A B2B Lead Generation & Risk Management Tool

Over the initial three years of DueDil we have focused intensely on building the infrastructure to process and handle a vast quantity of private company data. This is a surprisingly formidable task that many have attempted yet failed to achieve. In the past year, our development has centered around productising the platform and working with customers to solve some of their core business challenges.

Over the last year we have also experienced a number of incredible successes. We have built out an impressive client roster, which now includes dozens of public companies along with thousands of successful growth stage firms. Naturally, we want to continue on this path and solve the most significant problems facing business owners and professionals.

To continue in this pursuit we performed a significant amount of research and testing. We analysed terabytes of user data, ran a number of focus groups, led customer insight sessions, and performed a survey with 6,000 respondents. More than 70% of our respondents told us that growth and generating new business were their primary concerns for 2015, while the user data revealed that risk management was the other lead use case.

The vast majority of DueDil’s customers use our tools for these purposes already. From now on, we will fine tune our offerings to focus on these two use cases. This will include stripping back some services. These changes will likely affect 1% of our users.

Our mission at DueDil has always been to contextualise the world’s private company information. These changes stay true to that mission, and we will continue to give new services away for free - not just free, but free of advertising and the requirement to sign in to see basic financial data. We are going to also allow any professional to have a hassle free trial of our premium services, which we hope will lead to a much better experience.

Responses to our survey consistently highlighted new business as a top priority.

As well as helping businesses with B2B lead generation and risk management, our company has been instrumental in initiating public debate and policy, based on sound data and solid information.

We initiated back in 2010 the discussion of Companies House opening up their data for free. In 2011, we exposed the fact that 98 of the FTSE 100 use tax havens, leading to an international reassessment of how multinational firms pay their taxes. We led the discussion on migrant entrepreneurs and their contribution to the UK economy. Most recently, we quantified the UK’s digital economy. We will continue with projects such as these well into the future.

We believe this is the most accurate projection of the tech industry today. It’s not yet perfect, but this project is a starting point in trying to measure this sector.

What is it and how do I get my hands on it?

The best way is to visit www.duedil.com/technation/2015 to start digging into the data on our site.

You can also use  advanced search to slice, dice and create reports as you choose and download the key report.

The data is live and constantly updated to paint the most accurate picture.

But, if you’re looking for some headline figures, here are some from the research for your delectation.

Digital job growth is predicted to outperform all other occupation categories by 2020

1.46 million people - 7.5% of the entire British workforce - are currently employed in the digital industries across the UK

50% of digital companies in the UK have been founded since 2008

74% of digital businesses in the UK operate outside of London

77% of digital businesses say they benefit from access to a network of entrepreneurs or clusters to interact with and to share ideas

90% of the UK’s digital businesses expect their revenue to rise in 2015

The UK’s fastest growing tech clusters are: Greater Manchester, Liverpool, Belfast, Inner London, Sheffield, Bournemouth, South Wales, Brighton & Hove

How did you make it?

To make it happen, we drew on these main data sources:

Company websites. We drew on DueDil’s 2.7 million company-to-domain matches for 1 million+ companies.

AngelList data on UK digital companies.

CrunchBase data on UK digital companies.

Information was extracted from Wikipedia monthly data dumps, specifically to identify famous companies.

We also added the MTM survey companies.

We used the 2003 and 2007 Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities (SIC) system to include companies that self-identify as “digital”:                   

7221 (2003) - Publishing of Software

3002 - Manufacture computers & process equipment

5821 (2007) - Publishing of Computer Games

5829 - Other Software Publishing

62011 - Ready-made Interactive Leisure And Entertainment Software Development

62012 - Business And Domestic Software Development

6311 - Data Processing, Hosting And Related Activities

6312 - Web Portals

Information was extracted from Wikipedia monthly data dumps, specifically to identify famous companies.

Previous studies have been limited by relying exclusively upon SIC codes, which as we have mentioned aren’t accurate enough for robust analysis on their own.

We next extracted keywords from our core data sources. (Within unstructured text, we applied natural language processing to identify candidate keywords.)

We then conducted a classification exercise in which 2,000 companies were independently tagged by project partners as digital, non-digital or ambiguous candidates. The results of this exercise were used to create a machine-learning training set. (The training set was tested against 500 non-digital companies.)

This training set was then used to identify “digital” companies from among the wider universe of UK-registered companies, using the data sources outlined above.

As a verification stage, the crowdsourcing was used to identify and remove anomalous companies. Within this stage, and to ensure we had no poor-performing assessors, we asked multiple people to tag individual entities.

