Building Bridges to Tomorrow's Markets

Infrastructure for SME growth: clear roadmaps, lower costs, and the right connections.

SciBridgeX provides the intelligence and implementation infrastructure to help those who help small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) - whether that’s governments, corporates, development finance institutions, or philanthropists.

We provide both the data analytics and the execution engines required to scale SMEs: benchmarking against institutional standards, diagnosing operational gaps, and deploying AI to drive operational improvements. We support SMEs in reducing their costs, and connect them with the customers, talent, and partners they need across local and international markets to accelerate success in both profits and purpose.

Build with us

The bottleneck for SME growth is rarely a lack of capability. It is a lack of connectivity to the right talents, markets, partners, and programmes.

Many SMEs struggle to navigate corporate and public procurement, secure affordable services, or prove their operational readiness to large buyers. The bottleneck is a systemic lack of standardised visibility and data connectivity within the financial ecosystem. Demonstrating operational robustness to lenders and buyers remains fragmented and siloed. Banks usually need collateral for lending, while venture capital concentrates on a tiny number of high-growth startups. Meanwhile, the time, cost, and complexity of corporate and public procurement often lock capable SMEs out entirely.

How the SciBridgeX Infrastructure Works

SciBridgeX collects raw data from SMEs, assesses and analyses it, and turns it into standardised intelligence that institutions can trust and then helps SMEs act on it. The system is powered by five interconnected engines:

1

Diagnosis

This engine ingests SME data into a structured diagnostic protocol, benchmarking each company against institutional standards for financial health, team culture, product suite, compliance, ESG, and operational resilience. Results are comparable across markets and portfolios.

2

Acceleration

The acceleration engine turns diagnosis into delivery. It moves SMEs through targeted pathways to improve their operations. By combining standardised benchmarks with automation, it delivers tailored support at scale, ensuring continuous improvement across the portfolio.

3

Verification

This engine generates evidence-based records across finance, products, markets, resilience, risk management and ESG. These records are structured to feed into existing procurement, lending and investment processes, reducing duplicated data collection. Recipients remain responsible for their own due diligence and regulatory checks.

4

Connection

The connection engine provides qualified introductions to customers, talent, and partners, both at home and overseas, focusing strictly on operational and procurement readiness. Connections are based on assessed readiness. The system ensures that every introduction is traceable back to the original assessment data.

5

Monitoring

The monitoring engine provides continuous data on KPIs and outcomes across the portfolio. It shifts oversight from periodic snapshots to continuous optimisation by flagging risks early, triggering interventions, and generating forecasts to deliver a live view of portfolio health. Forecasts are for monitoring purposes and are not investment recommendations.

Built for Trust. Standardised for Markets.

We assess and document the three things that institutional buyers and lenders care about most:

Financial and risk resilience

including benchmarking SMEs against criteria commonly used by lenders and assessing their dependence on supply chains and tech giants.

Operational governance

including SMEs’ procedures for invoicing and payments, and whether they measure up to corporate and public procurement standards.

Compliance controls

including anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) controls, privacy and cybersecurity controls, and audit trails. Our assessments are not an audit or certification.

Built for partners.

Governments

Translate your SME policies into evidence-based results: jobs created, trade expanded, and economic growth accelerated. Designed to serve as shared data infrastructure for governments at every level, we provide a live view of policy effectiveness. This enables authorities to identify high-value public-private partnerships and adjust incentives in real time to drive measurable impact.

Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) and multilaterals

DFIs face a common bottleneck: assessing SMEs project-by-project is a "retail" model that is difficult to scale. We standardise fragmented SME information into institutional-grade data. This provides DFIs and private institutional partners with the visibility and connectivity required to conduct independent risk assessments, supporting internal data-driven decision-making and accelerating development programmes.

Corporates

We work to create an ecosystem of qualified SME suppliers, boosting your supply chain diversity and resilience. We assess SMEs’ readiness for EU sustainability reporting and due-diligence requirements (such as the CSRD and CSDDD), and our assessment outputs are designed to feed into existing vendor-qualification and procurement systems.

Philanthropists

Our philanthropic partnerships are built on a simple principle: positive impact should continue after the funding ends. We provide an ecosystem that equips social enterprises with the operational roadmaps, market access, and assessed data they need to become self-sustaining. This gives philanthropists continuous visibility to maximise long-term impact.

Built by institutional experts.

Our team and advisers draw on their experience of working with an extensive network of leading institutions around the world:

International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

Our founder co-chairs the ITU Task Group on Pre-standardisation for the Citiverse and has contributed to 8 ITU deliverables on AI, digital twins and smart cities. This includes the first approved ITU technical report on the citiverse (Building a people-centred CitiVerse), the ITU definitions for the Metaverse and the Citiverse.

