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In a recent development, Dealroom and Tech Nation are joining hands to launch a Data Commons for UK Tech. This is a ground-breaking national database that will reveal a record venture capital investment of $4.8 billion (nearly €4.3 billion) into the UK tech companies in the first half, which is the first five months of 2019.
What Data Commons database will have?
The Data Commons reveals the digital tech economy activity across the UK ahead of the London Tech Week. It is an open database, which is a vital resource for those who want to start a business and for investors, policymakers and entrepreneurs. At launch, it will possess information about a whopping 22,000 transactions and 33,000 startups. Also, there will be details regarding thousands of investors, businesses, founders, angels, accelerators, service providers, universities, VC funds and more.
This database will have data such as a list of 72 UK unicorns, 78 potential future unicorns, 1,600 female-founded startups, largest funding rounds of 2019 and many more. Having said that, here we list 10 ambitious unicorns in the UK tech ecosystem that are hiring at a fast rate as sourced from Data Commons.
What is a unicorn?
Before we head on to check out the list of unicorns in the UK, we need to tell you what a unicorn means in the world of business. For the uninitiated, reaching a valuation of $1 billion is an aspiration for all startups and entrepreneurs as they become a unicorn on doing so. As per reports, 11.5% of unicorns in the world are located in Europe.
Ambitious unicorns in the UK
Check out the list of 10 ambitious unicorns in the UK from below.
Deliveroo (London)
Founders: William Shu, Greg Orlowski
Funding: €1.3 billion
Deliveroo is a food delivery giant founded in 2013. The company focuses on building a world-class service to deliver what users want whenever and wherever they need. It aims to offer more work for the riders and help restaurants grow by letting them reach new customers. Deliveroo, which recently raised funding from Amazon is ambitious about bringing innovation in the food tech industry by developing new products to create a more personalised user experience.
Greensill (London)
Founders: Lex Greensill, Jason Austin
Funding: €955 million
Greensill established in 2011 is a supply chain financing company. It is a leading provider of working capital finance for companies across the world. At Greensill, they unlock capital so that the companies can put it to work. With its headquarters in London, this fintech company has offices in Bremen, Sydney, Frankfurt, Miami, Chicago and New York.
OakNorth Bank (London)
Founders: Rishi Khosla, Joel Perlman
Funding: €783 million
In 2013, OakNorth was founded to help businesses in the UK grow by letting entrepreneurs reach their complete potential by giving them customised debt finance solutions. The company offers competitive savings and personal accounts, business loans and property finance to entrepreneurs. OakNorth focuses on small and medium-sized businesses and helps them grow.
Farfetch (London)
Founders: José Neves
Funding: €638
Farfetch exists since 2008 for the love of fashion. The company believes in empowering individuality. It works with the mission to offer a global technology platform for luxury fashion, which connects creators, curators and consumers across the world together. The vision of this company is to create a single platform to address the complex demands of both luxury sellers and consumers.
Metro Bank (England)
Founders: Vernon Hill
Funding: €624 million
Metro Bank was introduced in 2010 as the first high street bank in over a century. This UK bank offers commercial, private, business and personal banking services with the focus of providing unparalleled levels of convenience and customer service. The company was founded with the concept of offering the best customer experience by making services available 24×7 via both internet banking and contact centre.
Improbable (London)
Founders: Herman Narula, Peter Lipka, Rob Whitehead
Funding: €547 million
Improbable established in 2012 is dedicated to building powerful technology, which is designed to solve impossible problems and let create new realities. In entertainment and gaming, this company unlocks the next-generation gameplay via virtual worlds of unparalleled persistence and richness. The platform called SpatialOS lets developers overcome limitations of regular computation and cooperate over the cloud to simulate complex and larger worlds.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies (Oxford)
Founders: Gordon Sanghera, Hagan Bayley
Funding: €529 million
Founded in 2005, Oxford Nanopore Technologies works with the ambition to disrupt the paradigm of biological analysis. The company has opened up DNA analysis to researchers who had no direct access to technology, thereby letting them carry out analyses in their own labs in real-time. The company has developed the world’s first nanopore DNA sequencer called MinION, which is a real-time, portable and low-cost device designed to facilitate easy biological analyses.
TransferWise (London)
Founders: Kristo Kaarmann, Taavet Hinrikus
Funding: €360 million
TransferWise intends to create a positive and irreversible change in the global fintech industry. The company founded in 2011 helps people across the world choose their platform to help them live, work and commute across the world. It offers one of the easiest and fastest ways to transfer money to a person in another country. The company claims that users can send money overseas at 8x cheaper than using traditional banks for the same purpose.
Funding Circle (London)
Founders: Alex Tonelli, Andrew Mullinger, James Meekings, Sam Hodges, Samir Desai
Funding: €339 million
Funding Circle is a leading lending platform in the world with its focus on small businesses. Founded in 2010, this company matches investors with money to lend with the businesses that are looking forward to funding. The company operates with the goal to revolutionise the dated banking system by offering its peer-to-peer lending marketplace. The company exists in London, the Netherlands, the US and Germany and is expanding to Canada with an office in Toronto later this year.
Immunocore (Abingdon)
Founders: Bent Jakobsen
Funding: €327 million
Established in 2008, Immunocore is a leading T-cell receptor biotechnology company. This company is focused on delivering best-in-class biological therapies with the potential to transform the lives of those suffering from serious ailments. It offers advanced therapeutic programmes focused on oncology and infectious and autoimmune diseases.
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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Are you next? These 5 award winning scale-ups took full advantage of EIT Digital Challenge
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