Finally, a keyword-clustering stage was implemented to enrich the keyword database.

This final database was used to show the companies within Tech Nation, and their location (based on registered and trading address, where available).

Got any questions?

We’re happy to help. Drop us a line.

If you’re a company looking to unlock our data, call us on +44 (0) 203 137 8490 or send us a message.

Over the next few weeks, we worked through the methodology together. The first question was around the best measure of organisational size - turnover, employee numbers, international footprint? Eventually, we decided to size companies by turnover, based on latest audited accounts filed within the past two years at Companies House.

Another question was, which geographic regions would resonate most with the Mirror’s 1 million print and 1.7 million online readers? The UK contains a plethora of parish, town, county, regional, parliamentary constituency and metropolitan boundaries. For England, we used ceremonial counties, including Greater London; for Wales, government principal areas; for Scotland, government unitary authorities; for Northern Ireland, the traditional counties.

There were other thorny questions. For example, an individual large company’s turnover will not fall purely within its region’s boundaries, so what makes it eligible? What if a company only has a registered address (often just a nominal thing) in a particular area, would that disqualify it? Our new trading-location search gave us helpful sensitivity here, and we decided to base inclusion on a company having a trading address within a county.

The map was eventually published on 8 October and got full-page Daily Mirror coverage, just across from “Fondant Nancy”, winner of the Great British Bake Off. Cue gags about cooked books and soggy bottoms.

The Daily Mirror’s Nick Sommerlad says: "It took a bit of work to identify the right companies, discounting those that had moved or ceased trading or were just subsidiaries of other UK companies, but we were delighted with the outcome. It's an eye-catching map that shows our country in a new light."

It quickly proliferated on Twitter, with loads of comments on our feed.

Geoff Riley said it would be a big hit in the classroom!

“This is Britain as it has never been seen before,” Nick wrote, “a unique map showing the biggest firms in every county in the country.”

There are so many insights in this map. The biggest four firms in London, Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Edinburgh, Nick discovered, had higher revenues last year than the largest firms in the remaining 104 counties combined. In counties like Somerset (Clarks) and Essex (Ford), it’s traditional big companies that still dominate; Cardiff’s biggest company, meanwhile, Admiral Insurance only started in 1993. It’s also reassuring to see such an industry spread: utilities, food and manufacturing, as well as financial services and IT. Britain, it seems, is a tapestry of talent.

Perhaps most important, “Who’s the business?” will inject some business evidence into what’s likely to be a fevered run-up to the 2015 General Election. What’s the biggest company in your area? Are they public, private, UK or foreign-owned? Are they in mature industries or thrusting new sectors? Is Britain’s economy diverse enough to withstand future volatility? For the very first time, you’ll have some answers…

In fact, I think it's a great move by Companies House, and here's why:

1. First off, it shows once again that the UK is a pioneer in data transparency, the first country anywhere to establish a truly open register of business information. DueDil kickstarted the transparency revolution back in 2011, providing vast amounts of company information for free, and we love any moves to open up more.

2. The second effect is to bring visibility to the very real problem around private company information.

Let me share some facts: according to the European Commission, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) accounted for 99.8 percent of the number of businesses, 67.4 percent of employment and 58.1 per cent of GDP in the European Union in 2011. These SMEs are almost entirely privately owned, with few formal reporting requirements.

So, while you can find out pretty well anything you want about a publicly quoted company, it's very hard to understand the story behind the bulk of the world's economy - its privately owned businesses.

This has serious consequences for all of us. For example, across Europe alone, there's an estimated €250bn shortfall in lending to small and medium-sized businesses, largely caused by a lack of properly organised information on these companies. It's reckoned that, for similar reasons, there's a €450bn misallocation of finance across the EU - loans to SMEs that default in the first year *. This is missed opportunity, and inefficiency, on a massive scale.

It's important to point out that information on private companies is actually out there; it's just in all the wrong places. It's locked up in silos - inside government agencies and tax authorities, with the companies themselves and their banks, on websites. In other words, it's disorganised. DueDil's vision is to organise the world's private-company information so that it can be put to proper use for everyone's benefit. We haven't raised $22m in the past 12 months to flog company documents!

Bringing order to the world's private company information is no small task, and it doesn't even factor in the emerging datasets that may turn out to be even more illuminating than traditional company accounts. As business speeds up, it's my bet we'll soon need tools that give us real-time sensitivity to private-company performance, but that's for another day...

3. Finally, this announcement is good news because it will encourage competition and grow the market. The job of Companies House - of any registrar - is to make company information available to the public. This announcement actually makes our life better because it allows us to move on to the more important issues of contextualising that information, linking it together, helping people to analyse it, and making it useful.

