David Richards MBE, founder of Yorkshire AI Labs, is unequivocal in his view of where the legal profession is heading – and intends to be at the forefront of the disruption.

Yorkshire AI Labs operates a sweat equity and cash model. Among the startups being incubated within it is Lexcelerate, a LegalTech which is targeting remortgages initially but has grander plans long-term.

LEXcelerate has been launched by Yorkshire AI Labs and aims to do for conveyancing what Uber did for taxis. Mark Hewitt, architect of the firm’s proprietary AI platform, has spent the last 30 years helping manufacturing, legal, insurance and property companies to transform their operations using tech.

“The starting point was a remortgage,” recalls Mark to ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud for Founder Friday. “The whole process, from start to finish, was atrocious: the lack of communication, the lack of interaction, and actually the mistakes that were made.

“So I decided that I would have a go – connecting to the land registry, allowing AI to read and understand and interpret documents such as a mortgage offer. And that started to work.”

Mark previously led legal software startup Rebmark from concept to more than ÂŁ1 million in annual recurring revenue before its acquisition by Verisk Analytics, a NASDAQ-listed data analytics group headquartered in New Jersey.

The software was subsequently expanded into the insurance sector and is now used to manage more than ÂŁ10 billion of catastrophic injury claims reserves.

“I had a lot of legal contacts and so I started to look at whether it could be a piece of software that could be packaged up,” says Mark. “But the reality was that wasn’t going to work – because you would have to throw away everything that a law firm currently does and start from scratch.”

Thinking bigger

He had known David, a multiple-exit entrepreneur, for more than 20 years. As founder of WANdisco, David had dual-headquartered the data firm in Sheffield and San Francisco but stepped down in 2023 after the actions of a rogue sales employee triggered a fraud scandal. The firm subsequently rebranded to Cirata plc.

“I knew him in passing – and from the pub! – and saw that he was back in Sheffield and launching Yorkshire AI Labs. I basically made it so that he couldn’t avoid me!” says Mark.

“Dave sent me off to speak to mortgage brokers, and also to have my idea sense-checked by Paul.”

This isn’t any old Paul from down the pub, but Paul Firth – a highly respected figure in British commercial property law who built DLA Piper into one of the world’s largest law firms and also served as UK regional managing partner at Irwin Mitchell for almost seven years.

“After those conversations, I told Dave that this didn’t work as a software play. He smiled and said: ‘I know – you need to think bigger. You have to ‘be’ the law firm.”

So rather than bolting software into a law firm, the idea is to replace the case management and practice management systems themselves, rewriting the whole process.

So starting with remortgages, an established law firm might have 20-25 stages, says Mark: “We’re past 150 steps, and a lot of them can be automated.

“So our starting point is to take the mortgage offer and effectively deconstruct it; then go to the land registry and get the title for property.

“The simplest check is: are the people that are listed on the mortgage offer the people that are listed as the owners of the property? 99.9% of the time that will be the case. But maybe they’ve got married since, leading to a difference in name; maybe there is a spelling mistake in the name; or an incorrect address or date of birth.

“Within about seven seconds of taking that mortgage offer we can highlight any issues that might come down the line; we can then go through the KYC (know-your-customer) and identity checks.

“The reality is that the computer is better at validating all this than a human is ever going to be.”

Lexcelerate’s target market is mortgage brokers who ordinarily suggest a law firm to their clients.

“If you ask a mortgage broker what their key issue is, it’s communication,” says Mark. “They are forever chasing up to find out where the law firm is in the process.”

Uber model

David draws a parallel with taxi disrupter Uber. “Minicabs existed – but what Uber did very cleverly was put it into an app; tell you exactly how much it was going to cost; exactly when it was going to arrive; and exactly where it was going to drop you off. All of it tracked.

“A˛Ôd what else did Uber do? They’re the biggest taxi company in the world without actually owning any taxis.”

He expands: “So Lexcelerate is a law firm – but in the same way that you can order an Uber, or sign up as an Uber driver, you can find a conveyancer, or register as one in under five minutes.

“We think we can become the world’s largest virtual law firm, in the same way that Uber is the largest virtual taxi firm.”

Of meeting Mark, he recalls: “Mark came in and he had the technology, but he didn’t have the customers. So we went out and signed up mortgage brokers straight away. What we then needed was the deep domain expertise.”

The Three Amigos

Enter Paul. “At DLA we had a troubled subsidiary called DLA Direct, that were basically doing remortgages for Halifax, Lloyds Bank and people like that, at scale,” Paul says. “It was losing money when I got involved; we turned it round and sold it, ultimately, to Capita for about £14 million.

“What I learned during that process was how much of remortgaging could be basically done by cutting the process down and breaking it up into the constituent parts. This was way before AI [as we know it], but even then we could find significant cost reductions and efficiency improvements on each job.

“That’s what first triggered my interest in this. And now, what Mark has produced is highly impressive.”

So impressive, in fact, that Paul agreed to lead Lexcelerate. “It’s ready to roll out, and we really do think we can change the market.”

Back to David, the computer scientist who envisions a sea-change of tsunami proportions across industries.

“In the same way that [large language model] Claude makes a software engineer 25 times more effective, we make lawyers 25 times more effective – which means that there are 25 times too many lawyers,” he says. “The disruption is going to be across the entire sphere – most of the tasks are going to be gone.

“But what this platform actually does is give lawyers a chance of surviving. It won’t be hard to find a lawyer that’s looking for work – starting now.”

Meet Sheffield founder unlocking healthy device habits for kids

Luddites

Referencing the Luddites who protested against the Industrial Revolution, he continues: “There’s going to be massive unemployment. People still live in cloud cuckoo land.”

Yorkshire AI Labs is also looking to build disrupters across orthodontics; journalism; advanced manufacturing; and football scouting.

The next step for Lexcelerate is to buy a law firm, says David. “We’re looking at two or three different opportunities. Given what we’re doing, we don’t need to buy something with 100 lawyers in it.

“We can buy something with zero lawyers, and we will be able to execute. It just needs to be a shell. It just needs the operating license.”

There will be rival startups with the same idea, he admits. “Our philosophy is that we’re not bothered about competition. This is a ÂŁ6 trillion global market – I’m okay with the 10% of that! A few hundred billion would be perfectly fine.”

Paul, who acquired tens of businesses at DLA Piper and loves deal-making, says: “What I like about this project is just seeing where we can take it.

“I’ve seen the legal business from the inside and, in many ways, it is very complacent. They think that the chargeable hour is here forever. Big commercial law firms are now charging ÂŁ1,200 an hour for a partner.

“Why would you want to pay that when you can do it for a fraction of the price and get a better service?”

He adds: “This will scale far quicker than DLA, where we were acquiring law firms, trying to integrate cultures from different countries and having to deal with all the regulatory side of international business.”

The shining Dymond at heart of Sheffield’s tech ecosystem

The post Could world’s largest virtual law firm be created in Sheffield? appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

Olivia was nine months pregnant at the time of filming and the relevance to their startup Cubbi, a discount platform for new and expecting parents, was clear.

“We’d already built our community up to about 10,000 users when the BBC got in touch,” Olivia tells me in Digbeth, Birmingham for Founder Friday. “I was inundated with emails and I thought it was spam so I just ignored it!

“They sent four emails before I was like, okay, let’s take this seriously. And from then, it moved really quickly.”

Tanyka adds: “When they found out she was pregnant, they were like: Okay, we need to get you in before you give birth!”

After receiving offers from Deborah Meaden and guest Dragon Susie Ma, they opted for the latter – and when the investment came through from the Tropic Skincare founder, they put it to good use. But more on that later.

Third time lucky

Cubbi, which is now looking to raise a further ÂŁ350,000 in seed funding – with ÂŁ100k already committed – almost never happened.

