Sister: The Manchester hub looking to spin out success

Cross the road from Manchester Piccadilly rail station, then walk down a narrow alley between imposing Victorian red-brick buildings and an impressive vista unfolds before your eyes.

The modern, bright white block before you is the Renold Building, the first space to open in the Sister district. It’s a major £1.7bn redevelopment, which sees the University of Manchester’s former North Campus being transformed into an innovation hub over 20 acres, as part of a joint venture with Bruntwood SciTech.

The old science and engineering university department has been relocated and more than 50 start-ups have already moved in. The building houses some of Manchester’s most promising companies. Many founders are recent graduates of the university. Others come here to tap into Manchester’s knowledge network.

In this piece on my visit to Sister Hub, you'll discover:

• Why "Meitheal", an Irish word for community spirit, explains Manchester's booming Irish business network
• How Fergal O'Connor built Buymedia into a €9m adtech company, starting from a Galway bedroom
• Why one green energy founder takes a 3am bus to London rather than the train, to save money
• How a sustainable dancewear brand used Manchester's materials science expertise to win over the Royal Ballet

It’s a shining beacon of Manchester’s booming economy, thrust into the spotlight by the rise of former mayor Andy Burnham. The prospective incoming prime minister has announced he will devolve some power from Downing Street with a new unit called ‘No 10 North’ in Manchester.

Manchester contributes £62.8bn to the UK economy, with rapidly growing financial and professional services, tech and science industries.

I met a selection of Sister residents to ask them what draws them here. Could they explain the magic of ‘Manchesterism’?

A place for real-world science

“We have university-affiliated spin-outs here,” explains Liz Bamber, director of place for Sister, speaking to me in one of the Renold building’s high-spec meeting rooms as she takes me on a tour. “We want to translate that [university] knowledge into real-world impact.”

The district focuses on AI, health tech, biotech and advanced materials – all fields highlighted in the government’s Modern Industrial Strategy. “These are the areas where we can provide the most support to help these businesses to scale,” explains Bamber.

She points to the university’s Graphene Institute, with two Nobel Prize-winners, as well as the Henry Royce Institute, with its expertise in materials science. Manchester is also home to the Greater Manchester Digital Security Hub (DiSH), which is closely aligned to GCHQ.

The building looks like many other modern coworking spaces. Its knowledge network is its unique selling point – and the allure of Manchester’s wider business ecosystem, which is already well-known for health and life sciences, backed up by recent success stories like Beauty Tech Group, which recently went public.

The Sister development symbolises the bold vision that Manchester has for itself as a true northern powerhouse, playing to the strengths of its industrial past in areas such as textile manufacturing and materials science, but with a modern twist of AI-enabled tech and sustainability.

The Irish Connection

The first entrepreneur I meet is Fergal O’Connor, founder and CEO of Buymedia.

“We have a phrase in Ireland called Meitheal,” says O’Connor, as we sit in a fancy meeting room in Sister’s basement level. “It’s an Irish word that summarises how people come together.” If a farmer loses a barn in a storm, he explains, the whole community helps to rebuild it, for example. “We very much got a sense of Meitheal when we moved to Manchester.”

O’Connor is a typical Sister entrepreneur for a couple of reasons. Firstly, his company specialises in ‘adtech’ and AI, so it is tech-focused. He founded it in a Galway bedroom in 2016, after two decades working in the analogue world of media sales.

Its digital platform helps SMEs to buy media space, using cutting-edge software to reach the eyeballs (or ears) of their “ideal customer”. By 2024, Buymedia had achieved nearly €9m in revenues and today it has 27 employees and additional offices in Dublin and Manchester.

There are several other Irish AI start-ups based in Sister. For example, Galvia AI is a “decision intelligence” company, helping SMEs and global organisations such as Atos and Nestlé with their data. Of course, AI companies are a trend and Manchester has had a strong Irish community since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. But some deliberate policies explain this phenomenon too.

Sister has a Memorandum of Understanding with the Galway innovation district, Platform94, giving Irish start-ups access to office space.

And crucially, Buymedia has received funding from Enterprise Ireland. “The remit of any business it invests in, is that you have to get off the island and be an exporter and bring revenue back into the country,” O’Connor explains to me. “You have to internationalise. So we were all born with that mindset.”

The more mundane issue of transport plays a role too.

“It takes me less time to get from my office in Galway to the office in Manchester than it does to get from the office in Galway to the office in Dublin,” O’Connor told me with a wry smile. “Flights [to Manchester with Ryanair] are €15, so it's accessible and inexpensive.”

Circular Refining

Transport costs are top of mind too for the next entrepreneur I meet.

Mark Shaw likes to keep his finances lean so he can invest as much as possible in his startup. He gets up at 3am to take the four-hour bus from Manchester to London for morning meetings, sleeping on the journey, he tells me.

While Manchester has excellent train links to the capital, a peak return direct fare typically costs more than £200.

The geochemistry engineering graduate from the University of Manchester is determined to make his business a success. Circular Refining is a UK-based green energy enterprise tracking international net-zero fuel trends to decarbonise heavy transport and industry.

Founded in 2022, the company has pioneered waste-to-fuel projects, solar-to-hydrogen initiatives and offshore nuclear-to-hydrogen feasibility assessments in places like Flintshire and the Isle of Man.

His enthusiasm for his hometown and this part of the country is infectious.

“We have a fantastic pool of people here, from Liverpool, North Wales, Warrington, Sheffield and Leeds,” he says. “Also there is a heritage here of innovation and actually delivering products and services.”

He supports that talent pool by recruiting university students as interns.

A tight fit

Helen Banks nips out of a session on international expansion run by the Manchester Growth Hub, which is being hosted at Sister, to speak to me.

She is the founder and CEO of Imperfect Pointes, which makes sustainable dance apparel, using recycled and more durable materials.

The former fashion buyer founded her business in 2020 and it now has three employees and a turnover that has just breached six figures. She’s sold more than 25,000 pairs of tights and clients include the Royal Ballet School, the English National Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet.

The tights are made in Italy, while her leotards are made in Yorkshire, where she grew up. But she has based her start-up in Manchester because of the expertise here.

“I’m exploring two aspects with the university right now,” she explains. “What I could be using to make the tights as sustainable as possible and what happens to the tights when they come back for recycling – how do you break them down, what’s the potential of making something exciting that could be sold back to dancers?”

Imperfect Pointes, therefore, is a real-world application of materials science, and Sister’s innovation hub has connected her to university researchers and experts at the Henry Royce Institute.

However, she offers one more down-to-earth reason why Manchester might be a great place to do business, that isn’t perhaps so new or down to any political intervention.

“Well, we’re all dead friendly down here, that’s one thing.”