August Roundup

Hi all, welcome to the first edition of UK Startup roundup!

The purpose of this is to recap all the startups news and Growth Hub analysis that I've completed, while giving more of my opinions as opposed to just hard analysis.

This newsletter will likely be every 2 weeks when it’s reporting season and slightly less frequently when it’s not.

Let me know what you think.

I’ve created this newsletter in collaboration with Mercuryo . I started building the Growth Hub database over a year ago so it’s a great milestone to sign my first partnership so please do check them out!

News?

• It’s been a huge month for Revolut who have secured an insane $45bn valuation (and in doing so have meant crowdcube investors are sitting on a 40,100% returns - see below), and FINALLY got a banking licence
• There was one new UK unicorn minted, in the form of Flo. Another UK unicorn is always great news, even if this one did attract some controversy over being the first femtech unicorn while being entirely male-founded.

• Deliveroo hit profitability. They made a small but notable profit. Great news for the company, however a lot of people reacted negatively to it as people in the UK are clearly still not thrilled about their business model
• TransferGo saw huge revenue growth.
• Thought Machine latest results show a company whose growth has slowed, whose GM is shrinking and cash piles are running low.?
• Cuvva continues to demonstrate how to be a high growth profitable insurtech, something even rarer that a unicorn in my view. Lower GM’s have made achieving profitability much harder compared to other fintechs.?
• Chip released 2023 results and 2024 H1 results. It’s seen huge growth. The question is always whether they can keep their customers when interest rates drop.

Insights?

• Crowdcube investors are sitting on huge revolut returns. After I posted this the story was picked up by Sifted, The Times and Forbes. I spoke to the Times journalist about their article as it contained quite a serious analytical mistake. I?pointed this out and provided the correct data, yet as of writing (>2 weeks later) it's still wrong. It's a sad state of affairs when journalists are content to have false information out there under their names.

• UK Fintechs generated a whopping ￡1bn of profit. Interest rates have played a huge role in this, check out my analysis below to see who has benefitted the most.

• My choice for the next 6 UK Unicorns: Moneybox, Cleo, Alicia Bank, Huel, Clearbank, Cognism. All are growing insanely quickly having revenue around or over ￡100m and most are now profitable.
• I analysed the UK's fastest growing companies based on their FY2023 results. Fintech dominated, however more results will be coming soon and I will update the table as they arrive.

• Interest rates are driving huge growth in both revenue and profitability for UK fintechs. I compare which companies are benefiting the most.

If you've got this far - thank you!

September is one of the biggest months of the year for financial reporting, so expect to see lots more news and analysis from me as I dig into the reports of the UK's biggest startups.

STAY TUNED!

This publication is brought to you in collaboration with Mercuryo. Mercuryo is the payments power behind the leading web3 companies. From onboarding and retention, to scaling revenues – Mercuryo makes the crypto promise come true for 200+ companies and 7M+ users globally.