Allica joins the Future Fifty

When I was a child, I wanted to be Prime Minister. In fact I came pretty close - winning a mock General Election at school, having run a campaign so unashamedly populist it would make even Trump blush.

Fortunately, those political leanings are long behind me - on a recent Spring Budget podcast I announced that I would “rather watch Teletubbies” than the budget speech in parliament.

So the mandatory No. 10 selfie is not because it’s my turn to be Prime Minister, but because today it was announced that Allica Bank has joined Tech Nation 's Future Fifty programme for the UK’s most promising scale-up firms.

Future Fifty alumni include household names like Deliveroo, Zoopla and Skyscanner, as well as leading fintechs such as Revolut, Wise and Monzo. In fact, 40% of the UK’s decacorns ($10bn+ valuation startups) are Future Fifty alumni.

Allica certainly can’t claim to be the coolest company on this year’s cohort - today I met a founder building world-leading quantum computing chips, and another building factories in space. We can, however, claim to be the fastest-growing, so I’ll take that!