Dear <<First Name>>,

Growing companies have specific requirements for capital, management, skills and organisational processes, and most scale-ups face similar issues:

• The Evidence Gap:  public and private sector organisations identify, target and evaluate their support to scale-up companies
• The Skills Gap: improve the ecosystem so scale-ups can  find employees to hire who have the skills they need
• The Leadership Capacity gap:  building their leadership capability
• The Markets and Procurement Gap: accessing customers in other markets / home market
• The Finance Gap: accessing the right combination of finance
• The Infrastructure Gap:  navigating infrastructure

• Skills, energy and R&D have been identified by CBI Director General Carolyn Fairbairn as priorities for a modern industrial strategy for the UK. Among her points are the needs “to offer young people a true picture of 21st-century manufacturing” and “to address the chronic shortage of physics teachers.” She also notes how the Catapults “have helped firms make the leap from ideas to invoices.”
  It is well worth reading her full speech.
   
• A new support body backed by some of the best-known names on the region’s tech scene has been set up to champion emerging specialisms and support the North’s tech start-ups and high growth businesses in finding investment, talent and continued success. I’m excited about this group as they have a successful model in London and are now scaling it to other regions where the need is greatest.  
  See article here.
   
• The lack of women in tech is more than a pipeline problem, points out Swati Mylavarapu in this article in TechCrunch. Framed in the US context, she notes that “this is more than a conversation about gender parity — it’s an existential issue for our industry, and an economic challenge for our country.”
  Read the conversation here.

The Leadership Capacity gap:  building their leadership capability

• A powerful article in the Washington Post focuses on what business leaders need to do to progress from ‘startup leader’ to ‘scaleup leader’.  That is to focus on the operational details of the company.  Well worth a read, or passing onto startup leaders focused on product and marketing and NOT internal operations:
  Article is here.
   
• A insightful conversation was hosted by Smedvig Capital with Pablo Graiver and Keith Lovell, CEO and CFO of TrialReach, in which they discussed their experiences of scaling up businesses such as Shazam and Kelkoo. “You have to start way before you actually want to scale up the business,” says Pablo. “You need to think about the problem that you’re trying to address, and keep yourself in check with the question, ‘Am I solving this problem?’'
  Read the conversation here.

The Finance Gap: Accessing the right combination of finance

• There are some interesting insights from high-growth analysts Beauhurst, as it provides an update on the progress of the five scaleups who raised the largest funding rounds in 2015 - Immunocore, Funding Circle, Atom Bank, Deliveroo and Mereo BioPharma.
  Read more here.
   
• Meanwhile, a trio of Oxford biotech companies have raised almost £37m in a record round of fundraising for UK academic spin-outs. According to an article in the FT, “the burst of deals highlights the growing supply of patient capital being ploughed into UK academic science,” and it quotes Isis Innovation’s Adam Stoten as saying “we are seeing more long-term investment in building scalable businesses which is something the UK has found difficult in the past.”
  Read more here.
   
• Meanwhile, Pivotal raises $ 253 M in a series C led by Ford and Microsoft.  Pivotal is one of the leading vendors behind the Cloud Foundry PaaS, the commercialized version of the open source project. Pivotal’s first quarter revenue rose 56% year over year to $83 million.  They definitely seem to have big rounds for follow-on investment in the US, don’t they?
  Article is here.   

The Infrastructure Gap: Navigating Infrastructure

• The FCA has created its regulatory sandbox, which aims to create a ‘safe space’ in which businesses can test innovative products, services, business models and delivery mechanisms in a live environment without immediately incurring all the normal regulatory consequences of engaging in the activity in question. This is a brilliant initiative and should be widely lauded.
  Firms can apply for the first cohort of the regulatory sandbox until 8 July 2016. Apply here.
   
• It has been a brilliant few days for the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Cambridge, with both the launch of the Dyson Centre for Engineering Design (which will provide space for 1,200 engineering students to work on cutting-edge projects) and the James Dyson Building for Engineering (which will house postgraduate students and research labs) as well as the second Eagle Lab being launched  by Barclays in the city.

Event Monitor:

• The UKBAA Awards are open to high growth companies that have received early stage finance, as well as angel investors and groups, early stage venture capital and crowdfunding platforms. Nominations on behalf of portfolio companies are encouraged from investment groups. So if you have made a successful angel investment, do make sure that you enter the UKBAA Awards.
  Enter here.
   
• The broader European picture for scaleups will be discussed at the Scale Up for Europe congress in Porto on 26 May.
  To register, click here.

Happy Scaling!

Sherry Coutu CBE

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