Janet Coyle, managing director of SVC2UK at London & Partners, on how leveraging the power of community can help UK tech entrepreneurs scale faster.
The UK technology sector has seen tremendous growth in recent years and, where previously startup and scaleups struggled to make unicorn status, we’re increasingly seeing homegrown talent break the billion-dollar valuation mark. Recently, challenger bank Monzo raised £85m to join the ranks of the unicorns, alongside other UK-founded businesses like TransferWise, Deliveroo, Improbable and Darktrace.
While there are still those who criticise the fact that the UK is still some way behind the US when it comes to hyper-scaling companies and huge funding rounds, we have made incredible progress. Cities such as London, Cambridge and Oxford are now recognised as the birth places of some of the world’s most innovative technology companies and talent, quickly nipping at the heels of Silicon Valley. In fact, data from Quid shows that over the past 10 years London has attracted $34.2bn in growth capital, more than three times the amount of total funding received by other tech hubs such as Paris ($8.9bn), Berlin ($9.1bn) and Tel Aviv ($3.5bn) and, since the start of 2018 alone, London startups have raised $5.6bn worth of VC and private equity investment....