In and of itself, data and documents aren't useful. What makes them useful is the information and insight that you can gain from them. To turn data into information and insight, you need to make it searchable, discoverable, contextualise it, map it and make it accessible; you need algorithms to help people make decisions.

As Companies House itself says, this move "will open up opportunities for entrepreneurs to come up with innovative ways of using the information." I couldn't agree more!

This article was first published on the Huffington Post. 

Mathew’s coding skills soared, he left school early, founded his own company and started contracting his new skills out. He’d found his niche, and that pre-teen hobby changed his life.

Mathew is now a spectacular member of the team here at DueDil. His story - there are similar ones among our talented engineers - shows that access to technology, at the right moment, can be huge. Whether it’s at school, at home or in a club, getting your hands on technology can help you carve your own path in life.

That’s why we’re so proud to stand behind CREATE!

CREATE! is a campaign to help teachers connect their students to careers in technology and enterprise. Its mission to inspire students to create their own solutions to challenges they see around them, and to provide a clear link in how the skills they are learning in school can be used to create the businesses of the future.

The campaign provides schools with free resources to help bring their STEM, computing, economics, enterprise and careers curriculum to life - through events with existing entrepreneurs, an app ideas competition and additional programs at the intersection of innovation and enterprise.

Sherry Coutu, chairman of Founders4Schools and driving force behind CREATE! says: “100 per cent of net new jobs created in the UK are from companies less than five years old, and there will be three million new jobs created by the app economy in the next five years. We want to help show students where the future jobs are, and encourage them to develop the skills to fill and create these jobs.”

The CREATE! campaign is urging teachers to act now and get involved during the autumn term. Here are some ways teachers can get started:

Inspire your students to think of their own business ideas by signing up now for an empowering hour with successful entrepreneurs in the UK.

Enter your students in our app ideas competition by uploading a short video of their idea by October 9.

Prepare your students even further for their future with Apps for Good, Behind the Screen, TeenTech and Young Rewired State!

Presenting the award, Vince Cable said, “Migrant entrepreneurs make a hugely significant contribution to the UK economy and the Tech City News International Hall of Fame puts the spotlight on the achievements of some of these individuals. The Government is committed to fostering this talent and making the UK the place for their businesses to succeed.”

Earlier this year, DueDil and the Centre for Entrepreneurs produced a ground-breaking report showing that one in seven UK companies are founded (or co-founded) by non-UK nationals. The research, which was covered worldwide by more than 100 broadcasters and publications, was also cited by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in his televised debates with UKIP leader Nigel Farage, and has shifted public attention onto what immigrants bring to Britain, not whether they’re a drain on resources.

In the build-up to next year’s General Election, the report was part of DueDil’s mission to inject evidence and data – not just conjecture and hyperbole – into our most important public policy debates.

Unfortunately, at the very moment that the “Best Enterprise/SaaS/B2B Startup” category was announced, the Europas were struck by, ahem, “technical difficulties” so the audience didn’t get to hear about the candidates. They did later hear from Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, but we’re not sure that’s a fair trade, so here are the back stories on the six great companies up for “Best Enterprise/SaaS/B2B Startup” 2014.

Headquartered in San Francisco, the social data analyst (and eventual category winner) Datasift was founded by ex-Tweetmeme boss Nick Halstead. With $71.7m raised in total, and legendary investor Hermann Hauser in on the seed round, the firm aims to make social media data “affordable and easy to use”.

In fund-raising terms, Import.io was the junior of the group ($1.3m raised since it was founded by Andrew Fogg, Matt Painter and David White in June 2012), but the London-based firm is in a hot space transforming websites into a table of data or an API.

Based out of California and Budapest, Prezi has $14.3m behind its vision of helping businesses connect more powerfully with one another. Pre-event, they’d already tweeted out a cool-looking presentation to all Europas’ candidates. Neat.

Qubit is right in the engine room of the data scene, building products for collecting and processing large data sets, and then selling these on so that marketers can optimize their sites and drive sales. Just under $9m raised, cash in the bank, heavy hitters in the exec team, it’s a serious player in the making.

Last up was Wunderlist. The Berlin-based firm calls itself “the only way to organize your life and business”. At the back end of last year, it sealed a $19m series B round with the mighty Sequoia Capital.

With $24m so far invested in DueDil’s vision of organising private company infomation, the total funds raised among the candidates was a stonking $139.3m. On the same day that new research showed the “ambition gap” growing between the US and UK, these six great companies show that Europe really can hold its own in the big dreams stakes.

