It’s never been easier to fund a good idea, but choosing the best route for your business can be a minefield.

Two decades ago, the choices were simple but limited: you’d need a bank, benefactor or redundancy cheque. These routes are still possible, of course, but they’re poorly suited to unconventional startups. Bold ideas from ambitious entrepreneurs need agile funding to match.

Modern, non-traditional sources of finance let today’s founders think big from day one, building the kind of cashflow that businesses of yore had to build over a period of many years.

Less interested in past performance, the investors that today’s startups attract buy into the stories behind them, many of which promise to build a happier, healthier, better-connected world.

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Traditional, non-traditional and personal funding explained

Traditional, non-traditional and personal funding have fundamental differences, many of which relate to the level of risk to the startup, as much as they do to the source of the finance itself.

• Traditional funding, like a bank loan, often requires that businesses have a proven track record, which is rarely an option for a startup. Alternatively, the founders may be asked to use their home as collateral. This makes truly revolutionary ideas or anything facing established competition, such as Mycroft’s Alexa rival, too risky to get off the ground.

• Personal funding, like cashing in a pension or spending your life savings, may be too great a sacrifice for the first-time entrepreneur. Family and friends will often pressure them not to gamble their life’s achievement against an uncertain reward.

• Non-traditional funding, like peer-to-peer lending, accelerators and business competitions, spread the risk across multiple micro-investors, or call on venture capitalists that can easily sustain a loss. They free the entrepreneur to focus on developing their idea, rather than chasing further funding or worrying that they’re about to be out on the street.

It’s this latter category we’ll be looking at here, with five non-traditional sources of funding all flexible startups must consider.

The different types of crowdfunding

Kickstarter is often credited with inventing the concept of crowdfunding, but that particular accolade goes to Marillion, after the band raised £43,000 through donations in 1997 to fund its US tour.

Since then, we’ve seen the rise of Indiegogo, Unbound and Patreon, which have developed a framework for entrepreneurs, authors and ambitious online creators.

Oculus Rift and the Pebble watch were both crowdfunding successes. Positive News, a magazine that majors on constructive journalism, crowdfunded its transition from a newspaper to a magazine in 2015. It’s now a co-op, owned by 1,500 micro-investors in 33 countries, each of whom can influence its direction.

But crowdfunding isn’t for everyone. Marillion and Positive News each had a following; you’ll be starting from scratch. Oculus Rift and Pebble were standout products. Is yours?

Successful campaigns need thought-through ideas, achievable milestones and – crucially – a plan for delivering tangible products or services. Your investors are your first customers, after all.

If your idea is conceptual, a slow burner, or promises to grow your supporters’ investment rather than send them hardware, books or music, you’ll have more luck with a dedicated business-funding platform. Crowdcube (which financed the Sugru mouldable glue) and Seedrs (which helped Tossed expand) let you pitch to a different kind of investor – one who is less interested in your product than your business fundamentals.

Accelerators vs incubators

If you crowdfund your venture, you’re largely on your own. You’ll be free to run things however you choose, but might end up spending capital on support. Consider an accelerator instead – or even an incubator – and that support will be built in.

“An incubator is more about the physical space,” says Nesta’s head of new technology and startup research, Chris Haley. “Accelerators major on advice and support, with a cohort of ten or 20 companies coming together for a fixed period – typically six months – to benefit from peer learning.”

Accelerators are often funded by businesses who want to get in on the ground floor by investing in ventures that will later deliver a profit.

Nesta has identified more than 200 incubators and 160 accelerators, which support around 7,000 UK businesses with £33 million of annual investment.

Seedcamp, the UK’s longest-established accelerator, appears in the Nesta list and has invested in 250 ventures. It typically exchanges £100,000 – plus the time it spends advising the founders and introducing them to its network of advisors – for 7.5% of the startup’s equity. Sia Houchangnia, a Seedcamp investment partner, describes the figures as “pretty standard in the industry… there’s not much of a question of modelling to understand if it’s the right price”.

It’s this equity swap that distinguishes accelerators from incubators, the latter of which offer advice and support in exchange for rent and fees. By necessity, incubators invest close to home, while more than half of the UK’s accelerators are in London.

