Rocket List 2021

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Ably's realtime APIs expose the entire Ably infrastructure to developers, making it easier to integrate real-time data flows and therefore to power realtime functionality at any scale.

Developers are increasingly looking to utilise real-time data to facilitate new kinds of services e.g in the Internet of Things or monitoring stock prices. Introducing massive flows of realtime data has previously been technically difficult.

The company believes their product is set apart from other real-time platform as-a-service providers because it features out-the-box products that are developer-friendly as well as secure.

The company expresses this developer-friendly approach through a variety of channels, including masterclasses as well as products like their unique offering of reliable message ordering.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Communication between patients and nurses/doctors has typically happened via telephone call or post. This outdated technology is costly and does not provide a great experience.

accuRx are building the tools that allow GPs and other healthcare providers to communicate more efficiently with their patients and with each other in order to deliver top quality care. Their products are now used in over 95% of GP practices.

This product has been hugely important through Coronavirus and has driven massive growth for accuRx. They have facilitated video appointments where in-person consultations would put people at risk, and they are now supporting with the UK's vaccination efforts.

Saul Klein

Co-founder and Partner at LocalGlobe

accuRx is building a world-leading healthcare communication platform. The mission is simple - to change lives by bringing patients and their healthcare teams together. accuRx is one of the UK's fastest-growing tech startups. In two years, they grew from only a few GP practices using them to over 50% of practices in England.

Today, 99% of GP practices rely on accuRx to communicate with their patients. They’ve just launched in hospitals and are already used by over 15% of hospitals in England. In response to COVID-19, they worked tirelessly to release new features to help frontline staff including a video consultation solution that went from 0 to 35k daily consultations in the space of 8 weeks.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

Bark is the UK's largest & fastest growing services marketplace, connecting consumers and businesses with the right professional for their project in over 1,000 unique categories. A customer can simply post a service requirement (they call this a Bark!) and their technology goes out and finds relevant professionals instantly.

Professionals who are interested in quoting for the work can post their responses to the customer. The customer can then speak to the seller, view their profile and read Bark reviews before choosing the best pro for their job.

As of January 2020, Bark had 5 million users booking pros stretching from gardeners and cleaners to counsellors and accountants. Their turnover doubled in the last year to £20 million, so they're clearly growing fast and have a big opportunity ahead of them.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

Beacon is aimed at the trillion-dollar freight forwarding industry - the booking agents between importers and exporters. With the top 10 forwarders controlling just 43% of the market and being slow to digitise, the industry is ripe for disruption.

Beacon has an established customer base and offers a full range of services across ocean, air and trucking, as well as supply chain finance – all managed on a single platform, using AI, data science, cloud and automation technologies.

Investment from Jeff Bezos highlights the significant potential that Beacon holds to benefit both Amazon and the industry as a whole. The technology of Beacon could help Amazon tackle a number of the logistics challenges it has faced.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

The volume of communications in the workplace is going up. Not only do people send emails but now employees are communicating all day through internal chat platforms like Slack.

Behavox helps companies make sense of the vast amount of data being produced from all of these messages. They use AI and machine learning to aggregate and analyse large volumes of unstructured communications.

The data they produced can be used to create actionable insights on employees' performance and also help risk and compliance teams in financial services companies.

Regulation is high for financial services companies, and it's likely to grow in other industries, increasing Behavox's potential addressable market.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Blink is a digital workplace app giving employees a single portal to all enterprise applications.

With Blink, you can instantly reach everyone in your organization with company updates in the Feed, share all policy and training documents and software shortcuts in the Hub via cloud storage and, also, increase productivity by harnessing actionable employee insights through their Micro-apps marketplace.

Blink aims to develop the best workplace app and meet the high standards that today's employees expect from their workplace software. Introducing Blink has been shown to reduce employee turnover by 26% and double engagement rates.

The company reported its highest growth in April 2020, driven by healthcare employers who adopted the app as part of a COVID-19 response. Employees were protected by Blink through the fact that the app reduced transference risks from paper by introducing digital forms. The company has raised £8.2 million in their recent funding in order to help get Covid-19 updates to frontline staff.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

2018 regulatory changes introduced a huge volume of admin into capital management and reporting for investors and firms. Capdesk, like the investment banks, has tapped into a rapid trend: the automation of repetitive, spreadsheet-based equity reports.

