tech deal of the year award

sponsored by Rothschild & Co

 
The 2021 shortlist:

AVEVA Group plc

Headquartered in Cambridge, AVEVA is a global leader in industrial software, driving digital transformation and sustainability. The group’s comprehensive portfolio enables more than 20,000 industrial enterprises to engineer smarter, operate better and drive sustainable efficiency. 

In August 2020, AVEVA transformed the scale and depth of its offering through the $5bn acquisition of California based OSIsoft. The deal was one of the largest tech deals ever made by a listed UK tech company for a US counterpart, against a challenging backdrop of failed US acquisitions by its peers.

Cazoo Ltd

London-based Cazoo is Europe’s leading online car showroom with over 6,000 subscribers across the UK, Germany and France. The group was founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneur Alex Chesterman.

In August 2021, Cazoo completed its $1bn merger with publicly traded special purpose acquisition company Ajax I. The deal, which saw Cazoo list on the NYSE, valued the company at $7bn, more than double the $2.6bn valuation achieved during its private funding round in October last year. 

Darktrace plc

Darktrace is a global leader in cyber security technology, based in Cambridge. The group empowers organisations in all industry sectors to stop cyber disruptions through Self-Learning AI.

In April 2021, Darktrace made its London Stock Exchange debut after raising £165m in its IPO, giving the group a market cap of £2.2bn. The IPO was described by Wired, as the deal that “salvaged London’s tech IPO dream” and has been widely credited with restoring faith in the London market as a suitable home for tech businesses. 

IMImobile plc

Headquartered in London, IMImobile was founded at the start of the mobile internet era and, since foundation, has delivered two-way customer interactions at scale. The group works with large enterprises across a wide range of industries to help build better customer experiences.

In February 2021, IMI was acquired by Cisco, a significant player in the enterprise contact centre equipment and software space, for $730m. The combined service brings together a range of technologies that will provide the most comprehensive CXaaS offer on the market.

Wave Optics Ltd

Oxfordshire-based WaveOptics creates waveguides and projector to unlock the potential of augmented reality for the mass market. The group works with global mobile and technology companies who are investing and creating their own smart glasses for augmented reality.

In May 2021, Wave Optics was acquired by Snap Inc. for a total consideration of over $500m. Snap, along with other tech giants like Facebook and Apple is racing to build AR devices as the next technological frontier after the smartphone. The deal is one of the UK’s, and possibly Europe’s, largest ever venture-backed deeptech exits. 

Wise plc

Wise is one of Britain’s biggest and best-known fintech unicorns. The group was founded by two Estonians who were exasperated by the cost of moving money between the UK and the Baltic country.

Wise joined the Main Market in July 2021, through a rare, landmark, Direct Listing. This was the first Direct Listing of a tech company in London, and subsequently the biggest London tech listing by market cap in history. At $11bn, Wise’s market cap is more than double the $5bn valuation achieved  in 2020.

tech journalist of the year award

sponsored by Luther Pendragon

 
The 2021 shortlist:

Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw has been covering the tech industry for fifteen years from San Francisco and Los Angeles, including leading the FT's reporting on Apple, Uber, Snap and other Silicon Valley companies. Now based in London, Tim contributes to the FT's coverage of Big Tech and start-up trends, as well as writing a regular column for the FT Weekend magazine. 

Mike Butcher/TechCrunch

Mike Butcher is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. He has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK. Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg and has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech start-up policy. Mike was awarded an MBE in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.

Sabah Meddings/Sunday Times

Sabah is a senior business reporter at the Sunday Times, focusing primarily on biotech, pharmaceuticals and the consumer and leisure industries.  Sabah has written extensively on the disruption in traditional industries by companies such as Deliveroo, Babylon Healthcare and the UK's biggest gambling giants such as Entain and Flutter Entertainment. She has also written on the Horizon software scandal at the Post Office, where faulty technology resulted in thousands of sub-postmasters being accused of stealing from the till.

Jamie Nimmo/Sunday Times

Last year’s winner of the tech journalist of the year award, Jamie is currently the Associate Business Editor of the Sunday Times, covering mid cap and small cap tech news. Jamie has covered some of the biggest tech stories of the year, including the global semiconductor shortage, the takeover of Newport Wafer Fab, and the government's AI strategy.

James Titcomb/The Telegraph

James has been covering technology at The Telegraph since 2015 and returned from a stint in San Francisco earlier this year. He writes across the Daily and Sunday Telegraph with a mixture of news, features and commentary on everything from electric cars to government tech policy. Recent scoops include DiDi scrapping its launch in Europe and revealing opposition to Britain's biggest tech deal.