Pitching to an accelerator isn’t easy, but there are ways to increase your appeal. “Having a strong team in place, with an edge and an ability to address the problems you’re going after, is crucial,” Houchangnia says. “You might not have all the resources you need, but if you understand your market and have executed on similar products, that’s important. We’re looking for companies with global ambition.”

“Accelerators and incubators typically take on companies at about the same stage,” says Haley. “It’s wrong to think that accelerators are always super-early-stage investors and incubators later ones. Some will be, but some accelerators do want you to have proved yourself.”

Accelerators and incubators typically take on companies at about the same stage. It’s wrong to think accelerators are always super-early-stage investors and incubators later ones

Houchangnia agrees. For Seedcamp, the right time to invest is determined by several factors – and it’s not always day one.

“If you’re technical, going after a well-defined problem like early stroke diagnosis, we’d be comfortable investing years before your first commercial contract. If the technology has less of an edge but the team has operational expertise, we might want to see proof of demand for the product. In some other cases, we might be looking at companies that already have early revenue.”

Accelerators won’t usually sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as they need to discuss your idea with their partners but, says Haley, it’s rare to come across a rogue operator.

Haley advises talking to potential cohorts and previous applicants, as well as the accelerator’s own team. Most accelerators trumpet their successes on their websites – which in Seedcamp’s case includes 161 operational companies, of which two are now valued in excess of £1 billion.

Business competitions

Failure to engage an accelerator may suggest you need to rethink your idea – or that you need a more specialist route of finance.

Funding competitions, sponsored by big business, accept applications from startups in the same or a complementary field.

Shell Springboard is open to applications from low-carbon businesses, and awards a single £150,000 grant per year, plus five additional grants of £40,000. When we say grant, that’s exactly what we mean: Shell doesn’t take equity in the winning businesses. The money is backed by business-development feedback from low-carbon advocates.

It’s just one of dozens that open for limited periods every year. Innovate UK – which itself offers between £25,000 and £10 million for innovative products, processes and services – maintains a list of available funding opportunities and advice on applying for both funding and loans online.

Peer-to-peer lending

If your venture doesn’t align with an existing competition, your product isn’t suited to crowdfunding and you can’t attract an accelerator, is the bank your only option?

Not necessarily. Peer-to-peer lending could be the answer.

You may find peer loan providers, like Funding Circle, to be more flexible than your local bank. They’ll still need to see a viable business plan and proof you can repay the loan, but by spreading the risk among hundreds or even thousands of individual investors, they’re often willing to take a punt where a single financial institution may not.

Your level of risk is naturally reflected in their rates, but for a good prospect with viable plans to repay the investment, they start at less than 3%. This is broadly the same as a high-street bank.

Beyond banking as usual

However you choose to finance your venture, the initial cash injection will likely mark the point where your idea becomes a viable startup. Where you go from here is up to you and your investors.

You may well discover that sourcing your capital was actually the easy bit. Check out how fintech can help you grow your business, and the one money mistake that all bad businesses make – and how you can make sure you don’t fall victim.

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What’s the one money mistake every failing business makes? It’s not setting the wrong price or paying its staff too little: it’s a failure to understand the various types of debt and debits passing through its books from day one.

When you’re starting out, getting a fix on your accounts is no small task. Well-funded startups hire full-time accountants, but that’s rarely an option for the 5.4 million British businesses employing fewer than nine staff. For them, choosing appropriate software is the best way to go.

But where do you start?

A profit – or loss – analysis

Few companies last long if they’re not turning a profit, but that’s not the whole story. To work out whether your business is viable, you need to separate your fixed and variable costs, the latter of which have a greater impact on your chance of success.

Variable costs, which include postage, tax and manufacturing, increase with every sale. Subtract them from your sale price, then divide your fixed costs by the result to discover how many sales it will take to turn your first profit.

A business with fixed costs (rent, utilities and wages) of £52,500, selling £8.99 books that cost £4.82 to print and post, would need to ship 12,590 copies to break even:

£52,500 / (£8.99 – £4.82) = 12,590

If the market won’t support those sales, the business will need to re-price, cut costs or find a new venture. No amount of playing with its accounts will change that.

“We can only support a business in doing business,” says Chris Wade, VP of product for accountancy software firm Sage. “If a company makes poor choices about what it wants to do or how to go to market, the best solution in the world can’t support them.”

