Rocket List 2020

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

Allplants has found a niche within home food delivery, competing with the likes of Gousto and Hellofresh (albeit Allplants meals come prepared rather than as recipe boxes)

While vegans make up a smaller portion of the total market, the proportion of people trying to reduce their meat and dairy intake now makes up around 33% of people in the UK, giving them a big and growing market to tap into (especially as people trying to change their dieting habits are probably more likely to try new things)

The UK is also now the world leader for vegan food product launches, with 1 in 6 new food products coming to market claiming to be vegan. This is not just a London fad, with Allplants saying that only 38% of their customers are based in London.

As a certified B Corp, Allplants are taking their commitment to the environment seriously, and they’ve designed the packaging so it’s as environmentally-friendly as possible. They use offcuts of cotton denim from the factory floor to produce insulation, which goes in its cardboard boxes so it can be recycled and used again. This compares with the polystyrene boxes that are used for food logistics 90% of the time.

It will be important for Allplants to maintain high quality and a strong brand to build the defensibility of the business. It will be easy for bigger meal delivery companies to offer vegan alternatives, but not so easy for them to live up to Allplants environmental credentials.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Babylon has a huge mission, to make health care accessible for all. This helped them attract a lot of funding and talent. In 2019 they raised $550m, the largest round ever for digital health delivery.

Making time to go and see the doctor can already be difficult, and often you have to wait over a week for an appointment. Bablyon's first step to making healthcare accessible is enabling people to interact with doctors over the phone or on video, a huge step change in convenience for the consumer.

Babylon says it delivers 4,000 clinical consultations each day and covers 4.3 million people worldwide, with more than 160,000 giving 5-star ratings for appointments. This traction certainly suggests they’re onto something.

Babylon partners with the NHS - one of the largest employers in the world and by far the biggest employer in the UK – and its staff and systems are stretched. It is turning to technology to help save time and redirect focus, but this process isn’t straightforward and will take time. Babylon is also looking to expand into the US and Asia, where the markets are larger but arguably even more complex given the regulatory environment.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

There is a lot of research being done in the pharmaceutical industry. BenevolentAI say there's a new research paper being published every 30 seconds. They argue this information is not being used in a smart way for the discovery and development of new drugs.

To tackle this problem, BenevolentAI uses artificial intelligence to analyse biomedical information, from clinical trials data to academic papers. They can then identify molecules that have failed in clinical trials and predict how these same compounds can instead be more efficient targeting other diseases.

They argue this approach can dramatically accelerate the discovery of new drugs. They've collaborated with large pharma companies like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutica.

It's a big market, with Global Market Insights estimating the global healthcare AI market will exceed $10 billion by 2024. This gives them a big opportunity, but it won't be an easy problem to tackle.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

People are increasingly not satisfied with the products being offered by traditional banks, who have proven slow to react to the needs of younger consumers who expect more from their everyday experiences.

Cleo was one of the first companies to make great use of chatbots that sit within Facebook's messenger app. This chatbot-first approach and Gen Z user base has given them strong virality, enabling them to grow to over 2.5 million users (up from 1m in early 2019). This seems to have been largely driven by a better-than-expected US launch in 2019.

Financial advice delivered via bots is now a very crowded space, so Cleo is benefiting from being a strong brand in the space. They’ve gone for very bold, fun, millennial-focused messaging which helps them stand out from the rest.

They’re experimenting with cash advances (an alternative to overdrafts) and premium accounts. Cleo is in a trickier position than some other fintechs who hold customer deposits, as these are much easier to monetise (even though a lot of the challenger banks say they don’t want to make money in the same way as a traditional bank!).

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Before companies like Cuvva, the most recent consumer-facing innovation in insurance was through aggregators such as Moneysupermarket. However, the experience of using these is not great. The industry is known for low levels of customer support, confusing policies and needing to create a new account every time you want a quote.

