FutureScope is the home of deep tech acceleration support from Digital Catapult – the UK authority on advanced digital technology.

Developed in collaboration with Arrow Electronics, this is a 16-week programme targeted at pre-scale or early scaling stage companies. Successful applicants will be tackling challenges in virtualisation and cyber physical systems (in particular digital twins, the metaverse, virtual production) with hardware.

Applications must be submitted by 23:59 on Sunday 06 November 2022

Enabled by the convergence of advanced digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT) and immersive (AR & VR), cyber-physical systems are the interface between the digital and the physical worlds.

These systems come together to provide benefits to businesses, the economy and society, by providing new experiences and opportunities through interactions with a digitally enabled environment.

This 16-week programme supports high-growth potential companies tackling the challenges in bringing virtualisation and cyber physical systems to reality using hardware.

The aim is to help accelerate their growth from a business and investment perspective, providing the necessary support needed to become investment ready.

Selected scale-ups will also benefit from interaction with programme partner Arrow Electronics, throughout the duration of the programme.

Applications must be submitted by 23:59 on Sunday 06 November

The participating companies’ leadership team will work with the Digital Catapult team, industry experts and growth coaches to assess and accelerate business processes in order to become investment-ready, whilst expanding their network of peers, investors and potential customers.

Support for programme participants includes:

• Business health scans and investment diagnostics
• Business and investment support designed from the business health scans
• One-to-one growth coaching throughout the programme and mentoring from subject-matter experts
• Opportunities for networking/peer-to-peer learning
• Opportunities to engage directly with Arrow Electronics

The programme is inviting applications from UK based pre-scale or early scaling stage companies, tackling challenges in virtualisation and cyber physical systems using hardware.

The programme is aimed at the c-suite level members, but support can be made available to the successful applicants more generally upon request.

Areas of focus include but not limited to digital twins, metaverse and virtual production:

• Digital twins: Cyber-physical systems with two way connection form the physical thing to the digital, with simulation and automated decisioning
• Metaverse: Digital experiences in the consumer and enterprise space, and the supporting cyber-physical infrastructure, including spatial compute, human computer interaction and web3 infrastructure
• Virtual production: Remotely testing applications and experiences for film and TV content creation with advanced and distributed digital environments

Defining pre scale and early scale companies:

• having previously raised Seed or Series A investment and/or having achieved commercial revenue of at least £500,000 in the previous 12 months

To be considered, Digital Catapult supports companies using advanced digital technologies including:

• Future networks and advanced digital infrastructure (internet of things including low powered wide area networks, NB-IoT, LIFI etc. and includes sensors, edge devices, wearables etc.)
• Immersive technologies – extended reality (virtual, augmented, mixed reality and haptics)
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning (natural language processing, machine vision, deep learning)
• Distributed ledger technologies (blockchain etc.)