Isabel Woodford/Sifted

Isabel is one of Europe's leading journalists covering fintech, VC and start-ups. She has been featured in The Guardian, Reuters, The New York Times and now works at the Financial Times' sister publication, Sifted. Isabel’s coverage has given a much-needed platform to local tech innovators, in addition to providing fresh scrutiny.

tech growth business of the year award

sponsored by ECI Partners

 
The 2021 shortlist:

Dianomi plc

Dianomi provides native digital advertising services to premium clients in the Financial Services and Business sectors. The group works with brands to deliver ads to a targeted audience across the desktop, mobile websites and apps of premium publishers. 

Dianomi demonstrated significant growth momentum during the period due to the buoyancy of the digital marketing backdrop and the increasing consumption of online content. The group listed on AIM in May 2021, to help accelerate further growth and expand its presence in the mobile and video segments, alongside entering new sectors. 

dotdigital Group plc

The dotdigital platform is an omnichannel marketing solution for B2C, B2B, and NFP marketers. The group’s Engagement Cloud platform provides marketers with a single solution to design, personalise and monitor email marketing campaigns to drive broader engagement.

dotdigital operates a subscription-based model, therefore recurring revenue makes up most of its top line. The group’s extensive and growing suite of products has led to a steady upwards trajectory of revenue per customer. Strategic partnerships with CRM systems and e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, have allowed for further global expansion. 

Exclaimer Ltd

Exclaimer provides world-class centralised email signature management solutions. These enable organisations globally to achieve brand consistency, legal compliance, and customer engagement on any device. Clients include Sony, Mattel, UNICEF and the BBC.

Since the launch of its first cloud offerings in 2015, Exclaimer has experienced rapid growth and expansion into new markets such as the US, with over 25,000 new customers now paying on a subscription basis. In December 2020, the group secured an investment of over £100m to help further accelerate sales growth, product innovation, and go-to-market channels.

GB Group plc

Shortlisted for the tech growth business of the year last year, GB Group are global specialists in digital identity. The group enables fast, simple and compliant customer onboarding, reducing the risk of fraud for many of the world’s leading organisations.

GB Group has experienced another year of phenomenal growth, establishing itself as the epitome of an innovative British business at the top of its game. The group’s exceptional sustained growth was helped by the rapid digitalisation of businesses, due to COVID-19, in addition to expansion into key markets and collaboration with regulators.

Tripledot Studios Ltd

Tripledot is a fast-growing gaming studio, led by a team of seasoned industry veterans from King, Facebook and Product Madness. The group’s mission is to bring the knowledge and experience of a chart-topping mobile games company into a close-knit, collaborative environment.

Tripledot has grown rapidly to profitability, achieving over $100m in revenue at the beginning of 2021. In April 2021, the group raised $78m in funding from three global investment firms, which will augment Tripledot’s growth by acquiring other studios. This latest funding values the start-up at almost $500m.

tech for good award

sponsored by finnCap Group

 
The 2021 shortlist:

Babylon Healthcare Services

Babylon is a leading digital healthcare company. The group uses AI and technology to help its clinicians gain insights in order to make more informed decisions, ultimately making healthcare more accessible and affordable. 

Babylon provides a number of online healthcare services, including its NHS GP app, which allows healthcare professionals to provide online medical advice to patients via text and video messaging. During COVID-19 the group launched a feature to check symptoms via the app and to disseminate government advice.

BBC Bitesize

Bitesize is the BBC's free online study support resource for school-age pupils. Bitesize launched in 1998, when only 9% of UK households had an internet connection, and is now the most popular dedicated educational site in the UK, used by around 80% of secondary school children, and around 40% of primary school children.

Bitesize originally covered seven core subjects for GCSE revision and now has content covering over 35 subjects across the Primary and Secondary school curriculum. The site was a huge success during lockdown in helping families conduct home learning by running daily lessons for students online and on iPlayer.

Kooth plc

Kooth is an NHS-commissioned digital mental health and wellbeing service. The group’s sole purpose is to create easy to access online mental health services that provide compassionate and effective support for those in need.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, Kooth realised it was in a unique position to provide extraordinary insights into the impact of the pandemic on the nation’s mental health. The group provided anonymised mental health insights to support the NHS and Local Authorities, Public Health England, policymakers, charities, and businesses since the first lockdown in March 2020. Kooth epitomises using tech and data for good.

Navenio Ltd

Navenio’s AI-led indoor location-based solutions help transform and improve workforce efficiency in hospitals and enable any use cases in applications and systems in any type of building, in any sector globally.

Navenio delivers highly accurate, frictionless and scalable indoor location, and works where GPS does not work, enabled simply by using sensors in smartphones. The group has had a dramatic effect on productivity in UK hospitals, resulting in better care and improved patient outcomes.

Raspberry Pi Foundation

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity that works to put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world. The group engages millions of young people in learning computing skills through a thriving network of clubs and events and partnerships with youth organisations.