Brokers and comparison websites add another step to the process, and charge companies they work with ~£70 on each policy sold, which is passed on to the customer in the form of higher policy costs.

Cuvva's focus on customer service is unusual in insurance, but it's providing them a winning edge. They are trying to make insurance more about the experience than simply the price of the policy. It seems to be working so far, as they’ve got a lot of great customer reviews. The challenge will be scaling this support (it’s notoriously hard to scale great customer service when you’re growing fast).

For an industry where brand loyalty is currently near zero (because people go for the cheapest policies) there could be a big opportunity for a company that provides an end-to-end amazing experience and cuts out the middlemen.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

In the same way that challenger banks have come along to re-invent legacy banking software from the ground up, Duffel is doing the same in the travel market, linking up airlines directly with travel agents with a modern platform.

Duffel's system connects with airlines’ booking channels more extensively than those of incumbent operators, like Amadeus and Sabre, meaning they can facilitate selling not just seats on a plane, but also other products such as speedy boarding, airport transfer and seat selection.

Add-on products make up an increasing part of airline revenues (currently 10% for European low-cost carriers, up 105% over the past four years in Europe) but are mostly sold through airlines own websites at the moment (whereas bookings are increasingly being made via intermediaries like Skyscanner). Duffel's technology will make it easier for airlines to sell more of these ancillary services, which is what makes them so attractive to airline customers.

Their main competitor in Europe, Amadeus, has $5bn+ revenue and 19,000 employees, so there's a big challenge ahead, but a big prize if they succeed in capturing some of that market.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

The rise of cryptocurrency in the last 5 years has been dramatic. While there hasn't yet been a huge breakthrough in terms of a mainstream product for consumers, there are some interesting applications appearing.

A key issue with most cryptocurrencies is that their nature means they can be used by criminals for illicit activities (especially money laundering). Elliptic’s focus is on tackling financial compliance, and they have developed machine learning tech that screens transactions to identify suspicious patterns and dubious transactors.

They now offer an integrated suite of products for financial institutions to screen crypto-flows, which they analyse for links to illicit activity such as money laundering, terrorist financing and other financial crimes. Their success in this area could be key to helping cryptocurrencies get the regulation they need to go mainstream.

Elliptic are especially targeting business growth in Asia, where they’re planning to open new offices in Japan and Singapore. They say client revenues in the region have risen 11x over the past 2 years.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

In the UK, the majority of wills are made by solicitors or will-writing firms, with prices normally around £200-300 on the high street and £850-£5000s with established firms.

There have been DIY will services for the last 5 years, but most have poor user experience and no real support beyond the form itself. Customers are required to read 10-20 pages of legal documents and decide what applies to them.

Farewill's technology asks simple questions and generates the legal text. Wills are important legal documents, and so every will still gets checked by a specialist and phone lines are open 7 days a week and 12 hours a day. Farewill are also cheaper than alternatives, with a cost of just £90 for an individual.

A competitor in the US (Willing) has taken the freemium route, referring customers to funeral services to make money. However, Farewill believes they can provide a better experience if the product is paid for. Farewell is also partnering with UK companies to provide the service as a perk to their employees, a novel distribution method.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

The average rental deposit in the UK is £1,110 and this means tenants struggle to pay the deposit when moving home.

For those with cash flow issues, there was previously no solution to finding £1,000 at short notice. Flatfair have created a solution where you pay a membership-fee equal to one-quarter the cost of a rental deposit. This is non-refundable, but means people don't have to take on credit card debt or borrow from family and friends.

Other companies such as Goodlord and Movebubble have tried to disrupt rentals, but it's a hard space to crack.

flatfair's access point to the rental market is a smart one. They become pivotal to both landlords and tenants, and so are in a smart position to streamline processes and improve the experience (for example when there are disputes over damages at the end of a tenancy).

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Freetrade is aiming to democratise investing. Investing in stocks has traditionally been restricted to a more wealthy generation who can afford the commissions of £10-£12 per trade and have the money to pay for financial advice. Freetrade are trying to make investing accessible for all (according to them, there are 16m millennials in the UK who have never invested in stocks before).

