Hull smart tech specialist Sauce is set to be one of the anchor tenants of the new @TheDock development in the city’s Fruit Market.
Sauce, which started as a team of three, now employs 30 people and works with some of the biggest names in Hull.
Currently based in the city’s C4DI tech hub, Sauce is expected to be one of the first businesses to move across to the new block of Hull’s digital campus when it was completed.
Matt Weldon, a joint owner at Sauce, said: “Our business is all about helping clients to do business smarter and better, through technology.
“We see ourselves as a fast-tech business. Unlike traditional software companies, we’re able to be much more agile in how we approach developing solutions for clients because we recognise the world of software changes daily.
“There are always new things coming out and we consider whether we can apply them to an existing or future project.
“We’ve gone from three people to 30 in three years and we’re not stopping there. There are so many opportunities for us because the work that we do is difficult, as it is so specialist, but also so important to the industries we work in.
“It’s hard to hire the people to do this in a large, traditional company and that’s where we come in.”
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Sauce has become the outstanding success story of Hull’s C4DI building.
The Sauce team are experts in deploying Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and helping businesses use Artificial Intelligence.
A prime example is Sauce’s work with historic Hull-based manufacturer Ideal Boilers to create and develop a smart heating system using IoT technologies.
As well as enabling customers to control their heating systems remotely, from anywhere in the world, the system also provides real-time performance information, opening up the potential for product maintenance and development through access to huge amounts of data.
John Polling, Sauce’s chief technology officer, said: “Ideal Boilers is a brilliant example of a traditional business that has really bought into digital. They now have their own in-house IoT team, who are all really switched on and who we work really closely with.
“We create the software, because that’s not their speciality, while they implement the work that we do and link with the builders of the hardware. They are the in-house innovators. They act as a bridge between the worlds of manufacturing and smart software.
“It’s reassuring to us that they understand the potential of what we are doing together. They could see where their industry was going and knew that, if they didn’t act, their business could be seriously disrupted.”
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Sauce was founded by friends Matt Gibson, John Polling and Jim Wardlaw in 2016 when they were among tech specialists using the co-working space at C4DI.
Sauce was born, with the name a play on the development term source code, and Matt Weldon joined as a fourth joint owner shortly afterwards to become chief executive
The business’ expertise in deploying smart technologies is driving growth, with more staff joining every month and turnover in the year to March 2019 coming close to £1m, with at least a further 40 per cent revenue growth forecast for the current year.
Sauce’s expected new home, in the @TheDock expansion, will be next door to its current base in the C4DI.
Plans have been approved for the development, and funding has been secured for the first of two new buildings.
How to contact Phil Winter and Business Live
Business Live's Hull & East Yorkshire journalist is Phil Winter, also the business editor at the Hull Daily Mail and Hull Live.
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Alternatively, email him on philip.winter@reachplc.com, or call 01482 315360.
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