Olivia had built a career as a project manager at Rolls Royce, Deliveroo, McLaren Automotive and Amazon – the latter for more than five years – while Tanyka’s path had taken her through PR agency Weber Shandwick, policy roles with the UK Civil Service then senior manager, public affairs at the British ŔĎžĹơ˛č Bank.

“We always came up with ideas,” Tanyka recounts. “We had a couple of business ideas in our twenties and we’d always get to the stage of writing a business plan.”

Olivia continues: “The first was an underwear company; then we looked at a subscription box allowing people to try black hair products. We were so passionate about these ideas – but just didn’t do them because we weren’t sure we were the right people to deliver them. And then we saw people come along and deliver our exact vision.

“So when we had this idea, we were like: yes, ‘go time’. We have to be the ones to deliver it.”

Superpower

At the British ŔĎžĹơ˛č Bank, Tanyka witnesses founders first-hand – and realisation dawned. “I always thought people that founded businesses and raised money had a crazy skill set that I would never have: they’d all be Oxford grads and have lots of money behind them. 

“At the bank, I was exposed to people just figuring it out and doing it. I was like: okay, they’re just normal people! They were telling me about the difficulties they’d been through, and how they were able to come out the other side. 

“That’s when I got the bug again to start something – then Olivia had her great idea.”

Olivia had recently given birth to her first child. “Honestly, it unlocked a superpower that I’ve never known,” she says. “I used to be so worried about perception and what people thought.

“It just disappeared because motherhood is the hardest thing I’ve done in my life and so I realised I could now do absolutely anything. That was the most life-changing thing that enabled me to start on this path.”

The passion of this super-positive pitcher in the Den was ignited from a difficult place experienced by many new parents.

“I found it really scary,” Olivia says of motherhood. “Before, I would take trips down to London to visit my friends when I wanted to; on a whim, I would go shopping for a pair of new jeans; I could just book a holiday. I’d built this incredible career, and I had great financial stability.

“There was suddenly a question mark around those things. I now had this little baby who needed me, and I couldn’t just be Olivia in the same way that I was before. And that was compounded by the fact that my salary was going down and down. 

“I’d been through a physical trauma in childbirth; I’d had the emotional challenges of adapting to motherhood; and then the financial thing was just an extra thing thrown in. 

“I just felt like new parents deserve so much more. What we’re building here is really to try and lighten that load and make parents feel seen – remind them that they deserve a coffee, or a new pair of jeans if their jeans don’t fit anymore. And they shouldn’t feel guilty about it.”

Tanyka adds: “Students get discounts, and everyone agrees with that because students don’t have a lot of money. UNiDAYS generated tens of millions in revenue last year. So did Blue Light Card.

“We are doing the exact same thing, just for a different audience that we know spends more.”

The reference to Blue Light Card, a discount platform for frontline workers – including the emergency services, NHS, social care, teachers, armed forces and veterans – is especially pertinent after Alex Dalby, its former head of strategic partnerships, recently joined as an investor and strategic adviser. Dalby’s brother Tom founded the firm with Steve Denny.

Founder life

Both sisters had realised that they didn’t want to spend their working lives in a corporate environment.

“I worked in jobs I enjoyed, but I never really had that passion which woke me up in the night with an idea,” says Olivia. “This has given me that passion. I designed our logo in the early hours during a night feed!”

Is it the same logo in use today? “It’s developed over time. It’s much more polished now!” laughs Tanyka.

After coming up with the idea in summer 2023, Tanyka built the first iteration of the app using a no-code platform. Launched in February 2024, they saw 5,000 downloads come through in the first month and used a startup loan to hire a software freelancer to take it from “super simple and scrappy” to something polished and able to withstand heavy traffic.

Dragons’ Den

Enter the Den.

“You see people who get really combative when the Dragons question their business,” says Olivia. “So we went in with a positive mindset.

“It’s your baby; but at the end of the day, you need to recognise that not everyone will understand you. So although we had a bit of back and forth with Touker [Suleyman], it was a positive exchange. It was all super light hearted.”

She continues: “Touker didn’t get it. He suggested we should just focus on offers for baby stuff, whereas the business that we’re building is for people who may have gone from being super independent to a new world where something is thrown in the mix… it can be jarring.”

The three male judges turned down their offer of 10% stake of the business for ÂŁ50,000, but Meaden offered the money for 20%.

However Susie, making her debut, is a new mum herself – and agreed to stump up the full amount for 10%. The Tropic Skincare founder first found fame on The Apprentice but has grown turnover to $100m.

“We tried to go in with quite a reasonable offer because we didn’t want to be one of those businesses where the whole episode is focused on discussing our valuation,” says Tanyka. 

“We also went in there with the attitude of ‘this is a really good opportunity to learn’. We hadn’t pitched a huge amount before that and knew we were never going to sit in front of a Peter Jones, Touker Suleyman or Steven Bartlett again.

“It was a really good opportunity for us to get immediate feedback and understand the kind of questions we might be asked.”

The pitch lasted for two hours. “On the actual day, we got into some really deep discussions which weren’t shown. They were probably boring for viewers!” reveals Tanyka.

“We had a really long conversation with Steven about marketing strategies and the funnel. It was a really good, constructive conversation that gave us a lot to take away.”

What was the most difficult question they were asked, I wonder?

“Steven asked us why we decided to launch with an app rather than a web platform, which was fair,” answers Olivia.

“But from our perspective, we had our eyes on building a companion for parents and being accessible – so being able to share push notifications about new brands and engage with them to stay relevant. It’s much more sticky.

“But it was an interesting conversation and we do now have a web platform too.”

On the Ma-ney

Once Susie’s investment came through, they used the money to work with a development agency and build a truly scalable platform.

“It had to be solid for the increased traffic we were going to see when the episode aired,” says Tanyka.

“Also before, we were approving every single user by hand. One some days we would have like 1,000 approvals to do!

“So we invested in automation which does about 90% of our approvals now. That has been incredible for us and also a great user experience because users can get approved in two minutes, whereas before they might have to wait 24 hours.”

The sisters say Susie has “just been incredible in general”. “She’s been really generous with her time,” says Tanyka. 

“Her office is about half an hour from where I live, so we’ve been able to go and have meetings with her there. She’s let us use her studio in her office, and lent us her graphic designer.”

Olivia adds: “She sent me a gift when I had my son, which was lovely.”

They are now bringing forward on the roadmap a planned expansion to parents of older children. 

“Lots of parents struggle with things like nursery fees, for example,” says Tanyka.

Vision

The user base is now in the tens of thousands with 300 brand partners. With the momentum from the Den, the sisters are aiming to reach over 100,000 users and 500 brands by the end of the year.

Olivia concludes: “We have this incredible vision which goes far beyond discount to deliver meaningful support for new parents.

“We are led by our users. We take their feedback and bolt on the features they want. We’ve been building the car while driving it! And I think the expansion to older children is a perfect example of that.

“When we launched, I contacted nearly 1,000 brands and we got 30 to say, yeah, we’ll join you. Now I’m barely doing any outreach because we’re getting so much inbound. 

“The tables have turned. And it’s really exciting.”

Less than a week to enter Founder 250 list

The post Inside Cubbi sisters’ Dragons’ Den pitch after Susie Ma backing appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

In a recent chat with Uptic co-founder Paul Bates in Leeds, the kickboxing black belt revealed that he and brother used to fight in competitions in Bacup – the small Lancashire town where I live – as kids.

Paul and his co-founders in the Netherlands and Chicago are now building their fast-growing consultancy across the globe. A lot has happened between those distant trips to the Rossendale Valley and executing contracts with the likes of Telefonica.

“I moved to Leeds in 1999 when the whole ISP (internet service provider) thing was kicking off,” says Paul, who had earned a computational science degree in Manchester. “I decided that I didn’t want to be a techie, so I moved into sales.”