Freetrade have strong customer loyalty. This enabled them to raise nearly all of their early investment through record crowdfunding founds (they also recently raised £12m from VC Draper Esprit). Crowdfunding tends to work particularly well when the investors active in crowdfunding communities can relate to the product, which is certainly the case here!

They've also created an active community where potential investors can share advice and learn about company stocks, which has helped fuel engagement and growth. Freetrade are in a market with a lot of well capitalised incumbents (such as the big banks and brokerages) and some big disrupters (like Robinhood and Revolut, who are both £bn+ companies already). The key to continued customer growth will be finding marketing strategies that don't rely on them outspending deep-pocketed rivals.

On the product side, Freetrade have built a brokerage platform from scratch using serverless technologies. This will help them scale their product in a cost-effective way, as they're not reliant on a 3rd party broker.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Subscription models are becoming the standard, yet recurring payments is still a messy space. GoCardless are attempting to build the one-stop shop globally for businesses that want to let customers pay via recurring bank payments.

GoCardless had a strong 2019, securing $75m led by GV to fund international expansion with new offices across EMEA, APAC and North America. They now have offices in France, Australia, Germany and the US and process $10bn in transactions each year for over 50,000 businesses.

Larger payment companies (e.g. Stripe and Square) don't seem to be focused on tackling the subscription economy yet, though they are starting to make some moves into that space, which means GoCardless needs to expand fast to keep them away.

Later in 2019 GoCardless announced a partnership with TransferWise for its currency exchange, allowing them to provide TransferWise’s FX rates to its own customers. This is a big win for GoCardless, as it helps them much better serve global businesses.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Access to mortgages was historically controlled by mortgage brokers who acted as gatekeepers to the market. 10 years ago the mortgage process involved meeting someone in an office somewhere to discuss your options; not exactly 21st Century.

This is changing with the rise of online brokers, who are bringing innovation to this previously undisrupted market. It's a big market, with £240bn of mortgage loans originated each year, so there’s plenty of money to be made for Habito.

In 2019, they started direct lending from their own range of mortgages, which are being funded by a £500m commitment from a large financial institution. Habito are hoping that other lenders will want to use their technology to launch their own digital lending products. They believe using smart technology enables them to provide a better customer experience and faster loan decisions, which will give them a long-term edge over traditional banks.

For now, they’re innovating by offering lending products targeted at underserved groups, e.g. mortgages suitable for self-employed people who don’t have a traditional financial footprint. Another opportunity the startup is eyeing up are mortgages with a much longer fixed term, which are more common in other countries, but in the U.K. are typically restricted to 2-5 years.

Habito ran a bold advertising campaign titled ‘Hell or Habito’ starting in late 2018, which they’ve built on in 2019. This has been successful in driving awareness of the brand and helping fuel their growth.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Impala wants to be as simple as Stripe or Twilio but for hotels. With a few lines of code, any developer should be able to get started with Impala before diving deeper.

Hotels use Property Management Systems to manage rooms, room types, extras, pricing, taxes etc. These systems are old, and providers to hotels need a load of integrations to connect to all the different hotel systems to get the data they need. Impala wants to make this easier by building a standardised API for anyone building services on top of hotel systems.

They're also building a direct booking API. Right now, many hotels manually upload booking data to websites like Booking.com, or use a middle-man to do this. Their API could cut out all of that and the commissions to middle-men along the way.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

The childcare sector in the UK is under pressure, with prices rising and nurseries closing down. The way of finding nannies hasn't seen innovation in decades, and there hasn't been an introduction of technology to drive great experiences.

Koru Kids has focused on after-school childcare, allowing them to hone their product and solve one of the most neglected areas. This is specifically important in major cities like London, where parents are often working longer hours.

