Here's my 2021 into 2022 summary!

As we start a new year, I want to wish my connections all the best for 2022.

Despite 2021 being a hard year where continuing uncertainty made planning harder, I’ve personally really enjoyed some key moments. We grew the team, welcoming former entrepreneur and now marketing and community engagement supremo?Charlotte Simmons?to the team at?White Horse Capital, to help us find more ambitious tech companies looking for growth support and funding (Seed to Series B). Charlotte helped us reengage with the real world as we returned to hosting some great investor / entrepreneur events, with our partners Haysmacintyre?and Marriott Harrison.?

I loved being back in a room watching and encouraging the life-changing connections being made, between great company founders and their future investors! As a sociable person, missing these events has been a bit miserable, and I hope 2022 allows much more of this :-)

Staying with that “in person” vibe, it was great to toast our VC Readiness Programme ‘graduate’?Gophr, following their ￡4m raise from?Nauta Capital?which we advised on, in an actual pub. I was astounded to hear the business had trebled headcount and revenue in less than a year, well done Seb Robert?and team.

Gophr was just one successful raise for our clients, of about ￡112m raised across the year. Our year ended as busy as ever, in the last fortnight we saw returning client Newsflare close its latest multi-million pound growth capital round in a deal put together by our colleague?Simon Fox?(details to follow in January). We also had the excellent outcome of seeing another longstanding relationship mature, as former Accelerator Academy graduate and then White Horse Capital client, Alex Packham?achieved a very successful sale of his company ContentCal?to US software giant Adobe. I was proud to be an early supporter and investor in ContentCal and I truly believe its a perfect case study of growing a UK tech scaleup. I wrote about this in more detail here.

In aggregate, as well as the ￡112m+ invested into our client companies this year, we’ve seen more than ￡250m of exits. A record year for us, and taking our running total well north of ￡500m of deals that White Horse Capital has advised / supported. We also have a strong pipeline of great scaleups currently in negotiations to close their next funding rounds including Forestreet, Optalitix, JobSwipe, ExpoPlatform, Explori, Webdadi, JoinedUp and others, whom I envisage we will close VC funding rounds for in the next quarter or so.

We continue to actively seek out great companies looking to raise late seed, Series A and Series B funding rounds, (￡1-20m), with our next 2 investor readiness programmes launching in February (last call!), Accelerator Academy for late seed stage / The ScaleUp Accelerator for Series A, plus our regular work at White Horse Capital, supporting companies at Series A-B, and M&A work. If this is you or someone you know, get in touch!

?I also chair The Accelerator Network, where highlights from the year included:

·?Concluding our 5 year contract with DCMS, hosting a public debrief?with the Minister?Matt Warman, who congratulated us and our partners including Digital Catapult, for supporting 253 cyber startups, who went on to raise ￡215m+! I remain an active board member at the Cyber Growth Partnership, and leading the Cyber Champions task force, so am very keen to see what is next for UK cyber startups.

·?Delivering our first international scaling accelerator programme to support leading Italian scaleups, looking to expand to the UK through Italian Trade Agency, and led by our (helpfully bilingual!) colleague Luigi Meschini.?Grateful to our ecosystem partners, 40 of whom played a role in the success of this inaugural programme, and its ability to attract great international scaleups to want to do business in the UK.

·?We pivoted the Accelerator Academy taking our 10 year record of supporting seed stage companies to prepare for early growth and seed funding and making it even more accountable, with an investment outcome now being the primary goal. Thank you for the trust in the new approach offered to us by Outt, Coeus Software, Unavine, Scene, STEP and DataFeast?…And our partners Beavis Morgan?and Marriott Harrison for supporting the pivot. We look forward to supporting these latest startups through their successful seed rounds, and providing onward growth support. This reinforces the Accelerator Academy’s role as the accelerator that delivers the most efficient connection to capital. With ￡150m+ raised for our 300 alumni, it has earned its continuing place in the startup ecosystem. Congrats to Luigi and?Duncan Knight?who led on this “refresh” of the programme.

Looking ahead, we have something?very exiting?planned for Q2; essentially a new community for funded founders who want to turn the process of scaling, with expertise and fundraising, into a managed relationship rather than just a transaction, supported by a new fund privately accessible by the community, that we are investing into alongside some amazing exited entrepreneurs and other forward thinking Limited Partners (LPs). I am especially excited, as I think this will be a game-changer for UK venture, in the same way launching our first accelerator programme a decade ago was, and a number of other firsts we have proudly been party to over that time.

Thanks for reading my end of year note, if you feel there’s an opportunity for us to work together in 2022, do please let me know. Happy New Year!