African Telecommunications Union (ATU)

Our founder, in her capacity as CEO of The Metaverse Institute, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the ATU, the African Union’s specialised ICT agency, uniting 52 Member States and 53 Associate Members in 2025. Under the MOU, the two organisations committed to work on developing continent-wide policies, capacity-building, and technical standards to guide metaverse development, and to monitor pilot projects across the 52 ATU Member States.

Universities

Our founder spent seven years leading QS World University Rankings operations in China. This gave her relationships across the global university sector, with links to talent pools, research spin-offs and IP pipelines.

International Science Council

Our founder sits on the Advisory Council of the Centre for Science Futures at International Science Council, a network of 250 national and international academies of sciences.

Cities

Through the ITU citiverse work, our founder engages with a global network of city associations. This can support local deployment, trade, and procurement channels across thousands of cities.

What changes when infrastructure works.

SMEs

An end-to-end system that lowers operational costs, sets results-driven growth roadmaps, and establishes a clear path to new markets and institutional supply chains.

Governments

A live, standardised data layer that can inform industrial and trade policies designed to support SMEs, stimulate job creation and encourage economic growth.

Development Finance Institutions and multilaterals

A standardised pipeline of assessed SMEs to accelerate existing development programmes and support private sector engagement.

Corporates

An ecosystem of compliant and qualified SME suppliers for innovative solutions, supply-chain resilience and ESG reporting.

Philanthropists

A partnership platform that transforms initial grants into self-sustaining, and high-impact social enterprises.

Universities

A growth engine that accelerates spin-offs, startups, IP, and industry-funded R&D toward market commercialisation.

The team and advisers building the bridge.

SciBridgeX brings together leaders in AI, financial services, assessment & benchmarking, regulation, and R&D infrastructure.

Dr Christina Yan Zhang

Dr Christina Yan Zhang

CEO, Founder

Co-chair of the ITU TaskGroup on Pre-standardisation for the Citiverse; Member of the Advisory Council for the Centre for Science Futures at the International Science Council; Former China Director of QS World Universities Ranking (2013-2020).

Laurence Moroney

Laurence Moroney

Technical Advisor

AI Director at Arm Holdings PLC; Senior Fellow at Andrew Ng’s AI Fund; Global Head of AI Advocacy at Google (2013-2024); Senior Product Manager at Microsoft; Harvard & DeepLearning.AI instructor, best-selling author of AI and Machine Learning for Coders, and award-winning AI researcher whose courses have trained millions of developers worldwide.

Prof John Wood CBE

Prof John Wood CBE

Advisor

Chair of the EU-funded Attract Project (Developing breakthrough technologies for science and society, coordinated by CERN); CEO of the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils (2001-2007); Founding Chair of the European Research Area Board; Former Secretary-General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (2010-2017).

H.E. Maher Al Kaabi

H.E. Maher Al Kaabi

Advisor

Executive Member of the UAE International Investors Council; Board member at UAE Ministry of Economy – Circular Economy Committee, Advisor to the Group Chairman of Alserkal Group; Member of the MIT Sloan CIO Council; Group COO of Emirates NBD (2012-2020); Chief Risk Officer at Dubai Bank (2008 -2012), Executive at CitiGroup (1993-2008).

Prof David Castle

Prof David Castle

Advisor

Chair of the World Data System; Chair of the Centre for Science Futures at the International Science Council; Researcher-in-Residence at the Office of the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister. Former VP Research (2014–2019) at University of Victoria, Canada.

Bryan Stirewalt

Bryan Stirewalt

Advisor

Chair-Julius Baer (Middle East); NED-Robinhood MENA; Executive Advisor to Grant Thornton UAE; NED-Astana Financial Services Authority, Kazakhstan; MENA Financial Services Regulatory Leader-EY (2023 – 2025), CEO-Dubai Financial Services Authority (2018-2021); Co-chair, Basel Consultative Group, Bank for International Settlements (2012-2021).

Advisers provide guidance in a personal capacity and are not employees or directors of SciBridgeX.

Latest Updates

Tracking our progress as we build the institutional infrastructure for the markets of tomorrow.

Build with us.

SciBridgeX is inviting governments, corporates, development finance institutions, philanthropists, universities, and institutional data users to join us in building the bridges to SME growth.

info@scibridgex.com

20–22 Wenlock Road, London, United Kingdom, N1 7GU