The business takes out all the hassle of finding a nanny. The solution isn't simply technology: Koru Kids also interviews, trains and references its nannies, and takes care of contracts, holiday pay and taxes. This operational complexity builds a competitive advantage.

The mission is easy to relate to and has been a strong attraction point for customers and employees.

When aiming to create the best childcare service in the world, quality will always remain important. Koru Kids have made sure to grow carefully. In 2018 they only accepted 6% of applications by people wanting become after-school nannies, to ensure standards remain high.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

Smart financing has been one of the most important financial innovations over the last few years. Companies in this space look at cash flow/payment problems that companies or people face (for example delayed invoice payments hampering a company's cash flow) and try and come up with an intelligent financing solution while taking a cut on the way.

Late in 2019 they moved away from their original name (MarketInvoice) and rebranded as MarketFinance, as they have expanded their range to offer business loans and corporate lending products (alongside invoice finance). Ultimately, they want to become a single source for all the finance needs required by ambitious business leaders.

Earlier in 2019 they received strategic investment from Barclays and Santander, giving them substantial capital to grow and also enabling them to distribute the service to Barclays' large SME client base.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

The speed of the challenger banks to provide a delightful experience has been impressive, and the number of competitors appearing has proven the consumer desire for innovation.

The new technologies that banks are built on means they can quickly expand internationally, which Monzo started to do in 2019. By the end of 2019, they had 1,000 users with beta cards in the US and have big plans for international growth in 2020. Growth in the US will not be easy, with the complex federal and state politics interacting with the financial world in a unique way. Regulation in the US is highly fragmented, so getting this launch off to a good start will undoubtedly be their biggest challenge for 2020.

Monzo has a huge mission, and its culture is known to be transparent and celebrate diversity. This has helped them to attract the best talent and move fast. They've continued to focus on launching features people care about in 2019, e.g. helping people sort their money into pots when payday comes around, and allowing people to get paid a day early.

Monzo spent little on marketing for their first few years, with growth largely coming from word of mouth and their recognisable coral card. This changed in 2019 when they poured money into TV and TfL adverts, which they said were very successful. They launched the ads in June, and this was “by far” their biggest month for sign-ups, attracting more than 250,000 new customers, up from 150,000 a couple of months before. Their brand awareness also increased 13 points from 35% to 48%.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

There are more than 8 million used cars sold annually in the UK — which is more than 3x the number of new cars sold, but the process of selling a car has gone largely unchanged for decades.

Motorway aims to make selling a car faster by bringing the options online and enabling easy price comparison. Buyers can quickly upload their information and compare headline offers, read buyer reviews, collection criteria, fees and payment methods before choosing their best deal. The experience is as fast and slick as they promise, with Motorway rated 4.8/5.0 on Trustpilot with over 2,500 reviews.

Motorway is growing fast, and as of their latest funding round they were handling over 100,000 monthly car sale enquiries. The UK used car market is worth over £50 billion per annum, so the potential for Motorway is significant.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

Papier has grown rapidly since its launch in 2015 and has established itself as the leading direct-to-consumer brand in personalised stationery, building a growing community of ‘stationery addicts’.

The company is tapping into increasing demand for highly tactile and engagingly designed paper products and stationery. Industry analysts predict that this consumer trend will lead the UK market to be worth £2.1bn by 2021, while the US hobby and stationery market is today estimated to be worth ~$50bn and it is projected to grow by 9% annually over the next four years, so there's a big market for them to grow into.

Since launching in the US in 2018, the market now accounts for 15% of the brand’s total revenue and is growing at over 40% each month. They're planning to double-down on the growth in this market by collaborating with US designers and brands.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Plentific is a technology property management platform that enables landlords to deliver a better, more transparent and digital tenant experience whilst reducing operational costs across all repair and maintenance services.

They digitise the entire experience and streamline manual processes, whilst connecting landlords with a growing marketplace of approved independent local tradespeople.

