Scottish scaleups are sound but near more vision, by Nick Freer
/It was announced last week that Infracost, a technology platform used by over 1 in 10 Fortune 500 companies in the United States to track cloud computing costs, raised a $15 million series A investment round led by Pruven Capital with participation by Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital, two of the world’s most storied venture capital firms.
What many won’t have realised is that Infracost has strong roots in Edinburgh and Scotland. The founding team of brothers Hassan and Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott previously built one of the first cloud cost management startups from a base here - and as their latest venture Infracost has a distributed workforce, its teams are now located in San Diego, Orange County, California, and here in Scotland’s capital.
Only Hassan, Ali, and Alistair know the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into turning Infracost into such an investable technology scaleup company - and because Hassan wrote for this column (‘The incredible power of networks for startups’) almost exactly four years ago, when Infracost was in its infancy, it’s insightful to see how clear a vision Hassan had for his company’s success at that time.
https://www.scotsman.com/business/the-incredible-power-of-networks-for-startups-3455590
Yesterday, at the Barclays Campus in Glasgow, I took part in Kayode Alabi’s The Growth Blueprint Podcast, where we discussed how strategic communications supports scaleup companies like Infracost.
My own experience in this area goes back to Sequoia’s bumper investment into travel search site Skyscanner in 2013, valuing the company at around $800 million en route becoming a tech unicorn with a valuation of over $1 billion the following year.
I managed to unearth a press report in The Scotsman in early 2012, which stemmed from an interview we arranged for Skycanner’s CEO and co-founder Gareth Williams in which Williams sets out his ambition for Skyscanner to become “Scotland’s first $1 billion web company”. https://www.scotsman.com/news/transport/ipo-on-horizon-for-skyscanner-1645457
If there is a key word in the paragraph above it is “ambition”, and it’s a prerequisite for any founder on a trajectory to startup success. Williams had ambition in spades, and a clear vision of how he was going to reach the promised land.
Fast forward to 2021 and we advised FanDuel founders (who had built Scotland’s other tech unicorn at a similar time to Skyscanner) when they raised the largest ever seed round for a UK startup, with San Francisco-headquartered crypto investment firm Paradigm backing the new venture, sports betting platform BetDEX, to the tune of $21 million.
And when Index Ventures led Wordsmith AI’s $25 million series A round earlier this year, we worked alongside Wordsmith and Index’s PR team to prepare and execute the press announcement across the UK and international media.
In Scotland, as various high-level reports have indicated over the last few weeks, we need to raise our collective corporate ambition and hone our vision in order to produce more world-beating companies that will translate to the kind of future economy that will benefit us all.