Insights from our portfolio

Joining a newly created role in a senior team is often most daunting in startups facing scale. It’s a recognition that the company has grown up, that its previous efforts are no longer befitting the business is now is, or is about to be. The challenge then is how to take your team to the next level, how to succeed if you’re moving to a new industry and have a lot to learn.

When you’re launching any new technology that can visibly impact people’s neighbourhoods and, even to some extent, how they see the sky out their window, these communities must be handled with care.

Culture plays such a fundamental part in the sustainability of an organisation. However, the values that underpin that culture may not be codified, so it’s important to make sure they are understood by all its employees.

Tech companies offering free trials is nothing new. A free trial has long been a great way to introduce your product to potential customers, and hopefully they’ll then like it enough to start paying for it when the trial ends.

Just like there are Olympic Games for world’s greatest athletes, for computational biologists, there is CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction). We just had the 13th competition (it takes place biannually). Until recently, it was just academic groups that played this game but now Tencent and Microsoft also show up. Like CASP12 in 2018, DeepMind’s AlphaFold came top but that is not the big news. The big news this time is by how much.

At the turn of the 19th century, Manchester became what is known as the ‘Cottonopolis’. A city at the centre of the British cotton industry, it industrialised the spinning and weaving of cloth, and in 1853, boasted over 108 mills.

We hosted a roundtable of execs from leading European fintech companies who shared their trials, tribulations, and successes of selling to banks and blimey, what a challenge that is.

Whether it's mini satellites bringing mobile phone signals to far flung places of the world, or your very own SunCube for $1,000, increased and affordable access to Earth observation hardware is providing businesses and governments alike, the ability to monitor natural disasters in almost real time or continue to make the world a more connected and data rich place.