He worked for several IT resellers and managed service providers (MSPs) before spending six years at B2net. After that firm was acquired for ÂŁ12 million by Swedish giant Proact IT Group, he spent another six there, latterly as a vice president running its cloud business.

During a 12-month stint working from the UK for a California AI startup – subsequently acquired by tech giant HPE – he realised that “I just wanted to work for myself”. 

He and former colleagues at Proact decided to set up an MSP – but that business quickly transformed. 

“The key differentiators were that we were going to be more application centric, selling to developers rather than selling to infrastructure guys. We didn’t want to be like the ANSs of this world,” he explains.

“Within about three months, we realised the opportunity was in the automation we could do, so we flipped what we did – and we ended up then selling to service providers.

“We began working with companies like Telefonica and Softcat. A few years ago I would have viewed them as competitors, but they are now key partners.”

Three-pronged attack

He continues: “There are three key things that we do. The first one is we develop: my cheesy tagline is ‘we do everything from UI to AI’.

“The second part of the business is platform engineering: we deploy cloud environments for the applications that we’re building. By modernising development processes, we allow developers to focus on their code while we take care of everything else underneath. 

“The final bit is managed services: we provide application support on an ongoing basis for clients.”

One of his roles at Proact saw him transition the European sales team from systems sales to annuity revenue – and that is where this latter service comes in.

“We’re trying to take the development world and merge it into the managed service world: that means we’re creating annuity revenue with the contracts that we have,” says Paul.

“So a lot of development you can do with 6-, 12-, 18-month projects – and at the end of that it’s gone, you hand it over. [In contrast] by providing ongoing support, it means we’ve got more longevity in our contracts.

“It means the business is worth more, but it also means you can offer customers a much better quality of service.”

The business, set up during COVID, employs 24 people split between the UK and Netherlands. Paul says around 30% of its revenue comes from the US and 20% from the Netherlands, with the remaining 50% from the UK.

A different model

Paul explains how the ongoing support works in practice. “We build a little product team for customers. What most people do, if they’re building quite a large application, is to have eight, nine, 10 guys working on a project. They’re never busy all the time. 

“Our concept is you only need three or four people – who those three or four people are varies at different points in the project. You might need a front-end developer early on as well as a back-end; eight months down the line, you might need to make some changes to the front end so we bring that developer back in. 

“Because we have our own staff – and it’s always our own staff, not contractors – we can move those people around.

“It’s a different model – flexible, fractional development services, with the platform stuff underneath. If we can do it faster, at higher quality and cheaper, that’s where customers really buy into it.

“They have a single cost for us to take care of that entire stack for them, and then we can provide managed services on the back of that.”

AI

The development world is also being turned on its head by AI, with tools such as Claude capable of coding entire applications via user prompts.

“You still need people,” says Paul. “But AI is making developers more efficient – they have to embrace the change in the market and use these tools.

“AI to us can mean lots of different things. I don’t think a lot of people really know what it is! 

“We could be integrating a common platform just to summarise text – that for us isn’t AI, it’s an integration point. We’ve come from automation and a lot of people still refer to automation as AI, but it isn’t.

“At the more extreme end, we build smaller language models with very, very specific use cases. We can build out a completely private AI platform, or use an open source tech stack, that means they know exactly where the data is and what has been trained.

“Our clients’ customers can guarantee that their data doesn’t leave the confines of that application, so it’s not on a public model, which is becoming really important. 

“We’re seeing a big shift towards people looking at AI for smaller, specific use cases, rather than using one of the bigger platforms.”

Why ‘unique’ HealthTech is at cutting edge of mental health support

People-centric

Another way of ensuring that customers are looked after lies closer to home.

“We take a little bit of [Richard] Branson’s philosophy: look after your staff first, and they’ll then look after your customers. When we launched Uptic we wanted to build something fun, interesting and delivering high quality – but also something that was good for the staff. 

After the whole world of COVID, people are now being forced back into the office three, four or five days a week. And a lot of developers don’t want to do that. 

“We’re happy to let the guys not only work from home, but work the hours that they want. As long as they are available for customer calls, and on stand-up calls, what does it matter if they prefer to work at 2am?

“One guy couldn’t believe it when he joined us and learned that he could pick up his kids from school every day!”

Uptic has performed work on behalf of Telefonica at Gatwick Airport, while a very different type of client is legal AI company Cloud Contracts 365. It also has a customer in the US, Ray Allen, which writes IT asset management software for the likes of Cisco and IBM. “We’re modernising their legacy applications,” says Paul.

Growth phase

Completely bootstrapped, profitable and secure, Uptic is now entering a growth phase. Currently at ÂŁ2m revenue, Paul expects to double that this year.

“We’re probably moving up a tier in terms of the size of our customers,” he says. “So before, a ÂŁ50k deal would have seen us all running around high fiving; that’s quite a small contract now for us. We’re also looking at more longer-term contracts.

“We’re taking some educated risk to grow the business and really embrace AI, not only internally to improve our capability and make us more efficient, but to help customers with that as well.”

Paul is an experienced snowboarder as well as a kickboxer, but is trying out new disciplines.

“I’m learning to ski because I’m conscious that in 20 years time, I probably won’t be snowboarding,” he says. “I’m like Zoolander on skis at the minute! I can turn one way, and I can’t really turn the other way.

“I’m also learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu after getting into that with my lad [who’s now 13]. He wanted to be a Ninja Turtle and got his black belt a couple of years ago. You get a lot of techies doing Jiu Jitsu as it’s very formulaic.

“I’m a white belt! But being able to go and punch some things is quite a nice way to relax.”

‘I’ll build a £100m company my way and without alcohol’

The post Meet black belt taking Leeds software house global appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

By the time we meet at Hyde Park for a ‘run and talk’, the rain is coming down under heavy grey skies. Ernesto may have grown up in the Miami heat – but it would take a great deal more than the UK’s changeable spring weather to dampen his enthusiasm.

“I love seeing everyone having an impact on my business,” the Gigasure founder and CEO tells me later in our run. “A˛Ôd they need to know it, too.

“Everybody’s got to be aligned in the startup phase to exceed the targets, to deliver on the promise. That’s the best part of building a business: the period where you get excited for someone coming to a meeting and delivering to you what a web page is going to look like; what the product can do; or what the technology can solve. 

“It’s all so exciting. It’s kind of like a dopamine hit – just like running.”

Ernesto should know: he is the only Salvadoran to run all seven Abbott World Marathon Majors. “I think really good while I’m having a run – it takes me out [of the business] and I create a lot of empathy in my thinking,” he explains.

“It’s something the industry has only just started to talk about, but I’ve always been a very empathetic leader in my businesses. I look after my teams; I have to personally enjoy who I work with; and they need to know that. 

“But I also love it when my team is built of people that are smarter than I am at their field, because I lean on them.”

Competitive advantage

Born in Paris with business studies in Boston and Barcelona behind him, Ernesto started out working on Wall Street. “I wasn’t actually looking for a job in insurance – it just happened. I joined AIG and spent the first 10 years of my true financial services career there.

“That’s where I picked up a lot of my insurance know-how and accreditations. It was a necessary period for me to also learn the industry.”

Settling in London, where he grew AIG’s personal lines division from scratch, he says he was always looking for an opportunity to build something. The experience with AIG was a competitive advantage in starting his own ventures, starting with Halo Insurance Services, as he understood both sides of the value chain.

“When you start your own business for the first time, you’re also learning how to raise capital; who to partner with; how to build your team,” he says. “At AIG I was already managing a large team, so I had the confidence that I could build one at a startup. I felt like I was on top of everything as we built Halo.

“The traits you learn in a corporate are very critical, I think, when you start a business: it also brings that discipline of going to work, of doing reports, generating insight and understanding, and being accountable.”