This is where the likes of Sage Accounting and Sage Financials software comes in. These programs are designed to help the business spot where the pain points lie, and identify whether they really are problems at all.

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Speculate to accumulate

Tesla lost more than $4,000 on every car it sold a couple of years ago, but with $4 billion cash on hand, it could keep the production line running. How has it done since then? At first glance, not well. Despite selling just over 100,000 units in 2017, its latest SEC filing showed that its revenues of $11.8 billion delivered a net loss of $2.2 billion.

Divide that by the number of cars it’s sold, and the losses appear to have widened – to $22,000 apiece. So if things aren’t improving, why hasn’t Musk shut Tesla down to focus on flamethrowers full-time?

The answer is that Tesla is about more than just cars, and if you only look at the headline figures you won’t see the whole picture. These figures include one-time costs, such as air-freighting hardware to Jamestown, South Australia, to build Tesla’s 100MW battery array. The array will feed money back into the company over the longer term, financing its ongoing research and vehicle production.

It’s easy to forget that Tesla, founded in 2003, is still a relative startup beside Ford (1903) and Mercedes-Benz (1926), making this the perfect example of a company taking early losses for the sake of longer-term success.

Sales are only for show

It’s tempting to follow Tesla’s lead, keeping prices comparatively low in the hope of generating buzz – but this is a dangerous game. Paper-thin profits don’t leave room for error and don’t build in contingency. Growing your sales feels good, but unless you’re doing it for the right reasons, the figures alone are meaningless.

IBM’s second president, Thomas Watson, is often misquoted as saying there was a global market for “about five computers”. He was actually talking about the 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, rather than computers in general, but the point remains that even on so few sales (it actually took orders for 18), it still made sense for IBM to invest in research and production.

There’s no magic bullet for formulating a sales plan, choosing the right price and attracting customers – and although software can help you monitor what’s happening in your business, it has to be used alongside your business sense.

“Having a system in place gives you that intrinsic visibility into the underlying performance, so you know where the money has gone, where it’s coming from, who your customers are and who owes you money,” says Wade. “All of that means you’re no longer relying on the most unreliable thing: the human brain.”

Profiting from proof

If you’ve cut your costs as far as you can, and can’t sustain losses for as long as Tesla, what next? Raising additional capital is one option, but it’s only open to businesses that can prove they can pay it back.

Tracking your accounts from day one – in software that was designed for the job – gives you an overview of your business performance and lets you project into the future. Both are crucial when pitching for additional funding and deciding how to spend it.

“You can make better decisions more quickly,” says Wade. “We hear about access to capital being a limiting factor to small businesses, but it’s much easier to secure funding if you’ve got a system that helps a financier understand the health of your business at the push of a button.”

Having this information to hand, in Wade’s words, “lets the owner worry about doing business, rather than managing a business”.

The one money mistake all failing businesses make

If all failing businesses have one thing in common, it’s not necessarily that they’re spending more than they’re making. As we said at the outset, it’s a failure to understand the implications of the various debts and debits that pass through its books. If they don’t have the tools they need to identify that imbalance – and understand what it means – it can quickly become an issue.

“It might not be the most fundamental mistake that an entrepreneur makes, but failing to prepare for a future where they need to know these things is preparing to fail for that future,” says Wade. “Systems give a business longevity – and the confidence it needs to take things forward.” 

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If you’ve recently ordered a takeaway, picked up a beer or had your DNA sequenced, you may have encountered one of the UK’s “unicorn” companies.

Unicorns are a rare breed of company, hence the playful moniker, billed as startups that have eclipsed a valuation of $1 billion (around £720 million). They’re companies making the impossible seem possible, acting as disruptors in their fields.

The term unicorn is not clearly defined, so there is a bit of contention over its use. Some argue publicly listed companies shouldn’t count, while others say companies that have moved to the UK from abroad should be excluded.

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As a result, top-level estimates suggest Europe has more than 50 unicorns; others suggest slightly less, with around 22 of these behemoth firms originating or being based in the UK – up from 18 in 2016. In fact, more than a third of European founders are said to be based on our fair isle.