To date Plentific’s focus has been mainly on housing associations, local authorities and large scale professional landlords in the UK and Germany, where there is a growing sense of urgency around the provision of safe, affordable and higher-quality accommodation at a time when budgets are under greater pressure than ever.

There are a few competitors when it comes to marketplaces for tradespeople, so Plentific will be hoping their management platform acts as the best distribution for these services.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Most would argue that the best advocates for a product are existing customers. Sometimes these customers can be incentivised to refer/sell the products they love.

Pollen (recently rebranded from the name Verve) has done just that, creating a platform to allow brands to provide various rewards for customers who help promote events. It is providing the infrastructure to make word-of-mouth marketing more scalable.

Pollen has sold 1 million experiences since being founded in 2014, with 330,000 sold in 2019, making tens of millions in revenue among a demographic that is mostly in the 16-28 range, a group whose disposable income will continue to grow.

Pollen has been known best for providing access to music concerts, club nights and one-off experiences. In 2019 they raised a large round of funding, which they’re going to be using to expand more deeply in their current verticals, but also sports and travel, for example beach holidays, city breaks, ski trips and festivals.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Banks haven't innovated their consumer offering for decades. The tide is now turning, with fast moving disrupters building consumer-first businesses and products with many more useful features.

Revolut has arguably been the consistently fastest growing startup in Europe since they launched in 2015. They kicked off 2020 by hitting 10 million customers, and the global team grew to 2,000 at the end of 2019. With over 500 job ads currently live, their CEO emphasised the drive to expand: they aim to have 5,000 employees by the end of 2020.

Growth is coming from all directions. Revolut launched free stock trading in 2019, and a business banking product to compete against Monzo, Starling and Tide. A partnership with Visa was recently announced that will enable it to grow faster outside of Europe. They are currently targeting expansion into the USA, Canada and further into the APAC region.

Revolut's team drives relentlessly to achieve success: they're known for being one of the fastest companies in Europe to ship new products. The team's attitude is to work hard, which has helped them to be incredibly successful at 'getting stuff done'.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Open source software is now a $14 billion market and it's growing fast. However, open source components can come with vulnerabilities, and so their widespread use in apps becomes a liability to a company’s cybersecurity.

Snyk, has built a way to detect when those apps or components are compromised. They work with developers, who are now commonly the owners of application security. Snyk works as an integration into existing developer workflows, compatible with the likes of GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab, as well as CI/CD pipelines.

Snyk’s valuation has grown fast, and they now have ~300,000 developers using it around the globe, with its customer base growing ~200% in 2019 and including Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and ASOS.

They vary their approach with enterprises depending on their security needs, working on-premises, via the cloud or a hybrid. This puts Snyk in a strong position to target all enterprises as customers.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Starting started life focused on consumer banking, they have since found most of their success by competing in the business banking space. They’ve caught up with Tide and beaten the likes of Monzo and Revolut to a more complete offering for businesses.

This progress resulted in them receiving a £100m grant in April 2019 from a body created to boost competition in SME banking, which they're using to accelerate building a full suite of digital banking products: intelligent forecasting tools, and digitally-enabled relationship management functions as well as lending products.

As well as continuing to expand in the UK, they’re expanding in Europe. They’re imminently launching an international bank in Dublin, which will allow Starling to offer its current account across the European Union after Brexit.

Banking for small businesses has historically been ignored even though the experience is poor. Starling is in tune with knowing what their customers want, and they continue to build out their range of third-party products within its banking app thanks to support from its open API. They currently have 11 integrations, including Xero, but that figure continues to grow.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

While other forms of workplace communication are gaining a lot of traction (namely Slack and Microsoft Teams), email still dominates as by far the most popular way for people to communicate at work.

At the same time, sophisticated cyber attacks are becoming more common. Cybercriminals are impersonating colleagues, customers or suppliers in targeted attacks that are difficult for people to detect. Tessian’s technology detects when an email represents a threat, reducing the chance of human error.