His previous experience was also key to convincing investors to back the firm with patient capital.

“Investors don’t really home in 100% on your idea; they really home in on the person presenting that idea – whether you have the credentials, the trust. It’s like going to an interview.

“But nothing can be done with my businesses if I don’t surround myself with a good team, because insurance is full of specialists, and you need them to guide you through the risk: underwriting risk, product risk. 

“If you don’t have a good idea how insurance works, you could end up just providing fallacies of what you’re going to deliver.”

Timing & luck

Halo sold car hire excess insurance which customers understood and at a price point 60% under the prevailing price point.

“Our product became a consumer champion story very easily,” he says. “All the papers would write about people being fleeced and the predominance of fear tactics… and here was the antidote. It was perfect timing.”

Somewhat modestly he says luck, as well as timing, is hugely important to succeed as an entrepreneur.

“I’m getting that same good luck again with Gigasure. But the whole point is reading the room: if you’re good at that, that can transfer into your new venture.”

Having sold Halo to Zurich Insurance Group in 2017, it would become part of the Cover-More group portfolio, with Ernesto appointed UK manager for the latter during his earnout period. By 2023, he was ready to target travel insurance with Gigasure.

“It’s a bit of a continuation of my first business,” he says. “We were thinking of doing travel at Halo, but we never got to do it because we were so busy with the exit purchase; we then tried to get Cover-More to support us, but that wouldn’t fly either.

“I then saw COVID wipe out three-quarters of the travel propositions in the insurance market: it went down from more than 1,200 to about 430. So I knew that when the market picked up again, we would be dealing with less competitors.”

Still speaking easily as we begin the next mile of our run, he continues: “We’d had a very successful exit with Halo and made people a lot of money – but this time I wanted to avoid complicated sources like VC and go private.

“I tapped the people I know in my network. They all supported me. And now I have all my funding through private angels.”

Gigasure

Gigasure, a star of our InsurTech 50 ranking, is redefining how insurance is delivered into the travel industry. Through an app, it provides flexible, customisable, upgradable policies, as well as real-time parametric benefits – a type of insurance that covers the probability of a loss-causing event happening – through GigaShield. Users can access instant payouts for flight and baggage delays.

“My target market was Gen-Zers and Millennials,” says Ernesto. “We decided to build a hero app to support all the self-service needs to manage your policy; and on top of that, make the product more modern and engaging.”

His approach is to partner with companies such as Blink (parametric insurance) and Miss Moneypenny (digital wallet cards). By collaborating with others in the InsurTech ecosystem, Gigasure’s proposition is better than that of everybody else, he says.

“Building a brand was something that I didn’t have a great time doing in my first business, because it was mostly built from search and PPC. 

“With this one, we needed a brand identity to establish ourselves as a product in the market that could trade through aggregators.”

Gigasure

Gigasure has around 10 staff and there are several nationalities within the business. Rather than spending crucial money on recruitment agencies, he has reached out to former contacts with specific insurance experience to build a highly productive team.

“A˛Ô entrepreneurial journey is very personal, and you don’t want to mix those personal goals with what the business needs operationally,” he acknowledges.

“For me personally, I want to continue testing new technologies into insurance to see what’s possible. But you want to keep it practical.

“With AI, for example, some people are on the bandwagon; some are not; and I’m somewhere in between. We’re a distribution business, and there’s nothing better in insurance than building relationships – so people are still key.

“With AI, while you’re a startup, you don’t have to prove yourself; whereas if you’re Direct Line and you’ve got millions and millions of policyholders, it could do something more impactful.”

Before leaving the cold behind in favour of a warm Notting Hill cafe, Ernesto tells me he is planning to run the New York City Marathon with his son this year. What time does he expect this 22-year-old to set, I ask?

“Under three hours: I hope to spend some time with him in the pen before the start because I won’t see him after that!”

The post Serial founder: Building a startup is a dopamine hit appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

Yet judging by his smile as he pours out a cuppa in the cool environs of a Somerset House cafe, he doesn’t mind one bit.

After sharing anecdotes on all sorts of subjects – among them delayed trains (my defence) – we soon find ourselves discussing technology and AI.

“My whole professional life has really been about driving change through innovation,” he tells me for Founder Friday. “I’ve launched 21 different technologies over the years.”

Martin’s previous business worked closely with Microsoft to develop technologies and make them commercially viable. As a partner to the tech giant, his credits included the launch of cloud computing platform Azure in the UK and also database management system SQL Server.

“It was a very unusual business model: we would then work with Microsoft to perpetuate the [commercially viable] model to other partners,” he explains. “That gave us a steal on the market, and we grew as the technologies grew.”

ICS.AI launch

In fact, it was the development of pre-built AI tools within Azure that persuaded him to launch ICS.AI in 2018. “When I saw the Azure Cognitive Services (now Azure AI Services) it was obvious to me that the entire growth of AI was inevitable,” says the entrepreneur, whose passion for the technology is clear.

“They reduced the price of AI from millions [of dollars] to a few cents per transaction, solving that core problem of how you price it.”

Taking staff across from the previous business – which he wound down – ICS.AI employed 14 people on day one but has been profitable from the start. Although remote-first, it has offices in Leamington Spa and Basingstoke, and will soon be opening bases in Wales and Scotland. 

ICS.AI’s focus has been delivering transformative unified AI platforms for the public sector.

“If your mission is changing the world, then why not start with organisations which help people?” he asks. “Less altruistically, there is also a high degree of replicability in those sectors. 

“They’re far more open to sharing what they do with other people, and they have challenges that AI fits into well: they have to engage at population level.”

GenAI pivot

In the early years the business grew every year, building products with the previous generation of AI technology – natural language processing and cognitive services.

However with the launch of generative AI such as ChatGPT in 2022, Martin did not hesitate in pivoting wholesale to adopt the new tech.

“I didn’t expect to see technology like that in my lifetime. All of a sudden, there it was,” he says. “It was like: where the hell did that come from?

“We totally pivoted the business. We basically retired all of the products that we had developed. We retrained the whole staff. We stopped selling our old technologies and focused on the new ones.

“Whilst being brave and expensive, it allowed us to make the most of GenAI way quicker than anybody else has.”

Derby City Council

The first beneficiary of this powerful new tech from ICS.AI was Derby City Council. As reported on the front pages of the Derby Telegraph, it saved the council from bankruptcy.

“They had to make savings of at least £10m a year from AI or they would go bust,” says Martin. “We spent a half-day session with Paul Simpson, the CEO. I told him they could completely change how the council worked with this tech.

“We had 40 workshops with different groups of people around the council and spent, collectively, 1,600 man hours pulling apart everything that they did, and how they did it. 

“We worked out which of them were candidates for AI – there were 262 – then went through them with Derby, costing them, modelling them, and working out the ones that could create in-year savings (i.e. save money that same year).

“We identified 54 candidates for that and set up a programme team. There were nine streams of work all running simultaneously – and social care was a big part of it.”

Because the council couldn’t recruit social staff, they didn’t have enough people to complete the finance assessments. “If a social worker has to make a choice between going and helping someone and sitting down and working out how much they’ve got to pay, they’re going to choose the help option,” explains Neale. 

“They were doing no assessments. 60-70% of all social care delivered is co-funded or fully-funded by the people that are receiving it; but not in Derby. 

“So that was literally ÂŁ4-5m just walking out the door because they didn’t have the resources.”

THIS co-founders launch utterly different business in Keith

ICS.AI saved the council £12m in savings in the first year, processing 1.4m phone enquiries with a 56% deflection rate, and halving customer waiting times. 

“GenAI doesn’t have any intents,” says Martin, referencing the closed options which callers were diverted to by the old technology. “It doesn’t have any prefixed answers – it just has context. 

