Yearly archive for 2016

Why is it that some companies find it easier to raise £500,000 when they barely have a business plan and one employee and yet can struggle to raise £5m three years from launch, having built strong revenue streams, won loyal customers and broken into new markets? It’s a problem that has blighted the British startup world for years but it is finally getting attention, with both the prime minister and the chancellor recognising that companies find it hard to make the leap from startup to scaleup. But they have taken

The UK government has pledged to spend billions of pounds on technology and science as part of its new and “ambitious” way of doing business in Britain. Prime Minister Theresa May announced a new £2bn annual fund to boost the UK’s technology and science sectors, with a particular focus on robotics and biotechnology. The Government will also assess how the new fund can best support other emerging fields such as AI, medical technology and satellites. The Prime Minister said: “Our modern Industrial Strategy will be ambitious for business and ambitious for

October saw 25 UK tech companies announce new funding rounds, totaling $161.2m (£130.2m), according to the Tech City News UK Investment Tracker. This is significantly higher than the amount announced in September – $70.91m (£53.8m) – representing a 142% increase. The October total was skewed somewhat by the $30m raise by Bristol-based computer chip startup Graphcore. Some nine of the rounds raised in October were Seed, while four were Venture funding, nine were Series A, one was Series B, one was Series C and a further one was Series D.

As an investor and advisor I get hundreds of startup ideas pass through my inbox every month, ranging from the genius and groundbreaking to the untenable and the downright crazy. Sometimes they can be both crazy and genius, with some really whacky ideas actually working out, raising a serious amount of money and gaining impressive support. It’s quite difficult to put together a list of such companies, though, because in many cases what must have seemed like a completely crazy product upon launch has become a norm and something hoards of

Octopus Investments has launched a new fintech business, Octopus Labs, to fix what it considers is ‘the broken financial services sector’, with technology built in-house as well as sourced from later-stage fintech start-ups across the UK. According to the new business, while the past few years have witnessed a fintech revolution in the UK, most of the innovations that have sprung up remain unfamiliar and unpalatable to both financial advisers and retail investors. Octopus Labs is breaking into a category it calls ‘advisertech’ by ‘self-building’ some solutions and supporting others through a fintech