Next time you're in your local pharmacy, take a detour to the men's shaving aisle. When you get there, scan the shelves in front of you. You'll see high-gloss packaging, lots of "Fusion" and "Turbo" and "Mach" brands. It's almost like you're in the Formula 1 pit lane, isn't it? The choice seems abundant.

In fact, you're staring at an oligopoly, a market controlled by two multi-billion dollar corporations with 92% market share of shaving hardware products. Whatever you choose from those flimsy little metal hangers, it's probably owned by Gillette or Wilkinson Sword. While there are some valiant entrepreneurs in the shaving sector, like Will King (King of Shaves) and Simon Duffy and Rhodri Ferrier (Bulldog), for the most part this is the land of megacorps, where prices are high and innovation isn't quite what it seems.

Oligopolies deprive customers of knowledge and information. Take energy, a sector so opaque in the UK that even the regulator Ian Marlee recently admitted that he couldn't figure out whether energy suppliers were buying electricity from their own power plants at inflated prices, and passing these on to customers. "Actually there isn't enough transparency to be able to actually look at that," was how he put it.

Surely the most egregious example of a sector where power and information are locked away by a few incumbents, is academic publishing. While the internet has liberated knowledge in many spheres of life, university libraries still have to pay vast sums of our money to a handful of publishers to access the latest printed journals. And - scarcely believable in the social media age - academics have to pay for the privilege of having their research reviewed by their peers.

The great 19th century historian Thomas Macaulay, who introduced the English language to India, said that "the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad." Two hundred years later, he'd be shocked that in petrol retail, dental implants, banks, airlines and, yes, business information, closed oligopolies and quasi-monopolies persist.

But all is not lost. The same winds of change that transformed music, bookselling and the media, are howling through the cracks. Price comparison sites are illuminating closed markets; APIs (application programming interfaces) are giving small companies huge data and innovative power. The Open Access Movement is creating a social framework for academics to share ideas, particularly in new fields of discovery, which will eventually break the stranglehold of the academic publishing industry. For many entrepreneurs, monopolistic practices are flagging up huge market opportunities.

Indeed, in the academic world, the ruling junta has already been rumbled by Chris Anderson's entrepreneurial model, which challenges the very idea of what comprises academic prestige. The phenomenal success of the TED Talks has has turned academics into rock stars and put big ideas centre stage in public discourse. As The Economist said recently, in an article celebrating their 20th anniversary: "TED is the perfect example of the power of disruptive innovation... TED has done more to advance the art of lecturing than Oxford University has done in a thousand years."

“While they promise much, most CRM systems are massively frustrating,” says DueDil COO Justin Fitzpatrick. “It’s estimated that 63% of CRM initiatives fail, often because sales teams don’t input and keep contacts up to date, and the data inevitably becomes unfit for purpose.”

Our v3 DueDil API turns the CRM problem on its head. As tech bible The Next Web puts it, “The release is looking to fix the age-old problem of managing customer information in CRM systems by enabling DueDil users to embed and then automatically update the DueDil platform inside their own operations. The idea is that this leaves more time for other aspects of the business and sales team to concentrate on, rather than having to keep records up to date.”

By including DueDil's advanced search features, the v3 API enables customers to define and qualify customer and prospect profiles, based on filters such as growth rates, location and size. As Justin Fitzpatrick says, "all organisations have key metrics and business triggers; the v3 DueDil API enables you to define, track and keep them at the heart of your business." 

You can also use the v3 DueDil API to power applications with up-to-date data and analytics, monitor the health of your own customers and suppliers, authenticate individuals and companies, and map industry sectors. 

Over the past six weeks, the v3 DueDil API has been trialled among ten Enterprise customers. The online accounting firm Clear Books is already using the v3 API to provide latest financial reports to its community of 10,000 accountants. You can read other client case studies at our new developer-friendly API portal. 

The announcement of the v3 DueDil API comes just four weeks after we closed our $17m Series B financing round, led by Oak Investment Partners. DueDil has raised $22m in the past 11 months. This API release is the first in a series of planned product releases in 2014, all focused on organising private company data and enabling the integration of up-to-date business intelligence. Watch this space for more action!

To find out more about the DueDil v3 API, email Luke Robertson, our technical account manager. He’s ready to talk...

In this context, it baffles me that the immigration debate in Britain always focuses on how much it costs to bring in immigrants, rather than how much they offer back. Right now in the US, for example, 60% of the top technology businesses have migrant founders. Can we in Britain really afford to risk turning away the next Sergey Brin?

