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From great community to real capital: the Isle of Man’s glow up

THE ISLE OF MAN
By Shelley Langan-Newton, Co-Founder and CEO, SQR
Startups Magazine

If you’d asked me a few years ago whether the Isle of Man was a great place to build a startup, I probably (definitely) would have sighed. I co-founded my second startup here a few years ago, and I’ve called the island home for 16. For most of that time, the 'startup ecosystem' has been a polite way of saying: a couple of brilliant outliers, a lot of people with ambition and ideas, and almost no joined‑up thinking. Support existed, but it lived in areas that never quite connected to the messy, chaotic reality of starting up. And yet, I’m still here. Because underneath all of that, the Isle of Man has always had two things going for it: an almost absurd quality of life, and a dense concentration of smart people doing complicated things in highly regulated industries. The raw ingredients were never the problem. The connections were. I’m here to tell you why, right now, I’m more optimistic about the Island as a startup hotspot than I’ve ever been.

THE SETUP

Let me be blunt for a moment, because I’m not writing a tourism brochure. In my years here, the Isle of Man has historically been:

  • Disjointed: founders, investors, government, service providers – we’re often running in parallel rather than in sync. Working hard, but not always working together.
  • Not particularly startup‑friendly: our ecosystem knows what it’s doing when supporting established structures, but we need to get better at catching and keeping the 'idea-stage' founders.
  • Weirdly invisible: for an Island with a history of innovation and a strong digital sector, why is the Island still relatively unknown?

Communities like Startup Grind Isle of Man have been holding the line. Launched in 2019 by Katie Nicholson and Alex Wilson, they’ve built a 500+ member network through 37+ events – the fireside chats and founder connections that kept the community alive when everything else felt quiet. If you were already plugged in, you could navigate it. If you weren’t, you might quite reasonably decide to found your startup somewhere else. At the same time, this Island has been smashing it in e-gaming, fintech, and digital infrastructure. We've got the pipes and expertise. And, we just never aimed them straight at early‑stage founders... until now. That’s the shift I’m starting to see, and I couldn’t be more excited.

WHAT STARTUPS REALLY NEED: COMMUNITY AND CASH

In every startup, the things founders really need come down to two words:

  • Community – people who get it, give advice, and connect you.
  • Cash – not just money, but pathways to capital: angels, syndicates, funds.

For years, the Isle of Man has been rather accidentally brilliant at the first and painfully under‑developed on the second. The community here is intimate and real. On a good day, you can:

  • Walk along Douglas Promenade and bump into five people who will genuinely ask how the business is going, and more actually, wait for the answer.
  • Get from 'idea over coffee' to intro to someone useful in government/finance/tech in less than a working day.
  • Talk directly to decision‑makers who in other places would bethree assistants and six weeks away, if you can reach them at all.

The downside is that community without capital mostly generates warm feelings and interesting conversations. It doesn’t extend runway. It doesn’t get you through the horrible, hungry middle of building a startup. So for a long time, the Isle of Man story looked like this: build here (because you love it), raise elsewhere (because you feel you have to).

Now, finally, that pattern is starting to shift.

STARTUP HOTSPOT

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