Raspberry Pi launched a programme during the pandemic called Stay Connected with School. The group worked with voluntary organisations to provide families not just with its new Raspberry Pi 4, but with all the kit and software needed to connect to a school's online learning environment, plus telephone support whenever it was needed. The Raspberry Pi 4 itself is a £67 device that is a small yet enormously significant contribution towards closing the digital divide for young people.

The ZOE COVID Symptom Study (ZOE Global Ltd)

Initially, ZOE was a nutrition-focused start-up. However, as the pandemic hit, the ZOE COVID Study app was launched, with the aim of providing scientists with rapid access to COVID-19 data. ZOE engineers built a COVID-19 monitoring system, recognising the opportunity to utilise technology for good in a time of crisis.

The ZOE COVID Symptom Study is the largest community-led COVID-19 study in the world. Contributors enter personal details into the app, then spend a minute each day reporting their physical health. The app was amongst the first to confirm anosmia, skin rashes and delirium to be key COVID-19 symptoms, leading to changes in the NHS symptom list. The direct correlation between the app and changing health policy is unparalleled and holds huge potential for the future.

tech investor award

sponsored by Design Portfolio

 
The 2021 shortlist:

Draper Esprit

Draper Esprit seeks out the most promising high growth technology companies in Europe with global potential and finds a way to invest and help the company execute on that potential.

The group builds a stake in businesses it backs over time, always taking the long-term view. Draper invests at Series A, but 70% of its capital is for growth stage rounds (Series B+). The group makes around 200+ seed investments a year through its partner fund of funds program.

ECI Partners

ECI has been an active investor in the tech sector for over 35 years. In the past twelve months, the group has completed three tech investments and realised four tech investments, in addition to supporting its portfolio to complete five acquisitions in the tech sector.

ECI’s commercial team works with management teams to assist with projects that are proven to drive growth, with a dedicated focus on helping businesses get the most out of their data and technology.

Hg

Hg has a diverse and high-quality base of institutional investors. These include public institutions, funds of funds, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, foundations and endowments and high net worth individuals from Europe, North America, Australasia and the Middle East.

Hg has over $30bn in funds under management, and invests on behalf of more than 150 clients based around the world, ranging in size and type, seeking to achieve superior risk-adjusted returns over the long-term.

Index Ventures

Index Ventures covers every investment stage, from earliest seed through to explosive growth.  Some of the companies the group has helped to get started include Adyen, Deliveroo, Dropbox, Farfetch, King, Slack and Supercell.

Index believe that now that technology is part of everyone’s life and reconfiguring the traditional economy, sector by sector, the group are no longer just “tech” investors. They believe every aspect of human life and economic activity can be transformed and improved by technology and entrepreneurial passion and that we are just at the start of this era.

IQ Capital

IQ Capital helps companies build and scale their vision – from development of their tech, supporting them to find the best product-market fit – and then providing unusually close support as they build their teams, hire their Chair and develop their board, focused on growth and strategy. The group has over twenty years unique experience as investors in deeptech. 

Founders tell IQ Capital that it is the only investor who really understands their tech. The group collaborates across sectors to identify how emerging technologies can be applied to create businesses which can become category leaders and dominate multi-$bn markets.

Vitruvian Partners

Vitruvian is an international investment firm that supports the most ambitious and talented entrepreneurs and companies to achieve their goals. The group invests in high growth, dynamic situation buyouts and growth capital investments, from six offices around the world.

Vitruvian targets growth capital and management buyout deals, investing between €25m-€350m in companies typically valued between €75m-€1bn+.

best use of tech in the digital economy award

sponsored by Zeus Capital

 
The 2021 shortlist:

Fetchmyorder.com

FETCH launched earlier this year and is an on-premises food and drink order and pay app for pubs, bars, restaurants, clubs, arenas, festivals, hotels and other venues. The team behind it has over 150 years of collective global hospitality and guest-facing technology experience.

FETCH provides a simple, efficient, contactless way to take orders and see vital customer information in real time. FETCH App Clip (Apple) and Instant App (Android) offer instant order and pay, removing the traditional need to download an app and allowing customers to start ordering in seconds. 

Hopin

Hopin is an all-in-one event management platform that makes planning, producing, and reliving event experiences easier than ever. The group creates immersive virtual, hybrid, and in-person event experiences for audiences, no matter where they are.

Hopin’s virtual venue has multiple interactive areas that are optimised for connecting and engaging. Attendees can move in and out of rooms, just like an in-person event, and enjoy the content and connections created for them. The group can host events of any size or type, sell event tickets and analyse data.

Huma Therapeutics

Huma is transforming healthcare and research globally. The group’s digital ‘hospital at home’ and decentralised clinical trial platform use real-time health data from smartphones to help patients, clinicians, researchers, and healthcare systems.

