Graze, the business delivering healthy snacks by post, made the cut
Silicon Valley Comes to the UK has invited a new batch of high-growth firms to join its Scale Up Club, for their potential to reach 100m in the coming three to five years.
The not-for-profit organisation holds a series of events that bring together early-stage investors with successful entrepreneurs, students and investors to discuss how they have come to create today’s most disruptive technologies. Its Scale Up Club chooses firms based on their year-on-year growth rate over the past three years.
The likes of Graze, Hassle and Bloom & Wild all made the cut, as did Skimlinks, Duedil and Sky-Futures.
The businesses currently have a combined revenue of 300m, employing over 3, 100 people in the UK, and have an average growth rate of 110 per cent. Kano, Bloom & Wild, Hassle and MotorK are growing at a rate of over 1000 per cent per year.
The CEOs of these flourishing firms are invited to take part in a programme of networking, mentoring sessions and workshops, starting with the CEO Summit at the London Stock Exchange.
SVC2UK was launched in 2006 by angel investors Sherry Coutu and Ellen Levy and internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman. Previous businesses to be featured in the Scale Up Club include TransferWise and SkyScanner now valued at over $1bn.
Recent research from London & Partners found that the UK had attracted more VC investment from Silicon Valley-based investors than any other major European country over the last five years, with 290 completed deals worth a combined total of around $4.2bn.
Janet Coyle, director SVC2UK at London & Partners, said: This year’s Scale Up Club includes some of the UK’s fastest growing digital businesses and provides further proof that we can produce companies of genuine scale.
there has arguably never been a greater time to grow and scale a digital business in the UK and I have no doubt that the Scale Up Club alumnI will go on to be market leaders, she added.
London-based tech firms attracted nearly half of all deals into the UK from Silicon Valley totalling $1.9bn, which was more than Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid combined. The Mayor Boris Johnson has also just unveiled a new 5bn programme to improve young Londoners’ digital skills and open up opportunities for them to join the capital’s tech companies of the future.
VC investment into the UK’s tech sector reached a record high this year, with $2.2bn raised by UK firms and three-quarters of that secured by London-based companies.
Sherry Coutu, co-founder of SVC2UK, said: I am so proud of the work SVC2UK has been doing to encourage high impact entrepreneurship over the past nine years.
She said the work her team was doing provides evidence that scale-up leaders need access to corporate customers and effective professional support schemes to help them expand faster.
The 2015 list of top UK tech firms joining the Scale Up Club:
