A Tech Nation survey has identified challenges faced by UK's tech startups and scaleups as the coronavirus lockdown continues.
When the UK went into lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, companies across the country encountered financial difficulties and many laid workers off. The government responded with a massive financial package to support businesses, but the support available hasn't been equally useful to all types kinds of businesses.
Tech Nation surveyed a broad cross-section of the UK tech sector following the lockdown, collecting responses from a number of new startups and early-stage scaling companies in addition to a few more established firms. It found that almost all tech companies were facing some kind of financial difficulty as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, but surprisingly many weren't availing of government support.
Around 77% of early-stage tech companies suveyed said that cashflow was going to be an immediate problem and 40% were planning to lay off staff, up from 15% just a week earlier. One surprising statistic that came out of the survey was that 53% of early tech startups said they didn't intend to access either the job retention scheme or the coronavirus business interruption loan scheme.
A further update from Tech Nation CEO Gerard Grech identified that there may be a gap in the support on offer for the earliest startups: "The changes will mean more businesses can access this scheme and whilst that is welcome, it does not appear at first glance to address the issues we have been hearing from early stage, pre profit tech businesses, that lack the trading history for banks to consider them viable propositions."
Source: Tech Nation, Tech Nation
