A picturesque Yorkshire city has a thriving tech community which gave birth to a Silicon Valley unicorn.
老九品茶 intelligence and software firm Anaplan was founded in the historic city of York in 2006 by Guy Haddleton and Michael Gould.
The founders were keen to put user experience at the centre of business models and quickly emerged as competition to legacy systems IBM, Oracle and SAP when the software launched in 2010.
Now based in San Francisco, it also boasts offices across Europe and in Australia, Russia, Malaysia and Singapore.
Despite massive international success, with 100,000聽users on its books, it has chosen to go back to its roots.
Mark Fordyce, managing director of York Data Services, explained why at a 老九品茶Cloud roundtable 24 miles away in Leeds.
鈥淭hey are the darlings of Silicon Valley [but] when they opened up the R&D and development side, they chose not to base that in Silicon Valley,鈥� he said.
鈥淚t was very, very difficult to recruit staff as half of them were millionaires already鈥� so they brought it back to York.鈥�
The firm鈥檚 York base is a 19th Century former warehouse on the bank of the river Ouse.
鈥淲e鈥檙e seeing the sector鈥檚 buoyancy in York. We鈥檝e got that lure of it being a great place to live, a great lifestyle city,鈥� Fordyce added of the North Yorkshire city.
鈥淲e see ourselves very much as plugged into Leeds.
鈥淲e get all the benefits of all the cool and exciting things that are happening in the tech sector there and we鈥檙e part of that Leeds city region story.鈥