The long and the short of IT
The Enterprise Awards: ‘HirSuted and Booted’
The Enterprise Awards honour the entrepreneurs, the spear tip of the UK US$1tn tech industry. This industry has created more unicorns than Germany, France and Sweden combined and Vishal Marria founder of one of those unicorns, Quantexa (US$1.8bn), was the big winner at last night’s 12th edition. The entrepreneurial stars spanned a variety of sectors, customer propositions, business models, software, services, tech-enabled and customer types. They are B2B, B2C, B2B2C, B2G. They are AI. They are young, not young, hirsute, clean-shaven, one X and one Y chromosome, or two X chromosomes, or whatever. They have true grit. They include Richard Holway MBE. For 40+ years, serial entrepreneur Mr Holway, has been the sector’s North Star. “I agree with Richard”. Richard received the ‘Wise Old Owl’ award from John O’Connell, event founder, co-host, serial entrepreneur and ‘chip off the old block’. Podium duties were shared with Tola Sargeant, CEO TechMarketView. The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists Charitable Fund benefited from the event profits. Read on, we review the winners, the runners and riders and take the pulse of tech entrepreneurs. Thank you Silverpeak (Paddy, Chris and Tallat) for your generous hospitality.
Enterprise Entrepreneur & Judges’ Award: Vishal Marria, Quantexa
Quantexa was founded in 2016. The company first came to our attention in 2017, when we awarded ‘Evergreen Entrepreneur’ Award to Imam Hoque, Quantexa Chief Evangelist, now COO and Global Head of Product Management. Interest was piqued. Quantexa was gaining traction as it tackled complex financial crime and regulatory compliance challenges in the banking, insurance, and government sectors. We got to know founder Vishal Marria who is ex Detica and EY - a reliably strong starting point. Since then, Mr Marria has quietly amassed all the awards available. Chair of Judges John O’Connell describes Mr Marria as a “charming ‘force of nature’ who has embraced the US model of raising a large amount of capital to ‘go for it’ and compete with big tech on the global stage”. Mr Marria started with a team of six. It is now 760 FTEs. “I’ve learned what it really means to be responsible for a constantly growing worldwide team. It is a great honour to lead so many talented people, and with that comes a great sense of duty. I take that role very seriously, and I am deeply humbled by it,” says Mr Marria.
Quantexa has blossomed to a US$100m ARR global AI, data and analytics software company pioneering ‘Decision Intelligence’. It empowers organisations to make trusted operational decisions with ‘data in context’ so customers uncover hidden risk and new opportunities. Use cases are in data management, customer intelligence, KYC, financial crime, risk, fraud, and security. Industry analysts Forrester conclude that Quantexa customers enjoy a whopping three-year 228% ROI.
To accelerate the AI skills, in February 2023, Quantexa acquired Dublin-based Aylien bagging advanced AI and Natural Language Processing, NLP. The aim being to super-charge customers’ ability to unify structured and unstructured data environments and thereby augment decision making. The deal saw TAM grow to US$230bn as Quantexa entered the US$11bn (Source: Gartner) text analytics market.
Emerging Entrepreneur: Dr. Gege Gatt, EBO
Dr Gatts wants to improve health equity for society’s most marginalised members and believes that AI reduces the bar of digital maturity. This will allow patients to access healthcare, as Dr Gatt advocates that personalisation and the ability to converse in the patient’s native language are key pilars needed to reach these marginalised members of society. “Our platform generates specific tailor-made conversations with your users, according to your domain and work processes. This is the main driver behind EBO’s Virtual Agents - the more information pooled from various sources, the more personalised each interaction will become.”
Dr Gatt is CEO of EBO, his fourth CEO role. Founded in 2018, EBO provides a multi-lingual virtual agent powered by conversational AI that can be tailored to specific industries and use cases. It is particularly strong in healthcare, where the use case is citizen/patient engagement to improve access to healthcare services amid high demand.
Developing Entrepreneur: Thomas McHugh, Finbourne
Son of a farmer from rural Ireland (we heard that before), Mr McHugh is a technologist with a career arc spanning building technology for global financial institutions, notably RBS and UBS, to starting Finbourne in December 2016. Mr McHugh is very ambitious for the company (220+ FTEs spanning the UK, USA, Asia and Australia) where he aims to “make investment better”. That is: “Better for clients, so they achieve their financial goals. Better for companies, so they get the capital they need to grow. And better for the economy, so everyone prospers.” A compelling journey. But for himself Mr McHugh is unassuming and humble.
Finbourne has developed a cloud-based dashboard for the investment management industry. The solution spans the investment cycle: portfolio, order and compliance management, fund, custodian and portfolio accounting. This SaaS offer is selling successfully to a variety of demanding clients (hedge funds to global investment institutions) and has amassed some great customer logos like HSBC, Fidelity, London Stock Exchange Group, Northern Trust and Baillie Gifford. Says Tom: “Our aim is to win the biggest customers in each of our target segments.”. Of the KPIs that we judges monitor, the standout is the 160% NRR, illustrating the deep-set customer value.
