A new report from Glasgow City Council has shone a light on the rapid rise of the city’s ‘smart things’ sector — a thriving cluster of over 90 companies working across AI-powered healthcare, intelligent sensing, and next-gen energy systems.

Published by Invest Glasgow, Beyond IoT: Glasgow’s Smart Things Evolution reveals that the sector has created more than 320 jobs and attracted over £40 million in venture capital investment to date.

The sector is being driven by the Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC), located at the city’s ‘thebeyond’ co-working space, which is drawing in smart tech companies, and acting as a landing zone for potential investors.

Paul Wilson, the former Blackberry executive who is the CEO of STAC, said: “The cluster is really starting to take shape. International markets look at Glasgow as a rich source of innovation.

“The energy and the creativeness that we have in Glasgow is first class; there’s momentum building, and there’s a big appetite in the younger generation for entrepreneurship.”

According to the report, photonics and sensing have been among the two biggest areas securing the support of investors, with active companies by sub-sector dominated by sensing, energy, healthcare and robotics.

Employee numbers in the smart things sector have also grown by a factor of eight since 2018.

Among them have been Seluna, a medical device company that specialises in paediatric sleep disorders. Co-founder Scott Black said: “Our core four are all PhD students from the University of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde. We’re collaborating with the University of Glasgow and also NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and then beyond that, loads of grant funding.”

Jonathan Burruidge, CEO of Utopi, which specialises in data solutions for the real estate sector, added: “We launched the business in October 2019, with four founders, myself and three business partners. Today, we’re now 55 people and we’re based in the east end of Glasgow, which is an amazing regeneration zone. We really love being part of the Glasgow ecosystem, and it does feel like a real community for us as well.”

Highlights for the sector include:

• Combined enterprise value of the Smart Things cluster has risen 3.7x since 2020 to £262M.
• Smart Things employees have increased 8x since 2018, outpacing the tech ecosystem as a whole.
• University spinouts account for 20% of companies in the cluster, with 36% led by alumni from regional Higher Education institutions.

According to data in the report, 57% of VC funding in Glasgow City Region went to health tech companies in 2024.

Ones to watch include Nami Surgical, which raised £3.3m in 2024 to develop ultrasonic robotic-assisted-surgical equipment. Neuranics, a spin-out of University of Glasgow & University of Edinburgh raised £6m in 2025 in the development of advanced magnetic sensors, and Seluna is collaborating with NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, to co-develop and validate innovative healthcare technologies to diagnose childhood sleep apnoea. It has secured £320,000 in pre-seed investment to support company growth.

A number of academic and industry partnership are also accelerating innovations in healthcare. The Digital Health Validation Lab and new Health Innovation Hub, part of University of Glasgow’s The Living Laboratory for Precision Medicine programme, offer a secure environment for innovators to develop, validate and accelerate digital health technologies.

The cluster is also attracting international support. Sonos, known for its high-quality audio systems, made investments into Glasgow in 2021 when it acquired RHA Audio and began developing a new premium over-ears headphone product – a first step into wearables for the American audio equipment manufacturer.

And a number of Smart Things companies are taking advantage of the regional push to foster greater collaboration between the private and public sector. Smart and Connected Social Places (SCSP) is a programme in the Glasgow City Region focused on using 5G and advanced wireless technologies to improve social housing, connected care, and data aggregation.

The programme saw a number of companies share a portion of £600,000 in funding, two of which were Glasgow-based Nooku and Smplicare.

To access the report, visit here.