Cambridge's only Springboard company leaves, lured by London talent pool
The one Cambridge startup to make it on to the 2011 Springboard accelerator is set to abandon Cambridge for London in search of the talent it needs to make a world class web-based business.Having closed what it describes as a medium-sized angel round on the last day of November, Arachnys is now recruiting web developers to help it build new data sets for new clients and while Cambridge has the level of expertise necessary, Arachnys believes it doesn't have enough.
"Our impression is that London's talent pool is more liquid for the kinds of skills we need," said Arachnys CEO, David Buxton. "There are plenty of very highly qualified people in Cambridge but they seem a bit less willing to leave jobs with big employers and work for startups.
"Also, the reality is that talent for this type of work is truly international – we've had applicants from Bulgaria, Italy, US, Russia, Portugal and Belgium so far – and London is a great place to attract global talent, whereas we just can't ask someone to move themselves and their family to Cambridge at this stage."
Arachnys will initially work out of Innovation Warehouse but expects to be looking for a larger office by the summer in the Shoreditch – Silicon Roundabout – area. Both sit on the fringes of the Square Mile, home to potential clients.
Arachnys captures specialist public data from many of the world's emerging economies for use by financial analysts, already has paying customers in the City of London and doesn't intend to seek any more external investment.
"We're already seeing a lot of interest from paying customers around our product and our plan is for the business to be at break-even within 12 months," said Buxton. "We don't have plans to take further funding as we see our current organic growth plans as achievable and very profitable.
"Our main priority is to grow the data sets that we give our customers access to by building a world-class data acquisition infrastructure. We are also hiring engineers with natural language processing expertise to help us become a leader in multilingual NLP and deliver valuable insights based on the data we harvest, consolidate and analyse."
The seed round was led by Martlet , the Marshall Group's investment arm, as well as Cambridge Capital Group and Cambridge Angels.