Scale Up Entrepreneur: Sam Horbye, Olsam Group
Mr Horbye started at Amazon where he helped launch the UK Business. It grew to >£3bn in a couple of years. Following this, Sam founded his first e-commerce store, Beachmore Books, which he sold. During Covid many of us had a side-hustle. But Sam and his brother Oliver went one step farther and launched Olsam (December 2020) an e-commerce platform and dreamed of becoming an aggregator in the Amazon FBA e-commerce space.
Since Olsam has grown as it acquired and scaled online consumer brands in the health and well-being segments. Revenue has gone from £zero to £50m via 21 M&A deals. The most notable transaction being the acquisition of its main European competitor, Dwarf.
The archetypal wonderkid, Sam was named in the Forbes 30 under 30 Retail and E-commerce list of 2022, as well as the HURUN Rising Stars 30U30 awards of 2023.
Public Sector Entrepreneur: Emma O’Brien, Embridge Consulting
With a background in transformation at large corporates, Ms O’Brien founded Embridge in 2009. At the time, Ms O’Brien had two young children so Embridge was a way to balancing work and family. The company targets customers who eschew ‘Big Four’ rate cards but demand top-flight skills. This became the Embridge calling card and today the company implements ERP, business change and digital transformation technologies. It addresses people, processes and technology and helps organisations to achieve impactful digital transformation outcomes. Clients include Cancer Research, Guildford Borough Council, Cherwell District Council, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Quartzelec amongst the 350-customer roster. In 2018, Elmbridge developed a Business Transformation as a Service offering: Embridge Value Accelerator (EVA) which has been very successful. However, success has not been linear and Covid was “extremely challenging”. Now recovered Emma has a team of 71 FTEs.
Outside of work, Ms O’Brien is passionate about supporting females in leadership / business and has recently joined the INvestHER which joins up women business owners with the investment community.
Social Enterprise Entrepreneur: Scott Vincent, Digital Futures
Mr Vincent hails from Australia. Landing in the UK in 1998, and after a decade in investment banking, Mr Vincent setup his own consulting firm which he sold it to Accenture in 2019. Then, after 9 months researching early career models, Mr Vincent launched ‘Digital Futures’ in 2020.
Digital Futures bridges talent and employers with a mission to support those from low socio-economic and minority groups. Digital Futures operates a ‘Hire, Train, Deploy’ business model whereby it attracts applications, selects candidates, puts them through a 14-week training bootcamp in one of a number of skills areas for free with the help of partners (e.g. software engineering, data engineering, cloud, AI with Amazon, Google, IBM). The company then employs them full-time for 2 years, placing them with a client who pay a fixed fee/placement. Then of the two-year anniversary clients decide whether to offer the staff a permanent role or not, with no additional costs incurred. All the profits are reinvested to create more opportunities and ramp up training capacity; which has grown rapidly, 400 last year, 600 this year.
Deep Tech Entrepreneur: Darko Matovski, causalLens
At 16 years old, Mr Matovski migrated to the UK from war-torn former Yugoslavia. A coding scholarship was his passport to freedom, which then led to a PhD in AI and the National Physical Laboratory. With co-founder, Maksim Sipos, Head of Research, Mr Matovski co-founded causaLens in 2017 to build a world “where humans confidently entrust machines with their greatest challenges”. “I am competitive and ambitious” Mr Matovski informed us. He is also well-travelled. In the week we tried to tie him down for our interview he moved between UK to US to Riyadh to London. For the awards last night, he was at the World Economic Forum ‘Annual Meeting of New Champions’ in Dilian, China.
causaLens is a startup which has developed a BI tool using Causal AI methodology to answer cause-and-effect business problems. causaLens’ AI platform identifies the cause of an event and its relationship to the outcome. The approach is leading to interest aplenty, and reflecting this the company has attracted some amazing customer logos including Meta, twilio, Goldman Sachs, BCG Capgemini, Walmart, Cisco, Nestle, GE Healthcare, Scotiabank, Aveva and L&G and on - you get the picture. The widespread interest is because causaLens solves two recognised problems:
predictive analytics apply algorithms and machine learning to historical data to predict future outcomes. The blind spot is that while they observe an event and predict an outcome it can’t show that the outcome occurred because of the event – i.e. correlation doesn’t equal causation.
Large Language Models are built on probability leading to hallucinations/ ‘make things up’, get things wrong and are unreliable due to their lack of understanding of causality. Current LLM-based AI algorithms predict outcomes based on patterns in past data but fail to explain how they arrived at those predictions – i.e. they do not understand causality.
Out of the box customers get a causal model builder with pre-configured causal AI models covering typical casual business questions. To avoid tyre kicking in such an interesting proposition Darko confides that he is not doing PoCs. Customers sign for a 2-week free trial which gives them full access and then he charges for a 12months subscription when they have seen the capabilities.