Reporting on employee options and equity to shareholders is often an arduous task. This data-gathering can take thousands of hours and drain revenue from a business, and it's no surprise that Capdesk's competitive pricing and rapid implementation was quickly adopted by fast-growing companies such as Privitar.

Capdesk differentiates itself in a crowded space by focusing on the UK market. Taking on British clients like MarketInvoice has enabled it to compete with equity reporting technologies tailored to US regulatory and formatting standards. They have recently raised £3 million, used to launch their own secondaries feature in partnership with Seedrs and Shieldpay, aiming to become Europe’s first platform that democratises the secondary private equity market for all classes of shareholders.

Sia Houchangnia

Partner at Seedcamp

US-based Carta and Capshare have proven the demand for an easy-to-use equity ownership management platform. This is why it’s promising and exciting to see Capdesk fill this same market demand in Europe. 1,000 customers throughout Europe, including scale-ups like Nutmeg and Secret Escapes, are already using the platform.

In 2020, the Capdesk team raised a £3 million Series A round, which has enabled them to nearly double their team and attract some of Europe’s top tech talent. This sets Capdesk up well for European expansion. Their goal for 2021 is to enable the first marketplace for pan-European employee share plans — it’s an ambitious but worthwhile and highly promising endeavor.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Through the Cazoo platform customers are able to buy, finance or rent a used car online and have it delivered to their door within 48 hours. This is a big step change vs. other used car websites, where you often still have to travel 25+ miles to see and pick up your new car.

The UK used car market is worth over £50 billion per annum, so the potential for Cazoo is large. Cazoo argue the market will grow even more when it goes through digital transformation, which they want to drive

While the market is large, there are a lot of established players, most notably Auto Trader. There are also new, well-financed startups like Heycar (backed by VW and Daimler), so the product will need to be a lot better to cut through the noise.

The CEO is a very experienced entrepreneur and used to taking on large incumbents, which should stand him in good stead. Alex introduced Zoopla to the market when Rightmove had a monopoly and managed to create a very successful company

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

The payments industry has exploded in the last decade as eCommerce continues to grow as the use of cash falls. Checkout.com are building the go-to platform for all things related to payments, e.g. accepting transactions, processing them and detecting fraud. It focuses on large merchants and tries to make its product as customisable as possible so that companies integrate it as an infrastructure partner in their product. This increases the stickiness of the product and create many opportunities for them to generate revenue.

Checkout.com have high quality proprietary technology (their platform has been designed from the outset so they can easily deliver incremental services as they expand their offering) and claim to offer the most comprehensive cross-border payment solution for digital commerce.

Anne Glover

Chief Executive and Co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners

Checkout.com exploded into the cross-border payments public-eye when it announced its $230m Series A round in 2019. This has been topped up by adding a further $150m in June 2020 and $450m in January 2021.

By offering a universal platform that integrates with all key international payments providers, it provides a single low cost set of rails for international e-commerce companies, such as The Hut Group, which announced the adoption of Checkout in December 2020.

THG claimed they did a comprehensive review of the market and that Checkout.com’s unified digital payments platform, offering global coverage, and granular transaction-level data enables them to fuel THG’s business growth.

Payments will remain a battleground internationally, with different competitors focussing on defined segments. Checkout’s positioning as a low-cost, robust, yet comprehensive service provider with a global footprint is currently defensible because of its scale – but it needs to maintain its market leadership. Other players may try to carve out niches, or insert themselves between Checkout’s ‘rails’ and the merchant.

With a savvy leadership (having built themselves up in stealth mode since 2012) and smart deep-pocketed investors, I would expect to see Checkout deepen and broaden its product offering to defend against becoming a ’dumb pipe’, while redirecting all the payments flow across its low-cost infrastructure. To help with this, it is both acquiring and investing as a VC in the next generation of fintech start-ups which will increase the moat within which it operates.

