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Two’s Company: Tim Critchley and David Sear

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BGF News 06.17.2015

Tags Portfolio News & Features

A hands-off, respectful investor-investee relationship gives other entrepreneurs the confidence to seek outside funding.

In October 2014, fraud prevention software company Semafone received a £4m investment from BGF.

Semafone provides the fraud prevention software necessary for companies to securely take customer payments over the phone. Its technology masks the tones from a cardholder’s telephone and replaces them with an unrecognisable flat tone.

Semafone’s CEO Tim Critchley realised that after winning a major deal with BT, a big investment of outside capital would really help the company deliver, and so approached BGF.

BGF’s investment excited Tim, as well as the firm’s network of business contacts.

David Sear was already the chairman of Semafone, three years before BGF’s investment, and he continued in the role following the funding, as his relationship with Tim has been key.

Here, in The Telegraph’s Two’s Company series, David and Tim discuss how they valued BGF’s relationship with Semafone’s senior management team and how BGF supported David remaining as the company’s chairman following the investment:

Two’s Company: Tim Critchley and David Sear

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Victorian Sliders targets ‘world-class’ status after new £4 million BGF investment

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Zahra is a technology leader and is the Executive Vice President and CEO of Salesforce UK & Ireland. She was appointed in March 2021 to lead the company’s operations across both key growth markets.

Prior to this, Zahra spent 22 years at Accenture and most recently Zahra led Accenture Technology in the UK/I for almost four years and served as an executive board member / director on the board of directors.

As Technology leader she was a transformative force. She was unrelenting in making the service more market-facing and repositioned the business within the ecosystem, notably with the award-winning Kaleidoscope concept. At the same time, she was personally engaged across a range of clients across automotive, legal, government, banking, energy & life sciences where she was instrumental in some of the most significant client relationships and client transformation activities.

During her 22 years, Zahra gained transformation experience across a number of clients and industries including grocery retail, oil and gas, retail banking, healthcare & telecoms. She believes that success comes not only from deep technology expertise, but also an understanding of the value it can bring to customers, employees, partners and anyone involved in its use. Zahra has worked with clients to help define value and achieve it by connecting them to vast ecosystem of technologies, from cloud and ERP platforms to artificial intelligence engines or extended reality.

Zahra has pioneered a number of ‘firsts’ – from convening the UK technology ecosystem at the award-winning Kaleidoscope to patented uses of cloud technology for energy industry divestments.

Zahra is strong advocate for diversity and inclusion and has held a number of D&I leadership roles globally and within the UK/I. She has written on diversity for publications, including Management Today, Forbes and The Telegraph.

She currently sits on the boards of TechUK, Cancer Research UK and Movement to Work.

Zahra has been widely recognised throughout her career as an industry leader, including being named as number thirteen in Computer Weekly’s ‘Most Influential 50 People in UK Tech 2022;’ also in Computer Weekly’s “50 Most Influential People in UK Tech 2021,” and Women in IT’s “Woman of the Year – 2019” finalist.

Zahra lives between London and Northamptonshire with her husband Stephen and enjoys spinning & running.

Zahra Bahrololoumi will be hosting Scaleup week sessions:

20 Sep

Working for everyone: how scaleups can build inclusive workforces

3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Founder and CEO of Learnerbly – the workplace learning marketplace. We empower employees through learning stipends to access the very best professional development opportunities based on what they need to lean and how they like to learn (coaching, courses, e-learning, conferences, books, podcasts + more) curated from 250+ of the top L&D providers. We are trusted by some of the world’s most progressive scale-ups and enterprises including King.com, GoCardless, IDEO, Curve, HelloFresh, Bazaarvoice, WeTransfer and many more. With 95%+ employee activation rates and 40-60% monthly engagement (3X+ industry average) across 100+ clients, Learnerbly creates impactful learning cultures for the modern hybrid organization.

Prior to Learnerbly Rajeeb founded Enternships.com, a portal that connects students and graduates to work placements in over 7000 start-ups and SMEs, and which developed innovative corporate talent programmes for clients such as Telefonica, Santander and Havas for which he was named the “02 X Young Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2009 and the youngest recipient of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion in 2013.

