Milton Keynes is home to a thriving tech cluster, community and innovation culture

A high-technology landscape

Milton Keynes is synonymous with intelligent design, having been engineered from the start as a better place to live and work. The city is a living test-bed for innovations in technology, its streets hosting new developments like driverless passenger shuttles and a fleet of autonomous delivery robots. Advances like these are brought to life in Milton Keynes, to the benefit of the city’s business community and residents, before being rolled out to the wider world.  

Milton Keynes is one of the first UK cities to benefit from the next-generation 5G standalone network, which provides stable, high-performance coverage across the city. As well as enhancing everyday online activities, this network provides a solid foundation for current and future innovations that use connected technologies.  

As a Smart City, it goes without saying that Milton Keynes has technology embedded in its infrastructure. An expansive data exchange acts as a backbone for data management from a variety of sources, including datasets on public health, housing, the local environment and more. It also plays a key role in the city’s new 5G network.  

Support for entrepreneurship

Milton Keynes City Council is committed to fostering local innovation, supporting local firms and cultivating the area’s thriving tech cluster. 

The council works in partnership with firms on projects like the driverless shuttles, which are being rolled out in the city centre. The eight-person vehicles were developed alongside local company Smart City Consultancy and built by New Zealand-based Ohmio, which has set up its UK headquarters in Milton Keynes.  

For businesses starting up and scaling, there is incubation support at Barclays Eagle Labs Cranfield, which is based at Cranfield University, a leader in engineering and digital technology. Connected Places Catapult also nurtures start-ups with world-class facilities and programmes to support testing, funding and strategic partnerships.  

A home for expanding tech businesses

There is a burgeoning ecosystem of specialised tech businesses in Milton Keynes, estimated to employ around 45,000 people.¹ Its business start-up rate is the third highest in the country, and it provides fertile soil for new and emerging companies as well as large enterprises.  

The city is home to a number of companies dedicated to robotics and AI. These include Starship Technologies, the brains behind the knee-high wheeled delivery robots that are fast becoming one of the city’s icons.  

Another flourishing sector is fintech. Santander has made the city its principal UK site, with its technology infrastructure, IT and cybersecurity functions all based at its corporate headquarters in Unity Place. Milton Keynes is also home to Xero, a cloud-based accounting software platform trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide, and Allica Bank, a rising star in the world of SME business banking.

Fans of motorsport know Milton Keynes as the home of Formula One’s Red Bull Racing. The Red Bull Powertrains factory harnesses cutting-edge engineering expertise to produce some of the most advanced, clean and powerful engines in the business.  

A thriving tech scene

However ingenious the technology, it’s people that make new developments happen, and Milton Keynes’ tech sector wouldn’t be what it is without a lively culture of events, groups and collaborative connections.

In 2025, Milton Keynes once again welcomes the Smart City Robotics Competition, where teams from across Europe will showcase robotic applications for everything from home assistance and coffee shop table service to medication delivery via drone.  

The event is part of Milton Keynes Tech Week, an event organised by the city council that features a full programme of hands-on experiences, expert talks, and a Dragons’-Den-style pitch event with investors from the local area.

Local research institutions, public bodies and government agencies all come together for initiatives like Digitising Social Care, an NHS-funded programme run by Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care System. It has helped transform lives through inventions like PainChek, which registers facial and vocal signs of pain in non-verbal patients to help carers manage their discomfort.    

The Protospace initiative is a not-for-profit dedicated to supporting technology and innovation in the city. In collaboration with the city council, it runs a programme of events to promote and develop the tech ecosystem and its community through networking, hackdays, talks and workshops.

Looking to the future

The future looks even brighter for Milton Keynes’ tech sector. A new Milton Keynes Tech Quarter will be established as part of the five-year Technology, Smart City, Digital and Creative Industries Strategy, providing a physical home for the local technology movement.  

The city council will work to bring more knowledge capital into the city centre, supporting the Open University’s Campus 2030 project and driving talent development and retention through an emerging tech HR leads group.

And from 2026, the new East West Rail link will reduce rail journey times between Oxford and Milton Keynes to just 45 minutes, making the city that’s better by design an even more attractive proposition for expanding tech businesses.