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. They now have 4m registered users, 96% of which are based in the US.

Financial advice delivered via bots is a 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!).

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Codat offers a single API, so financial service providers can easily access accurate contributed accounting data from their small business customers.

They're making the most of the Open Banking movement with a specific focus on accounting. Taking an ‘Open Accounting’ approach enables banks to have greater access to real-time accounting data, which helps banks provide faster and more accurate lending decisions for small businesses, while managing risk effectively.

With the ability for banks to make quick lending decisions based on real-time insights, small businesses feel valued, and long paper-based vetting processes are avoided.

Codat are one of the fastest growing companies in the UK right now, having landed on a problem that many businesses come up against. They're scaling fast and are now expanding their proposition to the US.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Credit Kudos is an FCA-authorised credit bureau that uses financial behaviour to measure creditworthiness.

They aim to provide lenders, brokers and financial institutions with a highly accurate and transparent scoring system based on consumer consented data, providing a fairer representation of an individual’s creditworthiness. Credit Kudos’ solution enables lenders to make better decisions, whilst simultaneously helping previously overlooked individuals access credit.

Credit Kudos goes beyond traditional scoring, providing a comprehensive view of a borrower’s creditworthiness. They transform complex sets of information in their easy-to-use, digital first tools to help everyone make better lending decisions.

Anne Glover

Chief Executive and Co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners

Credit Kudos is a challenger credit scoring platform, but is now finding considerable traction by integrating its open banking platform with lenders. These could be financial services companies that are all digital like Koodoo – or legacy providers like Admiral.

While it has only raised <$10m to date it counts among its angel investors some of the savviest fintech investors in Europe such as Tom Stafford at DST, and Christian Faes of LendInvest.

The original proposition was for Credit Kudos to use consumer transaction data to build highly accurate and transparent credit score-cards and affordability metrics. This makes credit decision-making possible for the ~8m previously “unbanked” as well as those with non-existent or “thin” credit files. But the AI technology upon which Credit Kudos is built can not only expand the market for lenders, it can improve scoring accuracy, which reduces default rates, and speeds up decision-making which benefits both sides.

The opportunities for Credit Kudos are enormous because increasing the underlying data set constantly improves insight. Once established in the UK it would make sense for Credit Kudos to embark on international expansion albeit country by country, since financial services remains one of the most fragmented and yet regulated industries world-wide.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Cutover has become a global leader in the new category of work orchestration and observability. Their platform currently has over 10,000 users around the world and is used by 14 global financial service companies. Cutover is also used by the telecommunications, pharmaceutical, insurance and energy industries.

Cutover optimises machine automation whilst safeguarding customer-facing operations. The platform allows for end to end planning, management and analysis of complex work activities as well as virtual team collaboration, which is a growing and increasingly important market.

The company recently raised £13.6m in its Series A round. The funding will support Cutover’s offering to solve some of the most important challenges for enterprises such as migrating to a hybrid cloud model, wider digital transformation, automating and evolving operational resilience practices and managing ongoing tech change without failures.

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.

Xav Kearney

CTO of Otta

Eigen Technologies uses its machine learning engine to helps banks and other businesses that need to extract information and insights from large and complex documents like contracts.

Most of their customers today are in the financial sector, but they are planning to move into other verticals like insurance and healthcare (both areas that deal with lengthy documentation full of important fine print).

They currently sell services to 25% of the world's biggest banks as well as professional services firms like Allen & Overy and Deloitte. Between their Series A in June 2018 and the Series B in November 2019, revenues grew 6x.

Eigen's system is unique because typically machine learning and training and AI requires hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of examples to “teach” a system before it can make decisions that you hope will mimic those of a human. Eigen requires a couple of examples, so this is their differentiator.

Anne Glover

Chief Executive and Co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners

Eigen’s founder Lewis Liu has pushed the boundaries of AI by using his understanding of the physics of lasers. It is exactly the convergence of such diverse fields as physics and data science that can yield the potential to take a leap forward in applications rather than simply incremental progress.