The problem is real for all company sizes. Hiscox, a big insurer, reported that small businesses in the UK are targeted with 65,000 attacks per day. Those suffering from incidents are facing costs of ~£25k.

There are not many other companies that have rocketed as much as Tessian in the last couple of years. They started out slow, but have grown rapidly since their $2.7m seed round in 2017 (which was quickly followed by a $13m round in 2018 and a $42m round in 2019). Tessian’s latest round was led by Sequoia, who are one of the most respected funds in the world and rarely invest in European startups.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

The Plum Guide pitches itself as the Michelin Guide for Homes. They seek out the very best holiday rental homes across multiple sources (e.g. Airbnb, private short-term lets etc.), vet them in person, and put them all in one place for people to book.

Their main differentiator is that they select only the top 1% of properties in a given city. According to their website, they've reviewed ~500,000 homes and have accepted just over 7,000. All of their homes are reviewed by a real person, which marks the property against 150 parameters (e.g. wifi, water pressure).

The Plum Guide competes primarily with the luxury hotel market and Airbnb, who are increasingly targeting more affluent customers with the release of Airbnb Luxe in the summer of 2019. It will be important for The Plum Guide to maintain super high quality and build their brand/reputation to grow their share in the market.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Tray.io aims to allow employees to essentially become programmers without them needing to have an engineering background, and enabling them to build out automation for their day-to-day role.

Tray's investors see them filling a big need in the automation space in a spot between high end tools like Mulesoft, which Salesforce bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion, and simpler tools like Zapier.

Tray’s rise comes on the heels of a wider trend. Integration and automation are key in advancing the way enterprises work. Bringing data out of silos, and doing so in an instant way, speeds up operations, reduces human error and helps drive down costs.

Tray has been around since 2012, but started slow by focusing on building out the product. Since raising their Series A in 2018 they have grown rapidly, with their annual recurring revenue growing by over 500%, customers include companies like SAP, VMWare, Lyft, Intercom and IBM.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Fintech innovation has been pushed further by the introduction of Open Banking standards. Financial institutions are now required to host APIs that allow sharing of your financial data, and you are in control of which third parties have access. It has never been easier for finance products to interact with each other. For example, you may be able to view your Halifax credit card transactions from your Monzo account.

The technologies and partnerships to build this financial layer are complex. TrueLayer saw this problem early, and started years before the standards were enforced.

They have made the most out of the London fintech scheme with key partnerships (e.g. Monzo, Revolut) and are now expanding fast in Europe. They have recently opened an office in Australia, ready for Australia’s introduction of Open Banking standards. This will also provide a base for expansion into Singapore and Hong Kong.

Their role as the ‘connecting layer’ is incredibly defensible. As TrueLayers partnerships continue to increase, the value of their platform becomes harder to replicate. Particularly as their offering now has global reach.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

There are over 1 billion people directly involved in small-scale agriculture, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Together these farmers grow 70% of the world’s food, however many of these farmers do not have access to the internet, and therefore cannot effectively share knowledge and best practices, or benefit from combined buying and selling power.

Wefarm is building a trusted digital platform for these farmers to be able to connect to the people and resources they need to be more successful. And thanks to it's leading machine learning and natural language processing libraries it's able to do this even via SMS.

Wefarm have also made early moves into providing a marketplace — helping to put farmers in touch with local suppliers of goods and gear such as seed and fertilisers. They have generated $1m of sales in the first 8 months of operating, seeing the bulk of its growth in developing markets where small scale agriculture is more prominent, and those farms have been very underserved.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

The non-cash rewards industry is worth $300 billion, yet hasn't seen much innovation. Incumbents focus on physical gift cards, and a lot of the work is done on spreadsheets and outdated systems.

WeGift has built a platform that offers API access for businesses to automate sending digital rewards.

There are clear similarities to Stripe here: they revolutionised payments to businesses and are now worth $20 billion. WeGift is providing quick integrations for developers and simple design, just like Stripe, but do it such that businesses can 'pay' their customers.