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basic portfolios ranging from the cautious to the adventurous.
Its portfolios weathered last year’s economic uncertainties well and each of the five outperformed its benchmark average between February 2016 and February 2017. Veeqo Swansea-based Veeqo is an in-one inventory, orders and shipping management sytem for e-commerce businesses. Founded in 2013 by e-commerce veteran Matt Warren, it has been backed by investors including New Look founder Tom Singh.
Veeqo has run a series of successful crowdfunding campaigns, raising more than £1.4m through the Seedrs platform and seeking to raise a further £1m through the same source.
The Veeqo team has grown from one to 30 over the past two years and the new investment round will be used to improve its software and further grow the team, with 75 new jobs planned over the next three years.
Having delivered 504% growth of its monthly recurring revenue over the past 12 months, Veeqo’s objectives are to further dominate the UK market and expand into the US. DevOpsGuys DevOpsGuys was set up in 2013 by current managers James Smith and Stephen Thair, who saw a gap in the market to build an IT development and operations business from the bottom up. The company exceeded its initial target of hiring 40 employees over 24 months and now has more than 70 staff and consultants.
Its main customers are government departments and blue-chip clients including Admiral, Asos, BAE Systems, Defra, Nokia, Fitness First, Waitrose and Travelodge. It recently won a contract with the DVLA worth £10m over the next two years.
The Cardiff-based firm is targeting £100m turnover over the next fuve years following a £1m investment from Santander Corporate & Commercial. It recently won an award for Creative and Digital Start-Up of the Year at the Wales Start-Up Awards. Amplyfi This Cardiff-based start-up was created to deliver business insights into possible technology or market disruptions by commercialising militarygrade artificial intelligence techniques developed for cyber-surveillance.
Its flagship product, DataVoyant, is capable of scanning all open-surface and deep web sources in every modern language, automatically interrogating, distilling and presenting underlying trends in hours.
A pilot programme, which included some of the world’s largest companies, was highly successful and demonstrated DataVoyant’s commercial viability in aerospace and defence, banking, energy, insurance, private equity, pharma and professional services.
Amplyfi now has a strong pipeline of customers and is refining DataVoyant with feedback provided by early adaptors. Paperclip Founded by Imperial College London graduates Rich Woolley, from Penarth, and Alan Small, along with their friend and current London student Ziad Al-Ziadi, technology startup Paperclip has developed an app that allows users to buy, sell, swap and give away second-hand goods with nearby Paperclip users.
The team first pitched their idea at the 2014 London Start-up Weekend, later appearing on crowdfunding TV show Moneypit, where they secured initial investment.
The app went live for Apple and Android devices in October 2015 and now has thousands of active users across the UK.
Last year Paperclip secured a sixfigure equity co-investment deal with Finance Wales and a Turkish syndicate led by Emre Fadillioglu. EchoSec EchoSec gives people the power to search social media based on location, helping to paint a picture of events as they unfold.
In under a second their service is capable of contacting all the services they tap into, aggregating and normalising their response, scanning for alerts and keywords and forwarding notifications directly to users. The results are also livestreamed to EchoSec’s connected end users. Elidir Health Medtech company Elidir Health has developed cross-platform mobile web applications that are revolutionising information dynamics in the healthcare environment. They allow healthcare professionals to have all clinical information at their fingertips, and the company is co-developing solutions for NHS nurses under the guidance of CEO Dyfan Searell.
He said: “The technology scene in north Wales is really exciting at the moment . ... We can capitalise on the advantages that maybe the rest of industry can’t see. Half of the world is rural like us and most of the world is bilingual like us. That means there is huge scope for innovation and huge scope for enterprise.” ProfitSourcery.com Based at Caerphilly start-up hub Welsh ICE, ProfitSourcery.com won the Global Start-Up of the Year title at the Welsh Start-Up Awards. It helps Amazon sellers find stock which will make them profits, helping them make smarter decisions on what to invest in.
The firm, which launched in 2015, has a six-figure turnover and analyses two million retail products per month and compares them to Amazon’s prices. It employs four full-time coders and has hundreds of customers, half of whom are in the USA. TestLodge TestLodge is a cloud-based software testing tool enabling users to document and manage their testing efforts with ease. It’s primarily used by start-ups, internal IT departments, product and design agencies and quality assurance teams looking for an easy-to-use program to test the functionality of their software.
The Penarth-based firm supports thousands of users in more than 180 countries and is widely regarded as one of the top emerging software testing tools to come out of the UK. Hoowla Many experts in the property industry criticise the conveyancing process, with increasing pressure to make it more transparent. Other issues include solicitors having less time to work on each case.
Hoowla aims to fix the problems by transferring the process online. With a user-friendly website, all parties involved in a house purchase are able to keep up-to-date with the transaction.
And it’s gone beyond conveyancing, adding family law, wills and probate, personal injury and more to the cases that can be supported through its case management software.