Whilst the amount of equity finance a tech startup has raised is a good measure of investor confidence, it’s also important to look at how this finance translates into sales. After all, this will decide the ultimate success of the company in the future. If a company fails to translate investor backing into turnover, like Blippar, then the results are predictably negative. In this post, we highlight the UK’s fastest growing tech startups in 2018, by growth in turnover. * *
*Based on their latest filed accounts.
**Where companies have filed their first full accounts, we’ve looked at the amount, not the percentage increase.
The UK’s fastest growing tech startups
1 – Darktrace
In their first set of turnover accounts for 2017, developer of AI-enabled cyber security software Darktrace saw its sales jump to £30.8m, boosted by recent contracts from a variety of institutions, including a Hong Kong university and the Las Vegas city authority. Darktrace tops our list of the UK’s fastest growing tech startups.
2 – improbable
Improbable, whose slightly esoteric product centres around the creation of virtual worlds, achieved £7.82m in sales in their first turnover filings. CEO Herman Narula believes these worlds could one day develop their own economies and societies: “basically, we want to build The Matrix.”
3 – Revolut
Challenger bank Revolut, who is fast-developing an array of additional financial products including cryptocurrency trading and investment services, saw their turnover jump by 442% 2016 – 2017, from £2.36m to £12.8m.
4 – Transferwise
Arguably the UK’s leading fintech startup, Transferwise operates a platform through which users can transfer money abroad, avoiding the high rates set by the traditional financial institutions. In 2017, their sales grew by 140% to £67m. Out of the five tech startups on this list, Transferwise is the closest to profitability, incurring operating losses of just £56k, down from £17.4m the year before.
5 – Deliveroo
This year the UK’s most famous tech startup Deliveroo saw turnover jump by 114% to £277m. Whilst the cost of sales still outweigh turnover, the rate of this growth is slowing – last year losses grew just 26%. Whilst still loss-making (as with every tech startup on this list), Uber clearly sees Deliveroo as a viable business threat, having made a bid to acquire them earlier this year.
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