Three Cambridge companies and one from Norwich are among the 50 fastest growing businesses in the UK as ranked by the Deloitte Technology Fast 50.

Epos Now (Norwich) in 30th place and Cambridge trio Speechmatics (36th), Horizon Discovery (41st) and Featurespace (46th) muscle in on a London-dominated league table.

Rated for their growth over a four-year period, Epos is said to have grown 597 per cent, Speechmatics 504 per cent, Horizon by 423 per cent and Featurespace 389 per cent.

Horizon, which is a gene editing world leader, is the only Life Science business among the East of England high flyers; all the others are software specialists.

Launched in 2011, Epos Now specialises in the design and manufacture of electronic point of sale (EPOS) technology that enables retail and hospitality businesses to automate processes, report, manage stock control, customers and is accessible anywhere via cloud computing.

The company has been a major disruptor in its market, enabling thousands of businesses of all sizes to access cutting-edge EPOS technology and connect to over 100 third party apps like Xero, Paypal or Apple pay at affordable prices for the first time.

Speechmatics provides cloud-based speech recognition based on the latest advances in deep learning neural networks. The technology was pioneered by Cambridge University ‘Dontrepreneur’ Dr Tony Robinson 30 years ago and is now pushing the boundaries in speaker-independent automatic speech recognition with world-beating accuracy levels.

London-quoted Horizon Discovery is a pioneer in personalised medicines and  a gene editing world leader. It is making incredible strides in Europe, Asia and the US with its gamechanging reference standards in  mass demand. Under the inspired leadership of life science entrepreneur Dr Darrin Disley the company is more than doubling its footprint at an expanded global headquarters at Cambridge Research Park.

Featurespace is a global leader in adaptive behavioural analytics; its machine learning ARIC platform uses anomaly detection to analyse complex data streams in real time, for fraud and risk management.

Martina King, Featurespace CEO, said: “Our technology is delivering world-leading machine learning fraud protection to our clients, by outsmarting risk.

“I am confident we will see continued levels of strong growth, particularly given our expansion to deliver our systems to customers in North America and Europe.”

The ARIC platform understands individual behaviour in real time, identifying new fraud attacks as they happen to reduce the costs associated with managing fraud. Simultaneously, ARIC reduces the number of genuine transactions incorrectly declined, enabling businesses to accept more revenue.

The platform is deployed live for customers in financial services, gaming and insurance, including Betfair, Callcredit, William Hill, and TSYS, the US’ largest payments processor.