Evelyn McDonald, formerly head of growing businesses at the Prince’s Trust Youth Business Scotland, takes on the role of the chief executive of the Scottish Edge Fund.
The fund takes in applications from small and start-up businesses across the country before whittling them down into finalists with potential for growth and giving out prizes typically between £25,000 and £50,000.
Steven Hamill, who joined ScotEdge on its formation in 2012 following a career with Royal Bank of Scotland, is also promoted to be the fund’s operations manager.
David Shearer, chairman of ScotEdge, said:
“Evelyn has done a tremendous job championing entrepreneurship in Scotland for the Prince’s Trust and was an obvious choice for taking forward the vision of the board.”
Today ScotEdge is also announcing its finalists can receive Amazon Web Services credits to allow them options to run their companies in the cloud and receive online training options.
Samsung is going to be running one-to-one consultancy sessions for finalists as well as workshops and technology showcases.
Scottish legal firm Harper Macleod has been confirmed as a partner to the fund and will act as its legal adviser along with providing advice to entrants.
Mr Shearer said:
“The generous support provided by global firms including AWS and Samsung demonstrates the huge opportunity and interest in the Scottish start-up economy, and we look forward to continuing to partner with innovative global organisations to ensure we play our small part in continuing to drive an entrepreneurial revolution in and from Scotland.”
Sir Tom confirmed his long-term backing of the funding programme in August this year with a pledge for The Hunter Foundation to put in £700,000. This added to £2.5 million from Royal Bank of Scotland and £2.35m from the Scottish Government to carry the competition through to 2017.
The fund is also moving from giving out solely grants to a mixture of loans and grants in order to move towards become self-sustaining. The final of the latest competition is due to take place on December 9.
Sir Tom said: “The final event will celebrate the huge opportunity for start-ups in Scotland and it’s great to have so much support from global organisations.”
This article was taken from The Herald’s website, and was written by Greig Cameron.