Deliveroo

One particular success story is Deliveroo. Founded in 2013 by Americans Will Shu and Greg Orlowski in London, it became a unicorn last year. From just five employees, its office now spans 50,000 square feet and its employees number almost 2,000.

The technology behind Deliveroo has allowed the company to grow at a rapid pace, reaching a valuation of more than $2 billion (around £1.4 billion) in just half a decade. Justin Landsberger, the company’s UK and Ireland commercial director, highlights the prominence of the iPhone in the early days as being “super important” in allowing the company to grow.

“When we first began, we were operational in one postcode in West London,” he says. “Fast-forward five years and we’re now in over 200 cities, we’re creating one of Europe’s biggest tech hubs, and we’ve created work for 30,000 riders.”

Just Eat

Deliveroo isn’t the only unicorn in the food industry. Valued at around $7.7 billion (£5.5 billion) in November last year, Just Eat is worth half a billion pounds more than the UK’s second-largest supermarket, Sainsbury’s.

It revolutionised takeaway food by letting people easily order online, and in 2017 it reported 21.5 million customers and 172.4 million orders worldwide worth around $4.6 billion (£3.3 billion), an increase of 26% on the year before.

First launched by five entrepreneurs in Denmark in 2001, the company moved its headquarters to London in 2008 and now employs almost 3,000 people. Last year it entered the FTSE 100 for the first time.

Improbable

It’s not all about food, either. Elsewhere on the unicorn list you’ll find Improbable, a virtual-simulation startup co-founded in 2012 by three graduates. In 2017, Improbable raised $502 million (around £360 million) in a round of funding led by Japan’s SoftBank Group, the largest ever round of venture funding for a private British company. This earned it a valuation of more than $1 billion.

The company is using this money to develop its main product, an operating system called SpatialOS. It’s designed to allow the creation of massive simulated worlds, some the size of entire countries, earning comparisons to The Matrix. The team is hoping to release a game based around this OS, called Worlds Adrift, in the near future.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies

Launched out of the University of Oxford by a handful of people in 2005, Oxford Nanopore Technologies now has more than 350 employees and is revolutionising the market of DNA sequencing with its low-cost and easy-to-use devices. Worth an estimated $1.7 billion (£1.25 billion), its lofty goal is to “enable the analysis of any living thing, by any person, in any environment”.

DNA sequencing involves reading strands of DNA that can be used by doctors and researchers to diagnose diseases, see how organisms evolve, and more. Oxford Nanopore is shaking up the industry with its inexpensive products, such as the pocket-sized MinION priced at $1,000, compared to its competitors priced in the millions.

BrewDog

BrewDog was founded as a brewery in Fraserburgh, Scotland in 2007 by James Watt and Martin Dickie. Struggling after the first year, the duo hit the jackpot when it won all of the top four places at a bottled beer competition organised by Tesco.

The company set out to make a more exciting beer for pub-goers, and it has certainly done that. From humble beginnings, the company is now worth $1.4 billion (£1 billion), thanks in no small part to its striking branding that separates it from the crowd.

BenevolentAI

In London you’ll find BenevolentAI, a biotech business founded in 2013 to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry. It uses artificial intelligence to mine research papers to find new compounds or molecules for medical uses.

The approach has been hugely successful. It is now the biggest private artificial-intelligence company in Europe, valued at more than $1.8 billion (£1.3 billion), with 19 active drug research programmes. Later this year it will conduct its first clinical trial, another major stepping stone for the company.

Skyscanner

Beginning in 2003 in Scotland as an Excel spreadsheet, Skyscanner now welcomes 60 million monthly visitors to its site every month. It’s one of the most recognisable flight-comparison websites in the world.

The site is now available in more than 30 languages, offering users an easy way to compare prices from all commercial flights. In 2016, Skyscanner was sold to China’s Ctrip for $1.7 billion (around £1.4 billion), meaning it is no longer a unicorn in the strictest sense – although it certainly has been a major disruptor.

The UK’s next unicorns

A number of companies has already been tipped to join the exclusive club of UK unicorns. One is London startup TrueLayer, an open-banking platform fintech firm. Another is Cardiff-based tech company Amplyfi, a prospective Welsh unicorn thanks to its artificial-intelligence platform that supports strategic decision-making.

