Exit planning
OrganOx
International expansion
Female founders
As part of our Stories of Growth series, we interview the co-founder of the mobile identity and intelligence business.
TMT ID was co-founded by John Wilkinson (CEO) and Fergal Parkinson (CMO) in 2016 to help companies use mobile and network data to better understand their customers, prevent fraud and make smarter decisions.
In 2025, BGF invested £30m to support its next stage of growth, including expansion into the US market and product development. Read on to find out more about the origins of TMT ID, the company’s growth journey and why doing ‘boring jobs’ can benefit entrepreneurs.
Our path to starting the business was fairly traditional. I partnered with four old friends and we decided to try and work for nothing by starting a business. We had an idea, some early customers, and grew from there.
The concept was simple. Two things were happening in the market, and still are. ‘Big data’ was the buzzword of the day, allowing companies to analyse and harness third-party information in ways they never had before. At the same time, the arrival of smartphones put a computer in everyone’s pocket.
We thought there would be a lot of interesting businesses created by those two trends colliding, particularly those with access to the deluge of data being created. Those trends haven’t stopped; online and mobile platforms are constantly evolving and exposed to new types of fraud, while the volume of information generated by smart devices and digital interactions has increased exponentially.
We started the business as TMT Analysis – the stock market acronym for technology, media and telecoms. Originally, the plan was to use our proprietary datasets to design analysis on stocks, so we sold services into hedge funds, merchant banks and the wider financial services market.
But as we went down this road, we realised it was quite a tough way to start a business. We’d be better off using the same data through different channels – into SMS aggregators who send out two-factor authentication and customer service messages, and identity and technology companies that need to conduct regular age verification or KYC checks.
There were several pivots along the way, which is the fashionable word for changing your mind. Our product is now a query-based service built on aggregated mobile and network data, embedded through a single API. But the fundamental logic stayed the same: trying to create as interesting a pool of data as possible.
We eventually reached a point where we needed to scale the business more quickly and provide some liquidity to key members of the team. A new phase of growth, including establishing a US entity, required more professionals around us and more robust processes. It was very much a growing-up moment for the business in a lot of ways.
That meant looking for funding. We ran a broad process with a lot of different funds, both American and British. We’d actually started talking to BGF maybe three or four years before we did the deal.
The minority model stood out. We still wanted to run the business, so an approach not contingent on control worked well. But fundamentally, it was about good people and a fair proposal, both of which felt right for us. They were flexible, which mattered.
It’s still pretty early – we only took investment less than a year ago. But a lot of the value creation support available is really interesting, and we’re trying to understand how we can harness it where appropriate. We’re excited about where we are.
I should have started the company sooner. When you’re in an interesting, steady, good job and you can see prospects, it’s very hard to leave. I think sometimes you need to be pushed rather than making a comfortable move.
My advice to other entrepreneurs? It’s not all about the idea. A lot of us would benefit from spending time working in boring businesses to learn management. When you do that, you understand how an industry works, who’s in it, how people behave, what they do — and then you can work out how to compete.
That said, who am I to give advice? If people have the courage to leap, they absolutely should.
You can find pretty much anyone you want here in the UK. It’s a melting pot of people and ideas, with a deep legal and institutional structure. It gets harder after that.
The cost of everything is high — employment, power, the cost of setting up a business generally. And it’s the easiest thing in the world to get a loan for a car or a house, but it can be very hard to get one to start a business. Small companies and sole traders should be much more encouraged — and then you’d see bigger companies flourish from that.
It may not be the most straightforward place to do business. But I’m very proud of everything we’ve achieved so far, solving fraud and KYC issues for some of the world’s biggest tech, financial services and ecommerce organisations. Our journey is just beginning.