By gathering real-time health data from patients, Huma creates insights that lead to tangible improvements in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. The ‘hospital at home’ service was used during COVID-19 to allow clinicians to remotely monitor their patients via their smartphones. The technology was shown to almost double clinical capacity, reduce readmissions, improve patient experience, and save money.

Moonpig Group plc

Moonpig is an international group made up of two brands – Moonpig in the UK, US and Australia, and Greetz in the Netherlands. The group describes itself as a technology platform at heart, but is known by customers as the leading eCommerce destination for greetings cards, gifts and flowers. Moonpig has been around for twenty years but continues to disrupt the market.

The group has built a tech platform designed to harness data science and AI at every point of the customer journey – from personalised triggers, and AI-powered smart filters to algorithms and product recommendations based on data history and algorithms. Moonpig floated on the Main Market in February 2021 with a £1.2bn valuation.

Tractable Ltd

Tractable is a tech company developing AI for accident and disaster recovery. The group’s AI solutions capture and process photos of damage and predict repair costs, meaning insurers receive damage assessments in a fraction of the time, and allowing them to make decisions more efficiently and more accurately.

The group has trained its platform on a proprietary dataset of many millions of photos of car accidents, and the repair operations that ensued, built up by Tractable through cross-geography partnerships and data integrations, meaning its AI can now improve even on expert human performance. 

WaveOptics Ltd

WaveOptics is the world leading designer and manufacturer of diffractive waveguides, the key component enabling the mass adoption of truly scalable and immersive Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in all consumer, prosumer and enterprise markets. 

In May 2021, Wave Optics was sold to Snap Inc. for over $500m”, in one of the UK’s, largest ever venture-backed Deeptech exits. Snap is one of the leading global pioneers in Augmented Reality and is rolling out novel AR content to its userbase, whilst innovating new wearable AR technologies containing Wave Optics waveguides.

tech innovation of the year award

 
The 2021 shortlist:

Doctor Care Anywhere

Doctor Care Anywhere is a doctor-founded digital healthcare company leading the way in personalised clinical care. The group helps some of the world's biggest businesses look after the health and wellbeing of their employees and customers. 

Doctor Care Anywhere brings together primary and secondary care to transform healthcare with one easy-to-use digital service. For businesses, this means increased productivity and decreased absenteeism and for employees, it means a healthier, happier work life.

Exscientia

Exscientia is a global AI-driven drug discovery company.  The group’s Centaur Chemist™ platform fuses the power of the original AI with the experience of seasoned drug hunters to enable new approaches to improve drug efficacy. 

Exscientia has designed two drugs that are in Phase 1 clinical trials. In April 2021, the group announced it had completed a $225m Series D round led by Softbank, with an additional $300m equity commitment to follow at the pharma tech’s discretion. The funds will be used to advance clinical testing and expand the group’s technology platforms. 

Geeks Ltd

Geeks is a software development company focused on business efficiency enhancement, via smart application of automation techniques. The group’s clients include the BBC, Easyjet and HMV.

Geeks has created a new tool, DigitalIQ to help identify and quantify the inefficiencies, blockers or challenges within a business and to calculate the room for improvement. This tool offers a bold rethinking of how an organisation uses technology to empower the whole team by optimising and automating day-to-day processes, simplifying functions and enhancing customer experience.

Graphcore

Graphcore is a semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. The group has created a completely new processor, the IPU, which is specifically designed for AI compute. 

The unique architecture of Graphcore’s IPU allows AI researchers to undertake entirely new types of work that are not possible using current technologies, to drive advances in machine intelligence. The IPU will become the worldwide standard for machine intelligence compute and will be transformative across all industries whether you are a medical researcher, roboticist or building autonomous cars.

IRIS Software Group Ltd

IRIS provides software, services and training to support Britain’s businesses by helping create greater operational accuracy and efficiencies in everyday tasks and aiding them to look forward with confidence. The move from desktop to cloud is often seen as cumbersome and expensive but IRIS has developed a solution to this problem. IRIS has developed IRIS Elements, a future-ready cloud accountancy platform designed to enable accountants to move to the cloud at their own pace. This flexibility was a critical ask from hundreds of customers who collaborated with the group to design the platform. IRIS Elements is driving technological change and disrupting the status quo by redefining the way accountants approach software forever.

Quanta Dialysis Technologies Ltd

Quanta Dialysis is an international commercial-stage, technology-enabled dialysis innovator that aims to improve dialysis experiences and to help people live more freely through products and services that are easy-to-use, versatile and empowering.

The group’s lead product, SC+, is a high performing, small and simple haemodialysis system, that provides greater freedom and flexibility in the delivery of life sustaining dialysis treatments. So small is the machine that complicated dialysis treatments can be performed at home. The pandemic accelerated Quanta’s commercial launch and the group supplied SC+ to numerous NHS Trusts around the country with very positive results.