It was six years ago when technology entrepreneur Sam Chapman entered the risk-averse insurance sector trying to take a risk on new technology.
The co-founder of The Floow, which crunches data to help prevent traffic accidents, knew traditional routes of finance would be difficult and expensive.
“If we’d sought support from financial houses, banks or more traditional routes, the repayment rates would have been extreme and the risks we’d have taken on personally as founders would have been prohibitive,” says Chapman, who received a loan from Creative England, the not-for-profit company that supports and invests in creative talent.
“It saw us as an innovator in the telematics space and, by championing us, it helped us take advantage of that by leaping ahead of what anyone else could do.”
Chapman says that the data captured helps prevent 16 out of every 100 road accidents. Two years ago his hard work catapulted the firm on to the CE50 list of top individuals and firms revolutionising the creative industries. It is published by Creative England and the fourth annual list of the 50 best up-and-coming creative businesses has just been released. Previous CE50 lists read like a Who’s Who of the country’s creative leading lights.
Chapman is unequivocal about the value of this form of funding for the digital sector. “There are a lot of tax breaks for manufacturing companies and companies that need expensive equipment as a capital expense, but there is no such investment for purchasing the staff you need to build something that later becomes the economic driver for your company,” he says. “That hampers the technology industry as a whole but Creative England filled that gap.”
The Floow has since taken further investment to expand operations in east Asia, but it’s a minority investment for non-voting and non-controlling rights.
“Insurers and drivers are saving money but at the same time we’re making roads safer for everyone and saving lives, which we would never have been able to do without the opportunity we were given to push the technology early enough to capture the market,” he says.
Mehjabeen Patrick, finance director of Creative England, says digital technology is the fastest-growing sector in the UK economy and her organisation works to identify the companies with the most potential to grow and make an impact.
“Creating the CE50 list each year allows us to not only identify future creative leaders, but to look back on the success of previous awardees and see just how far they’ve come,” she says. “We’ve seen film-makers go on to create companies and indie games developers that work directly with publishers such as Microsoft, all of which contributes to making the creative industries more sustainable.
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of these companies, and witnessing their determination and spirit of innovation first-hand. That spirit is vital for the growth of our economy, so we must ensure that companies in this sector are provided with the support they need in order to grow and prosper.”
Brighton-based tech startup Maker Club is another firm that has previously made the CE50 list, as well as winning the Creative Business Cup in 2016. Having received a 3D printer as a birthday present, founder Simon Riley was determined to make a 3D-printed remote-controlled car, and it was this experience that inspired his business.
“It took 10 months and the whole thing was untold aggro,” he says. “But I learned so much that I wanted to lower the boundaries to that experience, and now we’ve got the technology to allow 10-year-olds to do the same thing.
“With their [Creative England’s] help, we’ve been able to take really complex programming and code and make it drag-and-drop; simple enough for an eight-year-old to use.”
Immersive media company Hammerhead featured in the CE50 list last year.
It launched a pioneering 3D-capture studio in London in partnership with Digital Catapult and Microsoft. The studio enables the creation of believable virtual humans, enhancing the level of realistic detail that can be built into immersive games and stories (see main image).
“Around 50% of our team are recent graduates, so having their work recognised was real validation, an enormous morale boost and something they could be very proud of,” says Simon Windsor, Hammerhead’s co-founder and joint managing director.
It’s been “hard graft” getting to this point and Windsor feels he’s only beginning to see the fruition of almost a decade working on immersive AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality). But he believes the company is well poised for what’s ahead.
Yet Windsor’s proudest achievement isn’t bringing the studio to life after 18 months of development. “I am most proud of the culture we’ve built,” he says. “We’re an employee-owned company so everyone’s a shareholder, and without this team, we wouldn’t be where we are.”
Hope Dickson Leach’s debut film, The Levelling, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
It was developed and financed through iFeatures, the low-budget feature film initiativeled by Creative England. It earned her the inaugural IWC Filmmaker Bursary award in association with the BFI.
She says the experience was instrumental in taking her career to the next level and enabled her to move from “a struggling, emerging film-maker” to one with international recognition, who currently has five projects in development and is due to start shooting her second feature.
“Despite having had a very successful film school career before having children, I somehow ended up with my first feature film completely stuck in development,” she says.
“The scheme’s [iFeatures] inclusive approach – such as paying for childcare while I was away – was completely revolutionary. They’re trying to enable more diverse stories from all over England to reach feature level, and that’s crucial, given female film-makers are such a rare commodity.”
She has also co-founded Raising Films, which campaigns to make the film and TV industries – notoriously incompatible with traditional family life – more supportive of professionals with caring responsibilities.
