a huge amount of support for technology companies in Birmingham ranging from investment houses such as Midven and Mercia Technologies to tech-only accelerator programmes such as Serendip at icentrum.
“The presence of communities like Silicon Canal really helps reinforce this support too. For any entrepreneur wanting to start a tech company without the cost of working in London, Birmingham is the place to be.”
As well as Derry, Oliver Roddy, a Sales-i executive, sees the potential for Birmingham as the beating heart of the tech industry: “In my opinion, Birmingham is (and always has been) a business hub and not just a specialist in new technologies such as business
intelligence software or FinTech.
“With more, large companies leaving the capital for Birmingham than any other city in the country and more SMEs being started here than anywhere outside of London, too, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if an area of the city was renamed (or at least nicknamed) The Technology Quarter in years to come.
If these reasons aren’t enough for you to get involved with tech industry here then we don’t know what is! We hope, though, that this blog convinced you otherwise.