The founder of the media agency Gorkana has set up a rival company four months after the agency was sold in a deal worth up to £200m.
Alex Northcott, who founded Gorkana in March 2003 with Michael Webster, has launched Roxhill Media with two other former staff of the digital PR jobs and media industry information company.
Roxhill describes itself as “the definitive media database for financial and corporate PRs”.
Northcott said that new technology would play an important role in the new venture.
“In the last three years there have been huge strides in technology which means you can use the latest predictive analytics and algorithms to crunch content and give it meaning,” he said.
Northcott has been joined by Gorkana UK’s former sales director, Philip Godson, and its former new business chief, Andy Robinson, who are both directors of the new company.
The Daily Telegraph reports that Roxhill has a total of 14 staff, five of whom used to work for Gorkana.
Gorkana was sold to its rival Cision, owned by the US private equity firm GTCR, in October last year in a deal thought to be worth as much as £200m. GTCR had acquired the business from private equity firm Exponent, which bought Northcott and Webster’s stakes in Gorkana in 2010.
Northcott worked for JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley before founding Gorkana with Michael Webster in 2003. He named the company after Sergeant Gorkana, the Gurkha who saved his life by rescuing him from a swamp while he was in the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Borneo.
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