Jan-Michael Kochalski joins Amplifi as regional manager from Leyton UK, while the company has moved to the Kingsford Business Club on Dublin Street.

Mr Kochalski, a former downhill skier for Team GB who has competed at multiple international championships, has spent the last decade working in business development across the financial services and technology sectors in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, including with chartered accountants’ industry body ICAS and Samsung Electronics. He will work alongside Amplifi’s commercial director, Jamie Watts, and fellow regional manager Roger Daynes who joined the company in 2020.

Jamie Watts, commercial director, Amplifi Solutions, said: “Scotland is our fastest-growing region in the UK, we’re building a strong client base here and our pace of activity and local investment means it’s a good time to bring on someone with Jan-Michael’s experience and network.”

Jan-Michael Kochalski, regional manager, Amplifi Solutions, added: “Amplifi is supporting so many exciting companies around R&D tax credits, and when you look across Scotland as a whole, there is so much innovation taking place. I’m greatly looking forward to building on the relationships that the team has established and contributing to the local business ecosystem.”

Amplifi Solutions was co-founded by Jeff Drennan and Chris Maylin in Belfast in 2014. Amplifi’s Scottish office was launched in 2019 and its client base in Scotland includes venture capital-backed startups Exizent, an online probate platform and Quorum Cyber, a cyber security service provider.

Amplifi has recently widened its services and rebranded as an entrepreneurial tax incentive specialist company. To complement its existing R&D tax credit service, it has added land remediation relief service for companies that own land, and a service around HMRC’s Patent Box which aims to encourage innovative companies to develop, keep and commercialise their intellectual property within the UK.

Amplifi is observing increased activity across a number of sectors including property and travel tech. In property tech, against a backdrop of a rise in Scottish house and rental prices, Amplifi is seeing an increase in technologies underpinning these trends and recently won a new client, Let Tech Solutions, that streamlines the letting process.

In travel tech, Amplifi was engaged by Maison Sport, who connect skiers and snowboarders with top-rated instructors across Europe, and they have also worked with Continental Traveller, an online portal that showcases holiday homes, vacations, and holiday rentals.

The UK government has now completed a consultative review of R&D tax credits incentives and Amplifi is hopeful that the outcome will result in the government widening the scope of qualifying R&D activity to include data and cloud costs.

Jamie Watts added: “The government has expressed its desire to raise total investment in research and development as a proportion of UK GDP by 2027. It’s encouraging to see the importance being placed on how closely tied tax reliefs are to innovation and we look forward to the findings of the review.”