Emerging technologies to watch in 2022

“2021 has solidified the importance of looking at the future of work”, Chris Smith at Playfair Capital tells us, emphasising how businesses in this high-potential space have garnered interest from investors. The future of work is a broad sector, referring to technologies and services that reimagine the workplace, ranging from video calling programmes to employee wellbeing apps.

Although lockdown measures have been eased in the UK, and the Government is now encouraging a return to the office, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in how we think about working. The future of work gained popularity as the concept of remote working became mainstream, and companies began recognising the potential benefits of workplace flexibility. For example, in March 2021, Spotify announced a work-from-anywhere scheme, embracing the idea of an international workforce. More recently, in January 2022 several UK companies embarked on a four-day working week trial monitored by academics at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

Accompanying these changes was the opportunity for new solutions to be developed that help facilitate this shift and evolved workforce, as businesses reorganise their operations. Companies building collaborative tools raised £157m across 39 fundraising rounds in the past year. Of specific interest to Chris was the rise of companies embracing a distributed workforce, and the technology emerging to support this: “these technologies have positive outcomes beyond enabling remote working, they level the playing field globally by allowing individuals living outside the country to access career opportunities in the UK.”

One exciting company aiding the move towards a distributed workforce is Omnipresent, which secured £11.6m in equity investment in a January 2021 funding round with Playfair Capital. The business provides outsourced compliance, payroll, and benefits services for international employees, simplifying the administration process of managing people remotely.

Meanwhile, when they launched in April 2020, Fit For Work was in the process of developing AI technology that responded to the challenges of remote working in high-risk environments across the rail and construction sectors. As the pandemic set in, the business quickly broadened the scope of its technology to provide software that improves the health, safety, and wellbeing of employees in other industries. The seed-stage company has attracted £251k in equity investment since making this transition, with its most recent funding round (in December 2021) secured at a pre-money valuation of £1.8m.

Investors have also been eager to back companies working to improve workplace communications. Element, for instance, secured £21.7m worth of equity funding in July 2021. The business develops an encrypted messenger service that facilitates collaborative working, with tools for file sharing, private group discussions, and internal or external messaging.

As companies continue to embrace flexible working and more software emerges to facilitate this transition, it’s likely that investment into the sector will continue to grow (regardless of the Government’s ever-changing COVID-19 policies).