His business acumen has helped him to focus on high value applications in the financial and legal domains. The key advantage of the Eigen approach is to be able to train Natural Language Processing techniques on very small data sets, which enables NLP to be used in high value, low volume niche applications.

In September Eigen Technologies was named in CB insights Fintech 250 list of fastest-growing fintech start-ups. Later, in November 2020 the FT named Lewis LIu as one of the six top change-makers of 2020, and Eigen Technologies itself won the FT Intelligent Business Award for financial Services for its work with ING on the LIBOR transition. We are only seeing the tip of what this innovation iceberg could enable.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

It's now being recognised that women's health has been underinvested in for too long. That is changing, with the Femtech market (including fertility apps, maternal health and sexual wellbeing products) projected to be worth $50bn by 2025 (according to research by Frost & Sullivan).

Elvie are one of the only companies out there dedicating world class industrial engineering resources to making great products for women.

They've made great hires, and the team is full of super experienced people with varied backgrounds (Dyson, Bosch, McKinsey, PepsiCo, Pernod Ricard).

Gerard Grech

CEO of Tech Nation

Women’s issues have traditionally been shied away from in the male-dominated tech industry, but the global women’s health market is expected to be worth $51.3 billion by 2025. Elvie has worked hard to break taboos, creating women’s health hardware products. Founded in 2013, and led by Tania Boler, an internationally recognized women’s health expert, Elvie has started a much-needed conversation around women’s health issues, challenging everyday stigma experienced by women.

This work couldn’t be more important as technology becomes increasingly integrated into all parts of our everyday lives. In April 2019, Elvie announced its third private financing, a $42 million Series B led by IPGL to support the release of additional women’s health products. Their long-term plan is to develop products to support women at every stage of life.

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.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

Fidel is tackling the obstacles to accessing customer payment data, making it easier for developers to create smart solutions customers love, without the burden of complex integrations, cost or compliance.

They have developed a suite of APIs that make it easy to link a user's payment card to an app and securely access real-time transactional data through a single access point. A key application is loyalty programs, where users can sign up, earn points rewards and cash back when using their registered card.

By partnering with Mastercard, Visa and Amex card-linking is possible for the majority of customers, opening up a mass of opportunities in a variety of different industries.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Form3 provides a complete end-to-end Payments-as-a-Service for financial institutions and regulated fintechs. Its software enables businesses to offer direct payment services via a simple interface- modernising their payments technology to make it more reliable and secure.

In the modern day, people expect their user experience with financial transactions to be fast and secure. Modern businesses require money to be transmitted instantly, securely and with the promise of being available worldwide in real-time. Form3 has capitalised on this modern demand, offering a comprehensive but straightforward service which gives customers greater control of their payments.

The company recently raised an additional £26m, with investment from traditional banks like Lloyds and Nationwide. The funding will be used to strengthen Form3's cloud-native payment technology, build significant functional enhancements and accelerate its global expansion plans.

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.

Theo Margolius

COO of Otta

Renting is a frustrating experience for many, and there are a number of startups in the space that are trying to improve it, but most others are trying to replace the letting agent.

Goodlord is not trying to disrupt traditional letting agents, but their product aims to make the letting journey smoother for the property owner, letting agent and the tenant.

When you have a product that is helping everyone in the value chain it makes the sell easier and should enable them to scale. The company recently raised a £10m Series B, which is powering growth across their engineering, product and customer facing teams.

Saul Klein

Co-founder and Partner at LocalGlobe

Goodlord is building the software platform that streamlines the rental process for agents, landlords and tenants. Their product enables a smoother, paper-free lettings process and facilitates easy offer generation, fast contract creation, and referencing as well as easy signing and payments.

The traditional rental onboarding and transaction flow is a high complexity, high friction, low customer satisfaction process. This creates the opportunity for a single vertical software tool which offers transparency, control and efficiencies in time and cost, resulting in a new renting experience. Moving house is a valuable moment to own as renters rebuild their personal infrastructure, opening the opportunity for a number of additional services alongside managing the core rental transaction.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

The food space has seen significant disruption in the last few years, whether it's the rapid expansion of takeaway delivery (thanks to JustEat, Deliveroo and UberEats), online groceries (thanks to Ocado and AmazonFresh) or meal boxes (thanks to Gousto and HelloFresh).