The digital bank Monzo is rapidly making waves, being valued at about $336 million (£280 million) in November 2017, while Perkbox hopes to make the jump by offering employers new ways to provide incentives to their employees. And Performance Horizon, which provides real-time insight on data analytics, is being billed as the first future unicorn in the North East.

How to become a unicorn: Tips from the top

So with a number of successes and rising stars, what’s the key to unicorn success in the UK?

“It’s a cliché, but most founders make hundreds of mistakes,” David Buttress, the former CEO and co-founder of Just Eat, tells Alphr. “The important thing is to move on quickly. Good entrepreneurs are honest and not afraid to take risks.

“I can’t think of any successful founders who’ve started off by saying ‘I want to build a unicorn’. You need to grasp hold of something more meaningful, that you truly care about, otherwise no-one else will want to be a part of it.”

Justin Landsberger, meanwhile, says simplicity has been the key to Deliveroo’s success. “We’ve always done the same thing since day one,” he says. “We never deviated from our initial plan, and such a singular focus allowed us to truly focus on what we were about.”

Skyscanner CEO Gareth Williams says it’s important to maintain an uplifting environment. “As companies grow, they can bloat [and] become inward-facing, political and static.

“That doesn’t need to be the case, though, and I believe that with the right policies and the right people, you can maintain a rewarding, fun and positive workplace.”

Getting there will be no mean feat. But if the companies mentioned here are anything to go by, there’s plenty of opportunity for success. No matter how big you get, though, it’s important never to forget where you started.

“Will [Shu] still makes deliveries, and I don’t think he’ll be stopping any time soon,” says Landsberger.

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You’ve developed your idea, secured funding and finally launched your startup. Now you need to triage your venture and consider which tools will help you grow beyond a rented desk.

Chief among them will be how you process, track and chase payments. This used to mean a weekly trip to the bank, but now fintech – the technology of storing and moving money – has knocked digital finance into second gear, and left the traditional players looking unwieldy and out of date.

Fintech in the cloud

“The cloud is fundamental to the changing economic model,” according to Chris Wade, VP of product for UK accounting software firm Sage. “It makes success more attainable to more businesses and gives them the freedom to try something at relatively low cost. If it doesn’t work for them, they can change.”

Sage has been transitioning its products from local apps to cloud-based ones for some time. Requiring no capital outlay or investment in hardware and training, Wade believes this shift removes the imperative to persevere with a platform that doesn’t suit or grow with your business.

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“The cloud lets you make better choices about which technology works for your business. The whole collaborative, remote working experience applies in both management and delivery now, so if you’ve got a solution designed with that in mind, it’ll support you in ways a desktop [application] with an embedded workflow won’t.”

But accounting in the cloud does more than track your expenses. APIs open your books to a new generation of fintech tools, bringing to startups the kind of facilities that were once the preserve of the minted multinational.

Disruptors like Stripe integrate with Xero and other accounting apps so that solo and micro-businesses can now accept card payments. Yodlee is bridging the gap between banks and their customers, downloading business transactions and streaming them into cloud-enabled bookkeeping tools. FreeAgent will even reconcile the results – subject to your approval – based on the invoices you’ve sent, bills you’ve received, and what it’s learnt about how you run your business.

“These flows would historically have been on paper,” says Wade, “but no cloud is an island now, and no element of the workflow has to be solved exclusively by one vendor. That means you can make decisions based on what your bank account contains, not what your mistyped accounts suggest.”

Banking across borders

Sooner or later, a growing business will need to consider foreign exchange. Whether you’re buying supplies from China or selling goods to Europe, you’ll quickly discover the cost of doing business through a regular bank.

Why? “[While] the world is now very global, the financial system hasn’t caught up,” says Stuart Gregory, head of business for TransferWise. “It’s still pinned down to single countries with old, clunky ways of doing things. I don’t think that meets anyone’s expectations of what an online banking service should be.”

TransferWise saw this as an opportunity. With funding from an accelerator, it set up a cross-border transfer service, charging low fees and using standard inter-bank rates for every transaction. Seven years on, TransferWise now offers a borderless business bank account that simultaneously holds 28 currencies. With native IBAN codes for the UK, US, Europe and Australia, it lets customers pay in and out as though they were locals in 60 different countries.

