Startup Support in...Aberdeen

by Startacus Admin

Aberdeen based startups and entrepreneurs take note - here's the lowdown on key startup support and help available where you are...

Away from established startup hubs like London, the support for setting up a startup in the UK isn’t always so clear. It’s not a lack of support, just a quieter ecosystem that takes a little more work to unearth. We want to help with this by highlighting what some cities, which might not spring immediately to mind at the mention of ‘startups’, have to offer.

Remember when we said that we were touring the UK in no particular order? Well, we’re going back to Scotland today to have a look at startup support in Aberdeen!

PS. startup support in Glasgow and startup support in Edinburgh are already complete.

Co-Working space

Elevator offers co-working space for up to 20 startups, freelancers, or contractors in the Balmoral Hub in the city centre. This includes a fixed desk and 24/7 access for £150 + VAT per month.

46 Queens Road saves time by using its address as its name. It also offers flexibility in contract as well as hot desking for those just visiting. Benefits include meeting rooms, kitchen, and private offices if you need.

Desk@theD comprises of 20 hot desks and five fixed desks. Benefits include kitchen with free tea and coffee, quiet spaces, and they even boast included light and heat!

Centrum has an Aberdeen location, which offers co-working space and private offices, which is all-inclusive of video conference and presentation suite, meeting rooms, and showers. They also have what appears to be a weird inflatable igloo thing, so that’s a plus.

ONE CodeBase will be opening in Q2 2019, a partnership between Opportunity North East (ONE) and CodeBase to deliver tech company growth and transformation in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, including co-working space offerings.

Finances

Naming themselves Aberdeen’s leading business angel group, Aurora offers investment levels from £50k to £500k.

For further angel investment, you need look no further than LINC Scotland, a network of Scottish angel investors.

Scottish Enterprise has many ways of helping out starting and growing businesses, including access to funding and funding advice.

As always, we don’t like to always encourage loans, but if you want to take that route, Business Loans Scotland is a good place to start, and is recommended by the Aberdeen City Council itself. They offer up to £100k for startups and SMEs.

The startup ecosystem and programmes

Business Gateway can provide any stage of business in Aberdeen with free assistance and advice, as well as access to workshops and events.

As well as their co-working space mentioned earlier, Elevator runs an accelerator in Aberdeen, an intensive 12-week programme covering different entrepreneurial themes each week. Elevator takes no equity and there is no fee to participate in the accelerator. Elevator is a social enterprise dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs, business leaders, business owners.

The Data Lab has a hub in Aberdeen, and enables industry, public sector, and world-class university researchers to innovate and develop new data science capabilities in a collaborative environment. Among many other things, this means annual data science festival DataFest, monthly data science and technology meetups, sandpit and workshop events, annual thought-leaders away-day, and a guest lecture series.

The Support for Aberdeenshire Business Scheme has a range of grants and loans. These include an up to £10k development grant and a job creation grant of up to £2k per job.

Run by the University of Aberdeen, the ABVenture Zone is an incubation space for new start-up and spin-out companies and is also a comfortable, collaborative working space with state-of-the-art equipment. It is particularly suitable for the development of ideas in the digital and IT sectors but is open to entrepreneurs targeting other sectors.

As always, this is far from an exhaustive list and is here to help get you started, so feel free to let us know at editorial@startacus.net if you think there is a particularly deserving entity in any of these categories...

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Published on: 12th April 2019