I've got to put my cards on the table. I'm an American migrant entrepreneur. My company,DueDil, which employs about 40 people directly and engages (whether as customers, suppliers or partners) with thousands more, is my third entrepreneurial venture in the UK. We employ people from Egypt, Macedonia, Brazil, Australia, Israel, Poland, Slovenia, Pakistan - and even England!

The silence around the contribution of immigrants is mainly down to a lack of hard evidence. So yesterday we launched a report called Migrant Entrepreneurs: Building our Businesses, Creating our Jobs, with the Centre for Entrepreneurs, to examine for the first time Britain's real immigrant economics. Here are just some of the numbers we discovered:

Britain is a hub for young, productive, entrepreneurial migrants from 155 countries across the world. There are 456,073 migrant entrepreneurs in the UK, who have founded or co-founded 465,527 companies. These migrant entrepreneurs are, on average, eight years younger than the typical UK-born entrepreneur - 44 vs 52.

Migrant entrepreneurs are behind one in seven of all UK companies. Stop and think about that. And their entrepreneurial activity is near double that of UK-born individuals.

In the SME (small and medium-sized companies) sector alone, migrant entrepreneurs have created more than one million jobs.

Still believe migrants are a drain on society? I reckon this data moves the immigration debate into a whole new realm.

Sure, it leaves tough questions for politicians, but this research is also helpful because it gives them a start point. The writer and economist John Kay put it in the right order when he said: "Pluralism is the key to the success of a market economy. But pluralism must also be disciplined." I think we need to look first at immigrants' entrepreneurial potential and professional skillsets, then figure out the policy structures after that.

In my experience, this country is really welcoming to foreign entrepreneurs. I got my visa within two days, which would have been unthinkable in America! With the English language, the GMT timezone and the government's far-sighted regime, the UK is one of the greatest places in the world for migrant entrepreneurs to set up a business, and I really hope it stays that way. We need every competitive edge we can find.

DueDil, the business discovery platform, today announced it has completed its Series B financing round, led by Oak Investment Partners, which has increased its commitment to the London-based company.

The funding round was also supported by existing investors Notion Capital and Passion Capital. With its new investment, Oak Investment Partners will take a seat on the DueDil board, alongside existing board members.

This latest funding follows the company’s Series A financing in April 2013, and brings total investment in DueDil to $22m over the past 10 months.

The new capital will be used to increase DueDil’s user acquisition activity; deepen user engagement through new personalisation, discovery and network tools; and bring DueDil’s web coverage to new geographies. Customers can currently access information on companies and directors in 22 different countries via the DueDil API.

Already the largest source of private company information in the UK and Ireland, DueDil has democratised and transformed the business information sector by enabling any individual or business to access up-to-date information on all companies and directors.

DueDil founder and CEO Damian Kimmelman said: “Business has an information problem. While you can find a stranger’s entire employment history online, it’s difficult to find detailed information on their company. This poor information flow leads to bad decisions, increases risk and creates missed opportunities.”

“Our vision is a world of real-time decision intelligence, one where data is integrated seamlessly into business decision-making. To realise this, DueDil’s next phase is about embedding world-class discovery tools, platforms and networks into daily working life. Some of the smartest people and companies in the world are plugging into DueDil to exploit our unique business data and insights.”

Ifty Ahmed, General Partner at Oak Investment Partners, said: “We’re excited by the scale of the market that DueDil is creating. Business information is a multi-billion dollar industry that’s changed little in decades. In particular, DueDil is enabling small and medium-sized companies, which represent 99% of all businesses, to access rich insights and information. The DueDil executive team has a clear strategy for reordering the business information sector around customers, and is executing in an impressive way.”

The Series B funding is the latest in a series of significant achievements at DueDil. In the past 12 months, the company has:

Doubled in size since the Series A round and is expected to double again in the next 12 months.

Seen consistent growth in its blue-chip Enterprise customer base, including among most of the FTSE 100.

Launched the v2 DueDil and International API in May 2013, with the v3 API due for release later this month (March 2014).

Been named among Wired magazine’s ten hottest London startups; featured in Forbes’ “Britain’s Six Best Financial Technology Businesses” and in the 2013 & 2014 FinTech 50; listed as a Rising Star in the Salesforce Innovation Challenge 2014.

Well, you know the rest. As the charming picture shows, team BrightSun (aka Canada) sneaked a brutal contest 1-0, and the Big Macs were duly delivered to the door.

There is a postscript to this touching tale. In the final, the Canadian team went on to meet Sweden, and our good friends at BrightSun organised a similar wager with a Swedish company; this time the prize for a Canadian win was a delivery of IKEA meatballs.