“How it answers depends upon what you say and how you say it. It’s always contextually relevant.”

SMART model

Martin says the UK public sector is no longer able to afford piecemeal acts of digital innovation. His model – known as SMART: AI Transformation Programme – is now helping more than 20 councils move from disconnected pilots to enterprise-wide AI adoption, covering resident services, staff support and agentic back-office operations. ICS.AI is also working with universities.

“The market is littered with failed pilots,” he says. “Leadership teams are stuck in ‘AI tourism’, running small experiments that never scale. 

“We have productised the entire transformation journey. The return on investment is provable and guaranteed. Sovereign AI is the only viable and sustainable path for UK public reform. We are taking the risk out of adoption so our partners can focus on the reward.”

ISC.AI has tech teams focused on voice, email, web and the central ‘engine’. Always with an eye on the future, Martin is putting a team together around physical AI – robots and smart glasses – and is set to turn over ÂŁ12m this year.

Not bad for a bootstrapped business launched after Martin cashed in his pension at the age of 55.

“We grew 120% this year, 100% last year, and are targeted to do that again in the coming year. We are profitable enough to fund our growth organically,” he says.

“I feel happier now than I ever have in my professional life because of the positive change AI can bring. It’s in the application of the technology: by making it viable and useful, creating a return for someone, it solves problems – and that’s what I like doing.”

Diggers

It’s not the only thing he likes doing.

“I renovate diggers!” he laughs. “I’m never happier than when I’m doing a digger job. It just makes me the happiest man in the world. 

“I’m not very good on the digger. I’ve been over on it three times!”

Is that not dangerous, I ask? “The trick to not dying in a digger that falls over is: don’t get try and get out of it! As it goes over, just hold on.”

Meet Sheffield founder unlocking healthy device habits for kids

The post ‘Why I cashed in my pension at 55 to launch an AI business’ appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

Sam, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, had moved to the UK the previous year. He told me about his Instagram addiction and plans to tackle it with startup Applatch, which locked down certain apps on your phone when you needed to focus.

Fast-forward three years and Applatch, now , is a very different business.

“It was a free app and we had 43,000 users,” he tells me over coffee in our Founder Friday interview in Sheffield. “I asked a couple of my friends if they would be willing to pay for it, and they said ‘no’ – because they felt they had enough self-control [to manage their social media activity themselves].

“But they said they would pay for something which controlled the apps their children use.”

A dad himself, he also saw the value in that proposition. “After speaking with many more parents as well as children – in order to further understand the problem – I saw the gap,” he says.

“I realised that there’s a bigger problem here with the children: they actually can’t control when to stop using entertainment apps and focus on study.”

Sam, a former teacher, continues: “Sometimes, if you’re talking to maybe a seven-year-old and trying to teach them something, after two minutes they’re just looking around bored.

“Excessive entertainment screen time starts to build a low attention span. So when they’re in class they can’t focus on the teacher for long enough to understand what they are learning.”

Simply locking down these entertainment apps is not enough, the founder explains. “When they install a parental control app, the parent is hoping that by locking down Roblox, Minecraft, Netflix and the rest, the child will instead click on an educational app.

“But that is not the case. They just leave [the device].”

Screen time

Sam says that people mistake general screen time for the enemy, when in fact it is entertainment screen time. “If a child is learning on a tablet, that is educational screen time, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Everything is digitalised now.

“My realisation was that there is no motivation for a child to go to the educational apps on their device as children naturally want to have fun, not learn.”

Applatch Kids, which is built for children aged 3-11 – and available on both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store – counters this by rewarding educational app achievement with entertainment.

Applatch Kids

For example Sam’s daughter, who turns six this year, is granted an hour’s ‘play’ for every quiz she passes in each STEM discipline of English, maths and science. Parents can set this reward as low as 15 minutes, if they wish.

“We’re tackling the root cause of the problem, which is the learning behaviour: if a child builds up the habit of studying before they play, that will stay with them for the rest of their life.”

Indeed Applatch Kids, which was fourth on our recent EdTech 50 ranking, has the tagline: ‘Learn before play’.

With countries including Australia banning social media for under-16s – and the UK launching a public consultation on this – Sam has deliberately focused his business on infant and primary school children. 

“Social media is not a problem at age five; it’s games and platforms like Disney, YouTube and Netflix,” he explains.

“But no government is ever going to ban primary school children from playing games.”

A baseline assessment decides the level of challenge to set a child in the early stages. It then adapts through machine learning to ensure they progress as far academically as possible.

Applatch Kids is being used by 7,000 families at present – purely organic word-of-mouth growth – ahead of a full launch in April.

Africa

Sam seems so at home in Sheffield that it is easy to forget he spent the first 30 years of his life in Africa. Indeed Applatch Kids employs staff in Nigeria as well as the UK, with four full-time and another six on a contractual basis.

He moved to Yorkshire with his wife, who was studying an MBA at Sheffield Hallam University, but there was more to his decision to set up the business there.

“When I did my research, I found that outside of London, Sheffield is actually the UK city that supports startup founders the most,” he tells me. ”So I think this is the perfect city.”

The shining Dymond at heart of Sheffield’s tech ecosystem

A technologist who studied computer science at university, he regrets choosing to play games himself at a young age.

“I got my first computer at the age of 10, but guess what? I was just playing Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed.

“A friend also got a personal desktop computer at that age – but his dad taught him how to design flyers and he was making money straight away, designing flyers for small businesses!

“Right after secondary school, I studied how to repair computers, but the previous seven years I just wasted playing games. I didn’t learn anything.

“If a child has access to a computing device at an early age, why not show them how to use it to learn something brilliant, or improve generally in their educational performance?”

Label

Applatch isn’t his first rodeo: after university, Sam started a clothing fashion business as everyone in Lagos was wearing American brands.

He pivoted to B2B after realising he could generate more profit in one order than in 200 individual retail sales. The family business is now run by his mother.

After joining a digital marketing agency to learn how to build the brand, he enjoyed the work so much – running viral campaigns for brands like Pepsi, Intel and HP – that he decided to keep doing that.

“That’s how I got addicted to Instagram!” he laughs.

Now with Applatch Kids, he has an ambitious and laudable goal.

“In the UK right now, there are more than a million young people aged 16-24 who are NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and disengaged from the education and workforce system,” he says.

“If we can train kids, when they are young, to learn every day, they will move that habit into secondary school. 

“So when they own a smartphone, they will manage that effectively – and do well in their GCSEs and beyond.”

‘Pinch me!’: Founders celebrate Leeds Tech Map launch

The post Meet Sheffield founder unlocking healthy device habits for kids appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

A revision app for students founded by Dr James Gupta and Dr Omair Vaiyani – who had recently graduated from Leeds Medical School – it was already being talked about in regional tech circles.

Fast-forward eight years and the business is going strong – although it looks very different from that early-stage startup.

When I catch up with James in Bruntwood SciTech’s Platform building, next door to Leeds train station, my first question is: was there a pivot?

“We’ve pivoted a couple of times, but we’ve kept the same core idea of bite-sized studying with multiple choice questions,” he tells me.

“We started off as a revision app for students. We used it, other students used it; but when we graduated, we realised how difficult it could be to get students to pay for educational products.

“At the same time, we were getting B2B institutional interest. So the first pivot was to sell this same product into institutions instead of to students. And that started working really well for us.”

Today the firm’s 300-strong customer base consists of a third universities; a third employers and regulated sectors; and  a third private EdTech and tutoring companies.

“Our last major pivot was moving from low-stakes to high-stakes exams,” James continues. “As well as the revision tools, we began doing the actual end-point assessments for students.

“We started dabbling with that just before COVID, which was interesting timing because suddenly everyone needed to be able to do remote exams and we had this beta product out. So we leaned quite hard into that – and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last five years.”

