People’s Champion Finalist: Cambridge Intelligence

Start-up name: Cambridge Intelligence
Founder: Dr Joe Parry, 46
Started in: 2011
Based in: Cambridge
Business description: Big Data visualisation and analysis technology

The Cambridge Intelligence story:

When a three-year-old UK-based company reports its financials in dollars, you know its horizons are not limited by geographical boundaries.

And in Dr Joe Parry the company has a founder who has spent more than a decade designing and building software for UK and US intelligence communities.

He quit his head of research post at i2, which is now part of IBM, to set up Cambridge Intelligence. But why? This is where it gets technical. “Joe had a vision for a product: flexible, customisable, browser-based government-grade network visualisation and link analysis that could be used in any industry.”

Admittedly, most of us have had similar notions (or perhaps not!), but Parry’s idea quickly became something tangible with the launch of KeyLines. This toolkit for visualising and analysing connections in data is Parry’s successful attempt to shake up a marketplace dominated by large incumbents with a flexible web-based solution.

Rather than tying the product to an industry niche, such as military intelligence, Parry has created something with many potential industry applications which were “previously unserved and ignored”. That’s a big differentiator on its own, but Parry has sought to add great customer service. With a team of globally renowned experts to guide customers through the development and deployment of their application inordinate amounts of time are not wasted searching deep into obscure forums work-arounds. Cambridge Intelligence isn’t stopping there with a hive of research and development work around producing six new releases a year.

That’s why the company, which has grown organically through product sales rather than taking venture capital, now has customers across six continents and staff on either side of the Atlantic. It’s why revenue from military, law enforcement, and governmental customers is rocketing; profits are equally strong. And it’s why the team will swell in size to 14 by the end of the year. Watch Cambridge Intelligence go.

Why Cambridge Intelligence made our 50:

Building on Cambridge’s international reputation for game-changing technology, Cambridge Intelligence is one of those companies that might not receive the plaudits reserved for consumer brands among the public, but is a British B2B company of which we have the potential to be very proud.

Where to find out more about Cambridge Intelligence:

Website: http://keylines.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/key_lines

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