Edinburgh-based ePass has reported £1 million in revenue in its first twelve months of operation, as the GovTech platform sets its sights on becoming Scotland’s most successful GovTech scaleup — with ambitions stretching well beyond the Scottish border.
Founded in 2024 by CEO James Buchan and CTO Chris Renga, ePass emerged from one of the largest CivTech challenges to date, going on to deploy its tobacco and vapes retailers register in just six months. The platform provides a shared infrastructure for government licensing, permitting, and registration, and is now live across all 32 Scottish local authorities, serving more than 15,000 businesses.
Built on Scotland’s Digital Infrastructure
ePass was one of the first private organisations to be onboarded onto the Scottish Government’s cloud platform, and it will become the first live service on the Scottish Government’s ‘App for Scotland’ when that launches later this year. The App for Scotland, announced as part of Scotland’s three-year digital strategy, is intended to give citizens a single portal through which to access public services.
Buchan described the scale of the problem ePass was created to solve: “Scotland has had a licensing problem for decades. Licensing and registration are essential public services, but too often the underlying processes have been fragmented, paper-heavy and difficult to manage consistently. ePass was created to reduce that friction, and we are now a core component of Scotland’s national digital infrastructure. We are now helping public bodies move towards a more reusable, consistent and scalable model for licensing, permitting and registration.”
The company currently serves more than 15,000 businesses and expects that figure to grow to around 80,000 by next year as further public sector rollout continues.
Aligned With Scotland’s AI Ambitions
The milestone comes as the Scottish Government published its AI Strategy 2026–2031 in March, setting out a five-year framework for harnessing artificial intelligence across the economy and public services. For Buchan, ePass has a direct role to play in that agenda.
“Responsible AI in public services will depend on the quality of the underlying data, workflows and governance. That is where platforms such as ePass can play an important enabling role: creating structured, auditable service data from processes that have historically been fragmented or paper-based.”
The strategy, which includes a new transformation programme called AI Scotland led by the government and partners, places a strong emphasis on the data foundations that underpin AI adoption — precisely the infrastructure ePass is helping to build.
Targeting a UK and International Market
ePass estimates the UK addressable market for its platform at around £50 billion, and has its eyes firmly on growth beyond Scotland. The company has made a number of senior hires in 2026, with Bjorn Gisbertz joining as Director of Public Sector Strategy — bringing experience from elected office, public administration and public-sector digital transformation across Northern Europe — and Aaron Drummond joining as Growth Lead to drive UK and overseas expansion.
Buchan is clear-eyed about the opportunity ahead: “What is really exciting for ePass is the scope for expansion, not only into other areas of the public sector, but beyond Scotland into UK-wide and international markets.”
The company is also actively engaging with venture capital and investor communities, with a first external fundraising round expected later this year. Engineering, delivery, and operational hires are also ongoing as the business scales its capacity to meet growing demand.
CivTech’s Continued Role in Scottish Tech
ePass’s trajectory reflects the broader momentum behind Scotland’s public sector innovation programmes. The CivTech accelerator, which acts as a bridge between government challenges and private sector solutions, has increasingly become a launchpad for scalable digital businesses. Scotland’s wider tech ecosystem continues to attract investment and talent, with Holyrood’s annual Public Sector Digital Transformation conference returning in June 2026 as a key forum for the sector.
For ePass, the ambition is to turn a CivTech win into one of Scotland’s most successful GovTech businesses — and to export that model nationally and internationally.