No panic

Synap does not generate the content itself, but rather provides the tools for clients to do so. The platform used by students for revision is the same as that which provides secure assessments for institutions, albeit through different modules.

“That’s an advantage for us because if, say, you’re a university and your students are using our low-stakes features like question banks and revision, there’s a natural progression when it comes to exam day. 

“They’re not panicking and asking: ‘What’s my login? Does this platform work on my laptop? Where do the buttons go? What are the shortcuts? 

“I think we can reduce exam day stress quite a bit, because they’re doing a high-stakes exam, but on a platform that they’re already familiar with.”

One such client is the University of Law. “We are used across all of their campuses. We build up a profile of the students – what their strengths and weaknesses are – and show that to them so they know where to practise. 

“We also show it to their tutors so that they know where additional training is needed.”

He adds: “When we started working with them, it was very cool to get a large institution saying; ‘We see something in your idea – we now want you to embed it across our organisation and work with us to design our curriculum around your platform.

“It was a really good confidence boost that someone saw what we saw in the business.”

EdTech 50

Synap, which featured in our 2026 EdTech 50 ranking announced this week, works with some American Ivy League institutions on their admissions exams and in-course assessments. It also has clients in Australia.

Synap – transforming the landscape of online exams and learning

James says the Leeds-headquartered firm, which has employed a ‘steady’ 14 people for the last couple of years, is still operated as an agile startup – but on a big assessment day, its scale gives him a ‘pinch me’ moment.

“When a client delivers 10,000 exams on the same day in a test centre, and it all goes smoothly, that’s because it’s like a military operation,” he says.

“You realise that all of the work that the team’s put into redundancy, scaling the infrastructure and handling technology – like when a student tries to sign on with a 30-year-old version of Windows or something – has paid off.

“We have genuinely built something that does what it says it can do, and is capable of doing that at scale.”

Synap team on a Zoom call

Entrepreneurship

James’ father is a GP while his mother is a nurse who went into management. I ask whether the original plan was to enter the medical profession himself.

“My exposure was to medicine, in a sense, but then also to small business – because GPs obviously work quite differently to hospital doctors,” he answers. “I worked in my dad’s practice for a couple of years before university and really enjoyed it.

“By the time we were looking to graduate, we drafted in my now-wife and my sister to help with Synap. Every day was different and exciting. Nothing could really compete with that. 

“So when we graduated, we decided to do this for two years and see what happened. If it failed, we would know that we had gotten it as far as we could and could go back into medicine. But it didn’t fail!

“I’m grateful every day just for how much fun this is. I couldn’t go back to doing medicine now. I’ve just become way too used to working for myself.

“There’s a saying about how ‘successful entrepreneurs often work 80 hours to avoid working 40 hours for someone else’. Every day is a little bit different, a little bit challenging, and can be stressful. 

“But even a stressful day here is still really fun.”

Rhythm

The CEO, a self-confessed night owl and music lover, says he really finds his rhythm in the evenings.

“I like EDM (electronic dance music), drum ‘n’ bass, things like that. I love Metallica [as well] but if I put techno on, it’s just instrumental and gives you a steady pulse to work along to,” he says.

“The reason people like that sort of music is because the beat is synced in with their electronic pulses. The 4/4 beat is our natural walking rhythm and our heartbeat. So your brain and your heart are doing the same thing. 

“Even if you just create an electronic identical pulse, your brain will still interpret it as a tick-tock pattern. It won’t hear tock, tock; it’ll hear tick-tock, tick-tock.

“It definitely helps with concentration.”

Synap has raised around ÂŁ700,000 to date from angel investors and Venturion, a Wakefield-based family office.

The firm is profitable and growing, James says, and not currently looking for institutional funding: “We do about £1.5 million a year in revenue at the moment, against £1.1m-1.2m in costs.”

AI

As for future plans, he says it is looking at AI – but will continue to develop tech in-house.

“How can AI be used by our customers to create content from existing materials? Can we use it to mark and grade assessments? How do we prevent students from using AI as part of their essays?” he asks speculatively.

“I’ve used it on proctoring a couple of times – remote invigilation of an exam – but that needs to be done in a GDPR-compliant way. How do we install software on someone’s computer that allows us access to what they’re doing and their webcam, and to record it? Then, how do we review that?

“We’ve always got a strong preference for doing things in-house, because it gives us flexibility; it gives us control over where our data – and our customers’ data – is going; and it gives us end-to-end ownership and responsibility over the outcome.”

EdTech 50 judge Rachel Vecht was wowed by this year’s ranking and the growing number of tools to assist with #neurodivergent learning and positive #mentalhealth and #wellbeing. The founder of Educating Matters picks out @myhappymind, Cognassist and @gaialearningonline for particular praise. @educatingmatters

The post How Leeds EdTech Synap found its rhythm appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

I’ve just arrived to meet Jack Brewitt, founder of 92 Degrees Coffee, which has grown from this shop on Hardman Street to 22 locations nationwide – including its first franchised store on this very day in Birmingham.

A man with a rucksack peels away from the group: it is Jack, who has been catching up with his customers, and everyone seems very much at home here.

Later we will discuss the “long play” of connecting up brand recognition from his coffee shops to products in retail stores. Everything begins with that comfortable experience – and, of course, the taste of a delicious coffee.

“We serve 1-2 million customers a year and so you hope that the majority of their visits are good, happy and tasty,” says Jack. “Then when they go to their local supermarket, they might go: ‘I’ve had a coffee from there. I’ll take a bag of that home.”

Jack has grand plans for 92 Degrees, which I’ll come to later. But let’s start at the beginning: even before he and four co-founders had the idea of turning this space into their first store.

Dyslexia

Taking my first sip of a very welcome cappuccino – it’s labelled ‘Damn Fine Coffee’ with good reason – I am surprised to learn that Jack, who on first hearing doesn’t have a strong Scouse accent, grew up 200 metres from this very spot.

“I struggled hugely with dyslexia when I was growing up,” he tells me. “So my parents decided to send me to a school in Shropshire which provided a very good special needs education. That was where I began to understand the problems that I had with reading and writing. 

“Numbers were always fine and easy – my dad was a physics teacher – and when I did a dyslexia test at eight or nine years old, my maths was that of a 16- or 17-year-old, but my reading age was more like a three-year-old.

f“Some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world are dyslexic. It makes you think, and learn how to do stuff: the smartest kids that became my friends at school, they had A* grades, but they couldn’t dream of running a business.

“When you have to dig deeper to just pass or get through exams, you build resilience which comes in very useful later on.”

Everton deal

The young Jack has always been fascinated by business and so, when he returned to live with his parents in Liverpool, he started up a venture importing goalposts from China which were less dangerous if they fell on a child.

“I sat at my mum and dad’s kitchen table and just sent email after email, trying to sell to people. And it was very, very hard,” he recalls.

“I won a contract in principle with Everton to supply the goalposts to their training ground – but then the manufacturer couldn’t deliver the order! That was a kick in the teeth for an 18-year-old kid.”

Controlling the supply chain was a lesson he heeded when he set up 92 Degrees.

Draw & Code

After three years of the goalposts business, he decided he’d had enough and began to work as a labourer on the very building we are sitting in today.

“I wanted to learn about buildings and earn again – get away from the safety net of my parents,” says Jack. “One day I showed some people around who were interested in letting out a space, and that turned out to be Draw & Code.”

The immersive tech studio has built a global reputation from its Liverpool base within a stone’s throw of our interview. Jack was part of a team that helped them fit out the office, and before long he was working for them.

“I became fixated with what they were doing. So after my work here, I would sit in their office and just learn about technology – they were building some of the most incredible stuff,” he says.

“I then worked for them for two years raising capital, selling, looking after investors. I went out to Silicon Valley and pitched to every VC (venture capital) firm I could find. 