Rajeeb is also the Co-Founder of StartUp Britain, a national entrepreneurship campaign supported by the government; it was launched by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in March 2011. He served as a Trustee of UnLtd, the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs for over 10 years, and was recognised as one of the 1,000 Most Influential People in London by The Evening Standard. He graduated with First Class Honours in Economics and Management from the University of Oxford in 2008 and was appointed as the world’s youngest Young Global Leader (at 26) by the World Economic Forum in 2012.

Rajeeb is also a contributor for Forbes.com writing on issues such as the leadership, ‘future of work’ (or just work these days!), and entrepreneurship.

Rajeeb Dey MBE will be hosting Scaleup week sessions:

20 Sep

Working for everyone: how scaleups can build inclusive workforces

3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Stephen Welton is Executive Chair of BGF, a role he has held since July 2020, and is responsible for the strategic direction of the company. Before taking on the role of Executive Chairman, Stephen was the founder CEO of BGF between 2011 and 2020. Under Stephen’s leadership, BGF has grown from 1 to 16 offices across the UK and Ireland, with more than £2.2bn invested and a team of 170, becoming in the process the most active growth capital investor in the UK.

Stephen has extensive experience as an investor. Prior to BGF, he was one of the founding partners of the global private equity firm CCMP Capital (formerly JP Morgan Partners), and before that, Managing Director of Barclays Private Equity and Henderson Ventures, which he also co-founded.

In 2013, Stephen was appointed an advisor to the UK Government regarding the establishment of the British Business Bank and in 2017, served as a member of the Industry Panel advising HM Treasury on the Patient Capital Review and is currently a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Council. In 2018, Stephen was appointed a member of the first Council of Innovate UK, which forms an integral part of UK Research and Innovation. Stephen is also a member of the Diversity Project Advisory Board.

Stephen has served as an independent director on a broad range of companies over many years, both in the UK and internationally, and joined the board of FTSE 250 Intermediate Capital Group plc as a Non-Executive Director in September 2017. Stephen started his career in banking, has a law degree from Durham University and is a qualified Barrister-at-Law.

“BGF is operating at the very heart of the UK & Irish economies. We launched with the ambition to become a champion for British business, the most active provider of long-term capital and the first choice investor for ambitious entrepreneurs. I have no doubt that many of the great British companies of the future are already in our portfolio – and we have only just scratched the surface.”

Stephen Welton will be hosting Scaleup week sessions:

20 Sep

Achieving net zero: where will green investment come from?

9:30 am - 10:30 am

Graphcore (graphcore.ai) is a silicon and systems company based in Bristol- UK, that has developed a new type of processor, the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), to accelerate machine learning and AI applications. Since its founding in 2016, Nigel has secured over $700m in funding for the company from some of the world’s leading venture capital and financial firms including Atomico, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Merian, OTPP, Schroders, and Sequoia Capital, from major corporations including BMW, Bosch, Dell, Microsoft and Samsung and from eminent Artificial Intelligence innovators. At the company’s most recent funding round in December 2020, Graphcore was valued at $2.8Bn.

Nigel has a background as a technology business leader, entrepreneur and engineer having been CEO at two successful VC-backed processor companies XMOS and Picochip (sold to Nasdaq:MSPD, now Intel), a founder of Icera (sold to Nasdaq: NVDA) and VP/GM at Altera (Nasdaq: ALTR, sold to Intel for $17Bn) where he spent over 13 years and was responsible for establishing and building the European business unit that he grew from zero to $500m in annual revenues.

Nigel has an extensive network of connections in the global technology industry spanning USA, China, Asia and Europe. He is often called upon to speak at major industry events and has been recognized with numerous industry awards including, Icon of the Year at the Barclays Entrepreneurs Awards and ranked #1 on Business Insiders, 100 most influential people shaping British technology.

Nigel has served as a Board Member and Chairman at a number of technology businesses including as non-executive director and head of the technical advisory board at Imagination Technologies PLC, a FTSE LSE listed business, until its acquisition in 2017.

Nigel was a founding member of the Princes Trust Technology Leadership group which, with match funding support from the UK Government, was able to raise over £10m for the Princes Trust Charity.

Nigel studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Heriot Watt University and is the author on 3 granted patents. Nigel lives in Somerset, UK with his wife and two boys.

Nigel Toon will be hosting Scaleup week sessions:

21 Sep

Globalisation on pause? How scaleups can navigate today's uncertainty

9:30 am - 10:30 am