The entrepreneur behind a fast-growing tech firm based in Altrincham has outlined its plan for growth after completing a $35 million funding round.
Data transformation software provider Matillion has delivered triple-digit revenue growth for three consecutive years and CEO Matthew Scullion has no intention of slowing down.
Matillion’s software empowers its customers to extract data from a wide number of sources and transform it into analytics-ready data.
Scullion says the company is ideally placed to capitalise on two ‘IT megatrends’.
“We’re delighted with the progress we’ve made and excited about the journey we’ve still got to come,” he told BusinessCloud. “We’re operating in an amazing set of market tailwinds, at the intersection of two IT megatrends.
“Firstly, the cloud: everyone is racing to deploy new workloads and migrate workloads into the cloud in a once-in-a-generation shift in the way that corporate IT is delivered. Secondly data analytics: the compulsion for companies to compete using data.
“A lot of companies, globally and of any scale, could and we hope will end up using Matillion’s software.”
The company, which has raised $60m total funding to date, already has close to 600 clients in around 40 countries including Bose, GE, Siemens, Fox and Accenture.
“We’ve recruited heavily and our overall headcount is about 125 people,” said Scullion. “At the start of 2018 that number was in the 80s, so we’ve grown it by 50 per cent in the first five months of the year.”
Of those around 80 are based in Altrincham. After raising $20m investment last year, Scullion told BusinessCloud that he aims to take on and beat Silicon Valley competition but insisted he would never move the business away from Manchester.
“We expect to end this year with somewhere between 180-200 Matillioners. Many of those jobs will be created in Manchester,” he continued. “One of the reasons for that is that Manchester is the home of product and engineering.”
Matillion also operates from offices in New York, Seattle and, most recently, Denver, which has become the company’s largest base in the US.
The Seattle office is focused on maintaining and developing alliances with enterprise-level tech firms based on the West Coast of America.
“120-odd employees feels like a lot to me, but it’s pretty small compared to Microsoft or Google. I think we’re beyond start-up and now at the scale-up stage,” he said.
“We have a disproportionately large number of large-cap enterprise accounts making up our customers. That’s because our software resonates well with sophisticated use-cases and IT environments, which you tend to find in larger companies.
“Our principal goals are about fiscal growth. The key number we track is ARR, annually recurring revenue – the up-to-date measure of your revenue run-rate.
“How do you grow that? Add more customers; add more value to each of those customers so they want to consume more of your software; and retain your customers.
“All these levers contribute to the shared goal we have at Matillon. It’s like a soccer game: the guy who scores the goal is the striker; the guy who stops the goals going in is the defender or goalkeeper; but you also have the coach, the physiotherapist, the guys selling tickets outside the front of the stadium.
“They’re all part of the team and they know they’ve won because there’s a scoreline.
“For us, that scoreline is ARR and our goal is to, once again in 2019, more than double our ARR – deliver over 100 per cent growth.”
Battery Ventures led its largest round which also included existing investors Sapphire Ventures and Scale Venture Partners. Scullion says that the Silicon Valley pedigree of the investors was crucial to partnering with them.
“We’ve got some of the world’s best investors behind our company and just added another one this week,” he said.
“I think it’s incredibly important to pick the right investor. You’re likely to have a very long relationship with these people – in some cases it can be longer than the average marriage!
“They’re a big fund and that’s helpful because they tend to invest in companies which they think could really make it and become consequential and consistent businesses.
“That’s what we want to do at Matillion – we want to make a dent in a universe bigger than ourselves and build a company of consequence.”
UK national law firm Shoosmiths advised Matillion on the deal.