Edinburgh firm aims to be Scotland’s top GovTech scale-up as revenues top £1m

The capital company has set the goal after winning one of the largest CivTech challenges to date, with its tobacco and vapes retailing register being deployed in six months.

Founded in 2024 by chief executive James Buchan and chief technology officer Chris Renga following the CivTech win, ePass is a platform for licensing, registration and permitting, currently rolling out across the public sector.

The venture was one of the first private organisations to be onboarded onto the Scottish government’s cloud platform and will be the first live service on the government’s “App for Scotland” later this year.

Now live across the Scottish government as a core digital component serving all 32 local authorities and more than 15,000 businesses to date, ePass expects the number to rise to some 80,000 by next year.

Buchan said: “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.”

Buchan added: “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.”