Metro Vancouver-based companies are putting money behind the sentiment increasingly voiced by politicians: diversify international trade.
Two of those companies this week announced plans to expand to the United Kingdom.
The U.K. pre-pandemic was the , with the value of those goods in 2020 being $470 million.
Surrey-based Safe Software this morning announced that it plans to expand its business to the U.K. and Ireland.
Safe Software CEO Don Murray, who , told BIV yesterday afternoon that he plans to hire up to 10 people within the next year although he is not sure that he will lease office space.
"It depends where you find your really good people," he said. "They may not want to come into the office."
The main reason why he wants to expand to the U.K. is because it puts sales staff in the U.K. time zone to better be able to sell the company's software. Sales staff set to be based in the U.K. would also be better able to service clients in the rest of Europe, the Middle East and Asia, he said.
"We have 25,000 customers around the world in everything from local governments to utilities to airports," he said.
The company sells technology that helps companies better extract value from data by being able to integrate data from different platforms, using artificial intelligence.
“Our customers are tackling complex, high-volume data challenges across industries, and they rely on our [technology] to turn data into action," said Murray, who plans to primarily be based in Vancouver, although he will make regular trips to the U.K.
He said Safe Software’s U.K. and Ireland presence is key to it realizing its goal of having $250 million in revenue by 2028. The company's revenue run-rate at the moment is closer to $100 million. Rampant hiring in the past year has pushed the company's headcount to around 400, he added.
Safe Software’s announcement follows Coquitlam-based quantum-computing company Photonic Inc. on Tuesday announcing that during the next three years it plans to invest £25 million ($46 million) to open a new quantum research and development facility in the U.K.
That investment would create 30 high-paying jobs, according to the company.
Photonic, like Safe Software, said its expansion to the U.K. marks a strategic step in its growth.
While its headquarters, core research and foundational technologies remain in Canada, the U.K. investment introduces complementary capabilities, the company said.
“Our expansion into the U.K. is a win-win – strengthening our ability to scale globally while reinforcing Canada’s position as a leader in secure, scalable quantum technologies” said chief quantum officer Stephanie Simmons, who founded the company at Simon Fraser University, where she remains an associate professor of physics.
Photonic’s CEO, Paul Terry, is a serial entrepreneur, having been a co-founding senior executive for a number of B.C. high tech companies, including co-founder and former CEO of PHEMI, CTO of Cray Supercomputing, and CTO of Abatis, which was eventually acquired by Ericsson (Nasdaq:ERIC).
The company (Nasdaq:MSFT), in 2023.
Photonic in February announced that it had .
The quantum computing niche has been volatile. Share prices for some companies in that sector quintupled or more in last few months of 2024.
Influential technology executive and Nvidia Corp. (Nasdaq:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang then seemed to have popped the quantum-computing investment bubble at the CES 2025 conference in Las Vegas in early January, when he said practical quantum computing use was decades away.
Share prices for many quantum computing companies plunged.
Huang earlier this month seemed to have changed his tune on the sector, saying quantum computing was nearing an "inflection point."
That helped send shares in quantum-computing companies, such as Quantum Computing Inc. (Nasdaq:QUBT), soaring again.
