London Calling: AVORA
In this series, we’ll be interviewing one London startup that began life in Tech City. As the name suggests, the interview will take place over the phone.
Here’s how our first ever interview went with Ricky Thomas, founder and CEO of AVORA.
Hello, Ricky. You’re in New York right now. In true British style, what’s the weather like there?
Quite cold, but sort of sunny. I’m fairly high up in a hotel right now, so I have a great view.
Very good. What are you doing in New York?
Lots of meetings. We recently closed a pre-Series A round and so I’m here to talk investment or sales, depending on who I’m meeting.
When you’re selling or pitching AVORA, what’s your elevator pitch? What is the product?
It’s a business intelligence platform with machine learning embedded into it. And we take care of the entire stack as a service, so companies can manage the data projects they’ve got everywhere, and pull out the insights they need to make informed decisions.
Traditionally, our market finds it extremely difficult to get their hands on the data that they need to do this. There are usually multiple copies of data, with different algorithms applied to them. And this makes the output unreliable. AVORA takes care of all this for you.
How did you come up with the idea?
So I have a background in building real-time scalable systems. And when it came to selling my last business [PetMeds, sold in 2012] we were getting requests for segmenting the data. I deployed a business intelligence tool in the company, that was built on top of Tableau and Redshift, but — frustratingly — I couldn’t push the insights to our marketing platform and it was overall very limiting in terms of analysing up all the data we had.
And so you built something that could.
Yes. 85% of people in these roles spend time on data preparation and analysis, and far less time finding the insights, and making recommendations. What AVORA does is to drastically shift this ratio so that you’re now spending this time using those insights to drive the business forward.
Everyone likes a good ‘SomethingTech’ label. Do you have any sectors you’re specifically focused on?
Traditionally we’ve been pretty strong in retail and marketing, but the spread of sectors we cover is growing now and includes global media agencies and supply chain companies. That’s the advantage of building something that addresses a problem across industries.
Tell us about the early days.
We were a team of three operating out of TechHub @ Campus, on Bonhill Street. It was cheap and there was a good vibe. But, in terms of being able to learn from the people around us, we found it was pretty limited in terms of companies in the B2B enterprise space.
Why was that?
There was so much more happening with more consumer-facing products that — while they did use analytics — were doing so on a simpler level than we were. In other areas like growth, we could have accessed lots of support. But this wasn’t what we needed at the time.
How are you involved with the startup community today?
We’re still in a co-working space and work with partners [like Momentum and Tech Connect] to give back where we can. I’m also an investor so I’m also involved as a non-executive director with a few startups. Learning from their challenges is really enjoyable.
What kind of support do you provide to them?
They’ve generally cracked sales, but my particular expertise comes into play when it comes to the tech. I’ve been through years of intense, old-school training from the likes of IBM, HP, Oracle and Sun [Microsystems] — and fundamentally, I bring the technical expertise to the table.
In terms of technical skills, how does London compare with the rest of the world?
We’re not bad at all. It’s more of a case that there’s less deep expertise here. And all too often, people get caught up in learning the latest [programming] language and building their product instead of considering the business benefit. It’s also really hard to know what’s realistic, when you don’t have the know-how yourself. So that’s a challenge to consider.
What is London good at?
It’s a great place for startups. There are people who are extremely strong across a whole range of skill sets. The problem with London is that I personally don’t see much of a risk appetite from the VCs, so naturally it’s harder to compete with the US, where it’s good to raise money. But London is amazing, especially because of the diversity we have here.
So, how reflective is AVORA of London’s diversity?
We intentionally build diversity into every role. When we’re hiring, we always ask ‘what other perspective could add to this, or what viewpoint are we missing?.’ Statistically, AVORA is now super high on the diversity front.
And what’s next for you guys?
We’re planning a Series A round later this year and are building the team. We’ve recently hired extremely well in sales, customer success and ops. In five years we want AVORA to be the number one choice for business intelligence as a service. We’re already making a strong impression, so the plan is to keep going as fast as we can.
Thanks, Ricky! For more information about AVORA, visit www.avora.com