Female Entrepreneur: Uma Rajah, CapitalRise
Ms Rajahs purpose is “To disrupt the old way of investing in property and give investors easy and direct access to prime property-backed investments with attractive potential returns.” Delivering on this means that Ms Rajah brings Fintech innovation to the Prime Property lending market. Ms Rajah’s journey saw her complete a Masters of Engineering (Cambridge) prior to joining Mars on their graduate program. After a decade Ms Rajahs love of business took hold and this saw her leave the corporate world of chocolate and gain an MBA (INSTEAD) before becoming a fintech entrepreneur. That first foray was best described as a ‘learning process’. Her career took her to Wonga as Head of Product before co-founding CapitalRise in 2016. CapitalRise offers investors access to funding prime property developments in the “finest postcodes” of London and the Home counties. The company serves two customer bases: (i) Experienced property developers with bespoke, flexible and cost-effective funding; (ii) provides investors with the opportunity to invest in asset class of prime real estate debt. Ms Rajahs ability to raise money and then to be a great custodian of shareholder value is inspiring.
‘Wise Old Owl Award’: Richard Holway MBE
The ‘Wise Old Owl Award didn’t exist before last night. It was created for Richard Holway MBE who has long been the UK’s leading IT analyst. After training as a programmer at Hoskyns (a.k.a. Capgemini), he founded, then sold, Systemsolve before rejoining Hoskyns as Group Marketing Director (1979). Richard was appointed MD at Wootton Jeffreys plc (1984) but that entrepreneur ‘pull’ was in over-drive and in 1986 he established ‘Richard Holway Limited’. In double time, Mr Holway became the leading authority on the financial performance of the UK IT industry. In November 2000, Ovum acquired the business, only to be itself acquired by Datamonitor (2006). Off again, Richard joined forces with noted analyst Anthony Miller and the pair began launched TechMarketView LLP (2008) where Richard was Chairman for 15 years. Richard ‘claims’ to have retired in August 2023.
Out of the office, Richard was one of the founding members of the Prince’s Trust Technology Leadership Group (2002). He founded the Internet & Media Leadership Group (2011) before becoming Chair of all the Trust’s Leadership Groups and was appointed to the Prince’s Trust Advisory Board. He remains a Patron of the Prince’s Trust and a Patron of Eikon, the Charity for Children in Surrey.
So much for retirement, Richard remains a sought-after NED, board advisor, and is a Partner at ScaleUp Group. Richard was awarded an MBE in the 2012 Queen's Birthday Honours and has been a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists since 2014 - just writing this bio is exhausting.
Vox Pop
As we walked the hall, many suggested that funding world remained difficult, but operationally companies were confident in their ability to achieve estimates. Note: This morning Made Tech announcing that the FY ended in line with expectation – well done Rory and the team. Boots on the street advisors Rob Wirszycz and Paul Excell remain true passionate grafters for the sector with fingers in many tech pies and enjoy a broad following among the UK tech community, both talked about an improving operational backdrop but challenges for funding especially at the ‘A’ stage. Our hero Duane Jackson has left Iris and is about to re-emerge, but we are in the dark on the details – those of us who have followed Mr Jackson’s career expect something ‘cloud native disrupting an incumbent’ etc. Paddy MccGwire, Managing Partner, Silverpeak spoke for many as he said that he has seen “tech company revenue growth rates reduce (btw: our data supports this) as enterprise sales have been more difficult to close. Although there is still good demand for strong companies, buyers are being more discriminating and M&A processes are talking longer”. Paddy and the team represent European growth tech businesses, and from our dealing with him Silverpeak is engaged with the most relevant investors and acquirers, wherever they may be.
Hat tip the sponsors
HSBC Innovation Banking Platinum Sponsor
Gold sponsors:
Evelyn Partners, the wealth management and professional services group providing financial, tax and accountancy services for fast growth businesses.
ScaleUp Group, Funding advisors and co-investors supporting technology entrepreneurs.
Silverpeak, the specialist tech-focused corporate finance adviser.
TechMarketView, Tech analyst and advisers
The Awards were run by tx2 events – phew, this team takes the stress out any any shindig and are specialists for such events. CommsCo is the B2B tech PR agency.
The data
And the winners are: The 2024 Enterprise Awards cohort
Source: Company data, Technology Investment Services
Valuation heatmap January - June 2024
Note: n = 395, Priced 27 June. Source: Company data, Factset, Yahoo Finance, Technology Investment Services
End notes & Disclaimer: Please read
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My name is George O’Connor. I am a tech investment and IT industry analyst. I explore shareholder value, its drivers, the best exponents, the duffers. The target readers are investors, companies, advisors, stakeholders and YOU. If you like this please subscribe and pass it on to colleagues and friends. That said, if you hate it - do the same. Thanks for dropping by dear investor.