“I pitched at Apple’s head office and went to Meta’s and Google’s; I stood in front of some of the cleverest people on the planet and talked to them about technology that was being created in Liverpool.

“Then I opened a coffee shop.”

92 Degrees Coffee shop on Hardman Street

92 Degrees is born

When they suggested opening a coffee shop in this then-empty space, Jack jumped at the chance to invest with them and run it.

“The plan was to do six weeks of trade then meet at the pub down the road to discuss how everything was going. I had been in here every single day and it was busy. I thought: ‘We are all geniuses and we’ve got to go build more of these!’ 

“I went to the meeting so excited, but they all said no – and I was genuinely gutted. We are still close friends but it wasn’t really their long-term ambition to build a coffee shop business.

“I walked home to my mum and dad’s, and set out a plan to earn as much money as I possibly could in the next three or four years to buy them out then begin building more stores.”

Social Chain 

A meeting with Steven Bartlett and Dominic McGregor, co-founders of influencer marketing agency Social Chain, ended without a contract for Draw & Code – but instead a job offer for Jack.

“They offered me three times my salary! I couldn’t believe it,” he recalls. “I was the first commercial person within the media side of the business, and that team grew quite quickly. I became the client director there.”

After earning enough money to buy out his 92 Degrees co-founders, he left Social Chain to open its second location on Jamaica Street. A third soon followed and all performed strongly.

“When we got to three or four sites, we had to upscale our production with a bigger machine. When we got to 10 or 11 stores, we had to do it again; and then again when we reached 20 stores!

“From my earliest perspective, roasting our own coffee was an entirely commercial decision because of my lack of experience. Now it’s a control over the main ingredient.

“The commercial side speaks for itself, but the product standard is so important to me. We spend hours and hours and hours cupping different coffees from different places around the world, and I love it.”

Roastery

On a trip to the head office and roastery down by Brunswick Docks I see bowls and bowls of coffee beans laid out and labelled in the working kitchen.

‘Coffee shop’ inside 92 Degrees HQ

Jack shows me the sacks of greenish beans which are bought from around the world and demonstrates the 15-minute technique of roasting and cooling them in the firm’s original machine.

He says he finds the process of roasting beans therapeutic. “It starts from point zero and always finishes at the same point. Most jobs as an entrepreneur never really finish: they are continuous, frothy and messy, and things can go wrong at any time. 

“I’ve done 12, 13, 14 hours of roasting a day.  I absolutely love it. If I had a choice, I would just do that! 

“But obviously there’s other things to do as well… and there are better people than me at roasting!”

Revenue streams

92 Degrees is tracking ÂŁ10 million revenue this year, with the eCommerce and wholesale sides of the business playing their part. As well as supplying local hotels, coffee shops and restaurants, bags of its coffee are now sold into 32 countries.

Jack says that COVID prompted a huge increase in eCommerce sales overnight. 

“I remember sitting in our shop and outside there wasn’t a person, a car, a bus… nothing. I thought five years of work and all my money had just gone down the drain.

“I made the call to close about a week and a half before the government mandated everywhere to do so. I told all of my team that they were going to get paid for as long as possible, which would have pretty much cleared out the bank account in a very short amount of  time when subsequently we were trying to grow. 

“I had some of the most amazing messages from team members: they brought me to tears, people offering their time to do stuff – clean the stores for free or whatever we needed. People who genuinely cared.

“Then our online business grew by 10,000% overnight.”

They had no infrastructure for that level of delivery of direct-to-consumer product, and he admits it was a shock to the system.

“I did a lot of the roasting in the first month or so. We’d bag it up, stick it in the back of my car and drive it to the Royal Mail to be sent.

“Then we suddenly started to get the hang of it. The processes and procedures follow out of necessity.”

Expansion… in lockdown?!

Having negotiated down the leases on his closed stores, to the surprise of team members, landlords and everyone else, Jack took the opportunity to agree deals on locations in new cities.

“A lot of people thought it was a very stupid risk, because no one knew that we were going to pull out the back of COVID. 

“Landlords couldn’t believe that there was an operator wanting more locations! We started COVID with four or five stores, and doubled that over the pandemic.

“When things began to return to normal, our online business slowly dropped – but our in-store revenue started to grow. And all of a sudden, we had a proper business.”

Franchising

Jack is taking part in GM ŔĎžĹơ˛č Growth Hub’s ASCEND Scale Up Programme. He says that alongside its home city, 92 Degrees now has locations in Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Birmingham, with the latter the site of its first franchise. 

Growing the franchise model and rail station locations is the current priority, while also getting listed in retailers across the UK.

“I want to build the company to 100 locations in the UK in the next four to five years,” says Jack. “I can’t see that being a company that will be valued at less than ÂŁ100m if operating the team I want.

“A˛Ôd if that’s the case, I want to then give our initial investors the opportunity to be able to exit if they want to.”

These unnamed angels are patient investors who are not pushing for a multiple return in a specific timeframe. Jack still owns the majority of the business.

The post 92 Degrees founder sets ÂŁ100m valuation target appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

A veteran of Allied London who celebrated his 50th birthday last year, he can be found in the offices of his startup GAME FM – Go A Mile Extra Facilities Management – from Monday to Friday. And often on Saturdays, too.

Based on John Dalton Street, the business has scaled quickly since launch, with Erinle saying the team has grown to 38 core staff following seven additions in the last couple of months. 

This is despite only being founded in June 2024, with the startup also securing ÂŁ1.24m in contracted work in its first 12 months.

Culture building

GAME FM’s culture is rooted in Erinle’s own “non-traditional journey” through the industry – one where he started by doing the same frontline roles his teams now do. 

“I’ve been a cleaner, been a security guard, I’ve worked on maintenance,” he tells ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud. 

“I just remember some of the not-so-nice interactions I had whilst I did those jobs. 

“I remember thinking to myself that, if and when I ran my own business, I would never treat people like that.

“I don’t try and run the business with hierarchy.

“I like to aim for a ‘round table’ culture – open, informal and supportive.”

Part of the journey 

Erinle is quick to note that facilities management isn’t just about cleaning, security, concierge and maintenance – it’s about first impressions.

Long before a visitor meets the person they’ve come to see, they’ve already formed a view of the building based on the people they pass on the way in. 

He explains: “You go into an office building and you might see a cleaner, a maintenance engineer, you might see the concierge or the security officer.

“A lot of these interactions might determine how good your day is.

“I’m big on good human interaction. There’s a lot of desire for human interaction and good human interaction, not just any human interaction.”

A blueprint from Spinningfields

Erinle’s move into entrepreneurship wasn’t a jump into the dark. 

In many ways, he says, he’d already been doing the job, just within someone else’s structure. 

Working across complex estates and regeneration projects gave him a lot of freedom and it suited the way he thinks.

“Everything was exciting, everything was challenging. I love solving problems,” he says.

“[At Spinningfields] we really pioneered placemaking in Manchester.

“I led an in-house FM model that grew to around £6m in annual service value.”

Growth whilst maintaining standards

GAME FM’s second year is set to show £1.5m revenue, with a target of £1.7m in year three. 

However, growth so far has been deliberately controlled. 

“Year one and year two we’ve predominantly just focused on Manchester because we wanted to control the quality of the operations,” Erinle explains.

“We didn’t want to compromise ourselves by chasing contracts.

“The next step probably is to expand the footprint to places like Liverpool and Birmingham on the radar. That’s going to be the challenging piece.

“A lot of the contracts are quite price sensitive – it’s a race to the bottom.

“We are different from others in our industry. I don’t believe in paying the minimum wage – we are living wage employers.

“I only want to work with people who share similar values with us.”

Where tech fits 

Erinle sees tech and AI as tools to help teams work smarter rather than a replacement for people. 