“We’ve been focused on solving a specific customer problem, rather than seeing it as an opportunity for margin, which is perhaps where a lot of banks [have been focused],” Gregory continues. “Everyone travels, phones and works across Europe. This is a wake-up call. Banks need to respond to changes in the market – and changes in expectations.”

Regulated by the FCA on a licence that covers the whole of Europe, TransferWise is moving more than $2 billion a month and, at 15%, its share of the UK market for cross-border transfers is closing fast on the largest traditional banks.

Its offering lacks some of the features you’d expect of a regular bank account, such as direct debits and a debit card, but these gaps are plugged elsewhere. Revolut, which handles both international and crypto currencies, offers personal and business borderless accounts linked to prepaid cards. Monzo goes further, with debit cards and direct debits, but as it offers only one account type, it may appeal more to the freelancer or sole trader.

Do I need an office?

If you’re happy with virtual banking, you probably don’t need an office, either.

Slack, Trello, VoIP and web apps mean there’s little you can’t do remotely – even if you have colleagues. Hire a distributed workforce and you’re free to choose the best person for each job, regardless of where they live. They’ll be easier to recruit if they don’t need to relocate, and you might save on salaries, attracting higher-calibre candidates who are happy to offset potential earnings against the freedom of working from home.

You can still have a central number on your email footer, though. Answering services such as Lincolnshire-based Miss Moneypenny will pick up a virtual number using your company name and redirect enquiries to whoever is most appropriate. On the rare occasion you need to host team meetings, office-rental services such as Regus lease space for an hour at a time.

Scaling your IT investment

Reducing your capital outlay at the start lets you redirect your limited funds into marketing and hiring staff, so leasing hardware rather than buying makes immediate sense. You’ll preserve as much of your startup capital as you can, and in doing so, sustain your operation through the lean early months.

Birmingham-based Geex offers a standard three-year business hardware leasing option, at the end of which businesses can either buy the leased equipment, or upgrade. It also offers shorter-term leases but, says director Steve Khela, “anything less than two years and the numbers don’t really add up”.

Leases are typically only available to credit-worthy businesses, but Geex will loan to startups if the directors sign personal guarantees. With the era of quantitative easing at an end, and central banks increasing rates to counter inflation, leasing will lock in potential savings, as the repayments won’t go up in sync with the base rate. There are tax benefits, too, as the repayment can be offset against corporation tax.

Smarter money management is vital in the launch phase of any new venture, whether it’s through leasing, or leveraging fintech to reduce your exposure to fees and commission. While your ambition may be unlimited, your funds aren’t, and every penny held back – as well as each minute saved through automation – will help your business along the road to becoming a fully fledged enterprise. 

Sooner or later, a growing business will need to consider foreign exchange. Whether you’re buying supplies from China or selling goods to Europe, you’ll quickly discover the cost of doing business through a regular bank.

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Qualys and Google Cloud Platform can now play nicely together with the launch of the security firm’s Cloud Security Command Center (Cloud SCC) integration.

The security and data risk platform will boost the security of business’ cloud infrastructure, helping companies collect data to identify threats and fix them before they become a genuine concern.

“As businesses leverage new technologies to accelerate their digital transformation efforts and move into the cloud, their focus needs to shift towards building security into applications, as well as interconnected devices, right from the start,” Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO at Qualys said. “And this is what Google is doing with their Cloud Platform, helping businesses build security into the fabric of their workloads.”

The product is an update to Qualys’ previous GCP integration, but this new addition allows businesses to gain more detail about security, drilling down into more detail, which can then be used to innovate a better security strategy for every possible vulnerability. With one click, users can then head back to their Qualys subscription to find out more information about the threats uncovered in GCP.

Qualys’ tie-up with Google also means users are able to tap into Google’s own security information, including the latest data about botnets, cryptocurrency mining, anomalous reboots and suspicious network traffic threats.

“Now more than ever, the cloud is where an increasing number of enterprises are turning to protect their data and stay secure,” said Andy Chang, senior product manager at Google Cloud. 

“With Cloud Security Command Center, we are helping security teams gather data, identify threats, and quickly act on application and data risks. By working with industry leaders like Qualys, we are giving our customers the capabilities they need to keep up with today’s ever evolving security challenges especially as they move workloads to the cloud.”