We have just completed our second year of this hugely exciting and highly innovative programme which draws together leading GovTech and CivTech innovation programmes from around the world to deliver a global platform for fast-growth companies to access policymakers, procurers and investors across regional ecosystems. And from there, to present at events coinciding with COP27 in November.

For scale-ups this is an unprecedented access programme: we have 12 innovation teams across 9 countries waiting to help you gain access to the in-country innovation ecosystems. Last year, during a seven-week ‘Scale-up Safari’ preceding COP26, we scheduled 69 engagement sessions with policymakers and procurers, investors and innovators across ten participating countries. Over 200 introductions were made from 102 organisations, including the NASA open innovation team, the Federal Emergency Management Agency of the US Government, top researchers in the field of sustainability, ministers of environment and international trade, and gatekeepers of the €500m German family office funds.

For stakeholders across governments, NGOs, the climate change community, investors and sponsors this is a unique opportunity to engage and collaborate with scale-ups across North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australia to deliver real impact on climate change. Check out the government, academic and NGO teams participating in this year’s programme.  

Company Successes

• Gentian (UK) and WeDRT (UK) selected as part of Connected Places Catapult UK-LATAM Net zero resilience partnership as a result of COP27 presentations. Both raising seed funding.

• ValAI (AU) secured $1m AUS seed funding and venture partnership agreement with lead sponsor of COP27 Innovation Zone.

• CiRCLR (NZ) secured follow on meetings with Deputy Premier South Australia, Prime Minister New Zealand and Finland and selection on two NZ climatetech accelerators.

• ReFlow (DK) secured major contract with €bn renewable energy distribution company as a direct result of their COP27 video presentation.

The GSUP 2.0 Challenges

There are two challenges that we focused on in this year. We continued the environmental theme. The first challenge explored the issue around helping redefine natural capital to give communities the tools for better decision-making on making use of natural resources. The second focusses more towards helping the public sector procure greener services - encouraging ‘green govtech’. These challenges are global issues and resonate in different ways in different parts of the world. Like last year, they are broad challenges thus allowing for a spectrum of solutions that tackle different elements of the challenges.