“Facilities is one of the things whereby AI and tech makes the tasks more efficient rather than replacing them entirely,” he said. 

Automation has its place, he adds, pointing to the scrubber-dryers already roaming around airports and supermarkets – but it still can’t do the ‘fiddly’ jobs. 

He continues: “They can do wide areas, but they can’t do detail… not yet!

“There isn’t a robot that’s going to clean skirting boards and dust off cobwebs, or tidy a desk.”

ASCEND

Even with prior leadership experience, Erinle says there’s a big difference between running something within a wider group and being the person carrying everything as a founder. 

“There were a lot of things about being a solo entrepreneur that I just didn’t know,” he says.

He highlights areas like governance, strategic planning, building a board and thinking about longer-term options such as acquisitions.

Joining GM ŔĎžĹơ˛č Growth Hub’s ASCEND Scale Up Programme has helped fill those gaps through workshops and through being around other founders dealing with the same realities. 

“It’s quite isolated being your own boss – you sit in your own head a lot,” he explains. 

“Having access to 25 other founders, some of the solutions have just been available to me through conversations with my fellow cohort.

“You also have [ASCEND lead] Kellie [Noon] helping you, who is constantly asking you if you need to meet people. 

“She’s been invaluable. You get access to all these things from one place and I don’t think you get that anywhere else.”

The post From Spinningfields to startup: meet founder behind rising star GAME FM appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.

Candy’s Cupcakes is fast becoming a Greater Manchester success story after turning over £2 million last year. It sells traditional-style cakes nationwide and has a fast-growing TikTok Shop which broadcasts six-and-a-half hours a day.

It all began when founder Candice Bannister began baking cupcakes from her home kitchen back in 2011.

“I used to manage supported housing schemes in Manchester for homeless people,” she tells me on a visit to the facility as part of my Founder Friday series.

“But I was very creative so, when I had my first child, I began playing around with baking and decorating cupcakes. I started a Facebook page and it grew organically from there, so I set up as a sole trader.”

Candy, as she is known, was a self-taught baker and began using YouTube tutorials and library books to expand her repertoire to more intricate bakes.

“I learned how to decorate and work with icing and sugars. I learned to do intricate sugar flowers, which allowed me to start making wedding cakes,” she recalls. “I just loved it.”

From ÂŁ300 in my home kitchen to ÂŁ2m sales! Candice Bannister began selling #cakes from her home kitchen with a day one budget of just ÂŁ300. Now @candyscupcakesuk

With orders flying in and regular visits to events such as wedding fairs – not to mention a second child on the way – her diary was filling up. So she gave up her job in 2014 to work on the business full-time.

Ambition

By 2019 she was ready to take the next big step. “My ambition was never just to keep making cakes myself,” says Candy. “I had read a blog from a lady who said she didn’t want to be a baker for the rest of her life. She wanted to grow a business and expand it. 

“So it kind of got in my head that, yeah, I could make this into something bigger than myself.”

She was supported by her husband Oliver, who had a forensic science background but had retrained to become a digital marketer.

“He said ‘right, let’s put ÂŁ300 to one side to buy some stock’. Up to that point I’d bought stuff from Hobbycraft or wherever as and when I needed it!

“Oliver used me as a guinea pig – he built me an eCommerce website and designed me a logo. I then employed my first person and moved out of my home kitchen and into my mum’s garages.

“That’s a massive leap – to think you’re going to employ someone and that you’ve got to have enough money in your bank to pay them every month.”

She adds: “Then lockdown hit and I was like: ‘Oh no, this business is going to shut down.’”

Letterbox cake

The postponement of events such as weddings and birthday parties due to the COVID pandemic initially caused a significant drop in cake orders.

However Candy pivoted by delivering her products directly to customers’ letterboxes rather than shipping them to event venues.

She says their ‘cake in a box’ – four slices which slip neatly into a box small enough to fit through letterboxes – was an existing product but took off during lockdown.

“For contactless deliveries, it was perfect. It just went crazy overnight!” she says.

“Because I wasn’t a physical business with a shop – I was a purely online entity – I was able to stay open as long as I followed all the Government guidelines.

“People were sat at home and they still wanted to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and the rest. Or they wanted to send ill relatives a gift in the post. So that was where we came in.

“I employed a guy who was furloughed from Virgin Airlines. I employed my hairdresser, because she couldn’t work. 

“COVID was obviously awful, but we had such a fun time, looking back now.”

Traditional British flavours

Candy’s Cupcakes remains faithful to traditional flavours such as victoria sponge, lemon, Battenberg, cherry bakewell and Black Forest gateau, although I was quick to try my favourites the red velvet and carrot cake slices.

Another popular product is a ‘nostalgic school cake’ – vanilla sponge with runny icing and rainbow sprinkles.

“People absolutely love it – but they didn’t have it in my school!” says Candy. “It must be an age thing.

“We’ve found that if you over-complicate flavours, it just doesn’t work. People eat with her eyes.”

She adds: “I needed to think of products that I could teach the hairdresser how to make. I could teach you how to do them!”

Post-COVID

With businesses cutting back on marketing spending during lockdown, Oliver supported the expansion of the business by working for free as well as looking after the kids.

As COVID receded in the rear view mirror, he joined officially on a full-time basis.

“Moving into this unit was a massive, massive step for us,” says Candy. “It used to be an old nut and bolt factory; we had to gut it, build the office we’re in today, clean it down, paint it and make it into the five-star kitchen it now is.

“That took a lot of our profit. In hindsight, that was a mistake. If I could do it again, I would have sought some kind of finance, because it left us short and playing catch-up, although we obviously did recover.”

The only borrowing they ever did against the business was ÂŁ25,000 from family which they paid back.

“We did £2m last year and we’ve grown 40% in each of the last two years. It’s gone wild. Now it’s about making that next big leap.”

TikTok Shop

A big driver of growth has been the company’s TikTok Shop, which has dedicated presenters and formerly ran until 10pm – but has recently been streamlined to broadcast from 9am to 3.30pm six days a week.

“It’s a bit like QVC,” says Candy as we watch the presenter chatting with customers under spotlights. “He’s got a microphone and is encouraging people to place orders. He then packs the orders live and they get shipped out.”

@candyscupcakesuk

Candy says the company is doing between ÂŁ2-3k in sales a day on the channel, which accounted for 30% of its business last year.

By far the most popular product on TikTok Shop is the ‘cake in a jar’, which customers can literally eat directly out of the glass jar.

“I created that before M&S, by the way. Just putting that out there!” she laughs. “It started off as a bit of a teacher gift – I did a rainbow cake in a jar.”

ASCEND

Candy’s Cupcakes has been supported by advice from the GM ŔĎžĹơ˛č Growth Hub, from a Tameside-based business development mentor to the dedicated manufacturing team, throughout its journey.

These last few months the collaboration has moved up a notch with participation on the ASCEND Scale Up Programme.

“It felt like a natural evolution. There is one-to-one mentorship with people who have exited a business, which is next-level.

“Both Susanna Lawson and Vikas Shah are very different, but amazing.

“Then there is the networking with the peers, because everyone is in the same boat, no matter what business they’re in. It’s just feeling that vulnerability as a founder, which you don’t get when you’re in your business.”

2026 plans

Candy is one of the most honest entrepreneurs I have met. Despite phenomenal growth in the last two years, she says 2026 is about evolving as a business. 

“We’re going to work very much on profitability this year – try and repeat what we did last year, but grow a little bit more steady.

“When you grow too quickly, like we did in lockdown and again last year, your processes start to fail. 

“It’s about constantly learning and thinking more strategically. ASCEND has massively helped me with that.”

The post Candy’s Cupcakes founder’s journey from home kitchen to ÂŁ2m turnover appeared first on ŔĎžĹơ˛čCloud.