Consumer tastes are changing and there has been lots of innovation to try and get quality food in front of people more easily. Gousto is one of the drivers of that trend.

Gousto have made smart partnerships, notably with Joe Wicks 'the body coach', who has 2.6m instagram followers and very high engagement (Joe also invested in their latest investment round). On the technology side, they're seen as leading in machine learning and factory automation.

Gousto has seen a significant increase in orders since the outbreak of COVID-19, as people have increased their dependence on food delivery services. The company has recently secured £25m from existing investors Perwyn and BGF, which it will use to open three new customer fulfilment centres and create over 1,000 jobs.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

Harbr's platform enables companies to securely share data both internally and externally, across all data stakeholders – employees, customers, partners or suppliers. The platform enables businesses to convert any digital content into ready-to-use, monetizable products that are easily accessed through a custom-branded data exchange.

With over 15 years experience in data, co-founder Anthony Cosgrove founded Harbr from his belief that existing systems were too slow, too expensive and too risky. Typically, big data businesses generally lack the agility to package data in ways that make sense for each customer, a problem Harbr seeks to solve. Instead of just sending raw data, Harbr customers are able to leverage it to sell services, models or insights – which are far more useful to end users and customers.

Earlier this year Harbr opened offices in the US as it left stealth and publicly launched its platform. For now, the company is concentrating on large data vendors, helping them package and monetise the data they produce as a business more efficiently. Harbr has recently raised an impressive £30.8 million for their Series A – just six months after leaving stealth. The funds will be spent on R&D and team growth as the business scales.

Sia Houchangnia

Partner at Seedcamp

From the start, the founding team at Harbr have shown that they had the necessary background to transform how the largest companies in the world find, use, manage and monetise data. Led by serial entrepreneur Gary Butler & former Global Head of Intelligence Technology at HSBC Anthony Cosgrove, the team has shown exponential year-on-year growth.

Recently out of stealth mode, their unique enterprise data exchange platform is becoming adopted by an increasing number of Fortune 500 companies. With Snowflake’s recent IPO validating the market's need for better solutions across the data value chain, Harbr have built a truly differentiated product that enables their customers to collaborate freely with partners and customers in a secure manner. This places Harbr at the top of the list for companies aiming to become more proactive with their data.

With their recent Series A raise of $38.5m led by Dawn Capital & Tiger Global Management giving them the necessary fuel to accelerate their growth, 2021 provides the opportunity to continue to take this market by storm.

Sam Franklin

CEO of Otta

The market for virtual conferencing platforms is flourishing. In a time of increased consideration of sustainability and environmental impact, the event industry is being forced to adapt. Coronavirus has been a huge accelerant in shifting the event industry online, and has driven Hopin to be one of the fastest growing companies of all time.

Hopin is bringing something new to the table in order to reflect the same great benefits of offline events. They provide the tools to collaborate and network with larger groups, features that other video conferencing platforms might lack.

The demand is high, with a 10,000 strong wait list of event organisers and new investments they will continue to scale quickly to develop the platform and keep up with their growing customer base. They've hosted some huge events on the platform already (like TechCrunch Disrupt), and show no signs of slowing down.

Holly Bennett

Head of Ecosystem & Portfolio Development at Accel

Hopin has become one of the fastest-growing European startups ever, having grown from a team of 4 to over 200 employees and a £2billion+ valuation only nine months after launch. Its virtual events technology caught a tailwind when COVID-19 cancelled travel and in-person events all around the world.

After growing annual recurring revenue from $0 to $20 million in nine months and having reached more than 3.5million users, Hopin's Founder Johnny Boufarhat intends to continue to hire rapidly into 2021, allowing the business to double-down on investing in its product. In November of this year, off the back of this incredible growth, Hopin announced a $125m Series B led by IVP and Tiger Global, along with participation from earlier investors such as Accel and Seedcamp.

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.

Saul Klein

Co-founder and Partner at LocalGlobe

Impala is building the future rails of the hotel industry - a vast but architecturally archaic