EU Business News Q4 2018

16 EU BUSINESS NEWS / Q3 2018 , Meet The UK Technology Entrepreneur Who Sold Start-up To Silicon Valley Giant Silicon Valley firmvalued at $1bn acquires UK tech start-up Elevaate to boost Ecommerce, bringing strategic revenue-driving platform for search and sponsored product media to ecommerce site. Quotient Technology has recently announced its acquisition of UK start-up Elevaate, which uses an in-market technology platform to drive ecommerce sales through sponsored search and product ads on retailers’ properties and elsewhere on the web. This is the first acquisition in the UK by Quotient and will enable the company to help its retailer partners boost ecommerce media and sales at a time when shoppers are initiating an increasing number of trips directly on retailer websites. Elevaate was designed and created by entrepreneur Scott Weavers-Wright, based on a transactional CMS and bidding platform allowing brands and their agencies to bid for product platform on their retailer network. The technology matches brand product ads with relevant contextual placements mapped throughout the ecommerce purchase process. Proprietary algorithms, flexible bidding models, and rich analytics work together to ensure brands can optimize their programs to drive superior sales performance. Silicon Valley giant Quotient is the leading digital promotions, media and analytics company in its field. While Elevaate’s technology will be rolled out across Quotient’s customer base – including Albertsons group of grocers with $65 billion turnover – founder and CEO Weavers-Wright will leave the business to concentrate on new opportunities. Elevaate will continue to be headquartered here in Stamford in the UK, where its team will continue to run the U.S business from their head office and travel to the states regularly. Engineering teams will be tripled to support U.S rollout, both bringing highly- skilled engineering talent to Stamford and retaining it. Scott Weavers-Wright who founded the company in 2014 and sold previous company Kiddicare for £70m to Morrisons PLC, said: “I am very proud and excited for the team to be part of a billion-dollar business based in California. After all, it’s not every day a Silicon Valley giant acquires a tech platform in Stamford. It’s been an incredible journey over the last four years – in the early years of my career I always got asked by suppliers and brands if I could elevate their products higher up search results pages. Limitations on technology meant it wasn’t possible. In the following years I discovered supplier contribution formed a critical part of the trading arrangement between suppliers and the retailer at a global scale. And after asking ‘why is nobody doing this?’ I took the plunge, and this is now one of the biggest technology acquisitions in the UK this year. Having had such great success here, I fully intend to continue investing in digital businesses in Stamford.” In the past year, Silicon Valley investment in the UK has broken the £1bn threshold for the first time – representing a surge of 250 per cent in the past five years – with a vast majority of investment going to tech companies operating in the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ of Cambridge, London and Oxford. Despite claims US investors would shy away from the UK’s technology companies in the wake of Brexit, the number of deals rose from 21 in 2011 to 74 in 2017 according to a recent report by start-up database Beauhurst. While some industry experts have raised questions over whether the UK will ever produce its own tech ‘giant’ – a company valued at more than £100bn – several significant acquisitions made in the past decade represent Britain’s growing influence on the global technology industry, including social network Bebo and Google’s Deepmind AI project.