Founding-partner proposal Download PDF

Accelerating the growth of Scotland's venture ecosystem

Artificial intelligence and the digital economy

We believe the strongest driver of innovation is investment. The role of the Scottish Government should be to attract investors and innovators to converge inside the Scottish economy, and to ensure that from the earliest stages founders are supported to build in Scotland.

TRUST 2030 is a thematic Edinburgh incubator for founders in AI and the digital economy, built on that belief. Investors back the companies, and public finance is used for additionality, amplifying and incentivising their capital rather than standing in for it, so that founders can raise money before they have customers or a track record and gain the means to earn both.

TRUST encapsulates the technologies we believe will form the foundation of the next digital economy, with data increasingly financialised, AI in abundance and a pressing need for new technologies that let society and the economy interact with them.

This document is a proposal. We are seeking partners from the private and public sectors to co-create what we believe will be the most exciting incubator in the Scottish ecosystem, with a pure focus on AI and the digital economy. Together we want to empower the earliest-stage innovators from across Scottish society to build radical new business models with these technologies, and to catalyse an ecosystem that relaunches Scotland's tech economy.

This is a direct answer to the Deputy First Minister's call for Scottish Enterprise to “increase the number of entrepreneurs in Scotland” and to “grow the number of start-ups”.

Making Scotland the place to raise

Investment is what turns ambition into companies, yet today there is too little competition among investors in Scotland, where first-time equity deals, at 114 in 2025, are still below their 2021 peak. Ambitious founders, whether they arrive with a big idea or simply the drive to find one, typically go to London or abroad to the United States to raise, and that has become the status quo. Our ecosystem is not yet competitive, and it lacks the tools that would let even pre-idea builders flourish here.

We want to change both sides of that market at once, making Scotland an attractive place for innovators to build and showing venture funds and international investors that Scotland is where they need to be, because this is where ambitious builders are changing the world.

Freedom to build

Many public-sector initiatives fail because their terms are too rigid. We want to work with private investors on models that give founders the freedom and flexibility to innovate, to pivot and to test business ideas and models, with safe, simple, founder-friendly equity and very simple intellectual property (IP) terms so that a team keeps what it builds.

TRUST 2030 will sit at the intersection of government support, the private sector and the startup ecosystem. It is not an untested idea, because we are learning from hubs in San Francisco, Tallinn, London and Singapore, where the right support has led to an explosion of new companies, builders and innovators.

Background

The Digital TRUST Centre of Excellence built a record of success. Its Future Payments Challenge funded development at Stableport and Stabledrop, the Centre took part in the Bank of England's DLT Innovation Challenge, and its evidence was cited by the House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee.

It had failures too, which taught us as much, from how a single late payment can sink a team to how good companies stall without investors able to take them through the next stage, and together they showed us how support should be targeted and what did and did not work.

Above all, it showed that while Edinburgh has no shortage of ambitious founders, it lacks the no-strings-attached support they can find elsewhere in the world, which we believe is a significant driver of brain drain from Scottish universities and the Scottish economy. This proposal is the culmination of those multi-year learnings, in a package we are confident will deliver impact at scale.

A place to build, in person

We will build TRUST 2030 as a physical space in Edinburgh, sized for the first cohort, where founders are required to join us in person and are given the tools, the compute and the resources to build alongside other founders in what we hope will be a truly inspiring environment, which we think is critical to the proposition.

A long-term public–private funding model

We believe public money should go only where it changes a private decision, so we propose a simple split in which every pound invested in a TRUST 2030 company is made up of 30p from public finance and 70p from investors, which means public money shares the risk and investors have a reason to back founders earlier than they otherwise would.

Investment

The intent is to provide a platform where investor capital and public finance are both used effectively, through a model in which investors are incentivised to invest in Scotland's innovation ecosystem and the Scottish Government's funding for innovation is magnified. Investors meet supported teams in AI and the digital economy and draw on founder relationships and technical expertise through us and demand testing through industry partners, while shared support is publicly funded so their money goes into companies, not overheads.

In return, investors put their own capital at risk and hold agreed rights to equity returns, and the investment decisions are theirs.

Additionality, measured

Additionality means investments that would not otherwise happen, and we will measure it by whether programme support changed the decision, investor capital per public pound (the target is £2.33), investors new to the programme, repeat investment, and whether investors keep investing once public support steps back. We will also track company outcomes, including customers, further funding, jobs in Scotland, research and graduate placements, and teams that close stay in the record too.

The terms are open

The public 30p could invest on commercial, equal terms, as Scottish Enterprise's Co-investment Fund does, or on softer concessional terms, which is a matter for negotiation, and anything preferential would need its own agreement.

Lightweight governance, no strings attached

Investors make the investment decisions, while public partners agree the mandate at the outset and see the results without sitting on individual deals. A small independent board and a small team run the programme and report once a year on outcomes, with no complex conditions on founders or investors, and before launch we settle the legal structure, founder terms, conflict handling and rights to any returns.

Who we want to hear from

Investors.
Funds, angels and corporates who have backed early teams and would shape selection and founder terms with us.
Public partners.
Scottish Enterprise first, as the intended anchor funder, then others in government.
University and industry.
Technical support, facilities or customer trials for a first cohort.

Long-termist institution building

TRUST is intended to be a long-termist institution that keeps working after public support steps back. We envision it sustained by returns from its investments in early-stage startups and by investors who keep backing TRUST on the strength of its success, because a long-term funding model should not depend on a call on public money. At this stage, however, we are seeking investment from Scottish Enterprise to bootstrap its creation, to help co-design the model and to be part of its long-term story, and in time we expect that partnership may no longer require direct funding.

The ask

We are seeking partners and collaborators to join us in founding what we believe will be a truly exciting, visionary centre in Edinburgh. We plan to submit a proposal to Scottish Enterprise by the end of 2026, so if this is worth building, please reach out to Peter (p.ferry@napier.ac.uk) or James (j.ball@napier.ac.uk).