Investment Manager
A huge opportunity for impact
We know that women and their families have been long underserved by existing healthcare systems. Clear care pathways simply do not exist for areas like menopause, early parenthood and men’s health – symptoms can be non-specific and complex, and people are not always comfortable talking about these challenges particularly in the workplace.
These challenging times can lead to people leaving their jobs, taking time off and being less productive and engaged - 1 in 10 women actually give up work because of menopause symptoms.
Peppy provides access to personalised support for all genders, age and background, addressing the widespread but unmet need that remains underserved by the traditional healthcare systems.
Peppy started out focused on menopause and now also support endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This is a huge financial opportunity (the menopause market alone was valued at $15.4bn in 2021) but also a huge opportunity for social impact for women globally.
B2Employer will thrive as the health and wellness delivery channel
Albion's recent research has shown the huge increase in the workplace wellness segment. We found that health and wellness benefits are the most protected in a recession and allow companies to remain competitive and improve retention rates where broader salary increases are not possible.
As healthcare systems become increasingly capacity constrained, greater expectation will be on employers to provide these benefits as part of their compensation package.
Over 1.5m people currently love Peppy’s service
It was very clear to us that Peppy has achieved product market fit both with the customers (the employer) and the users (the employees). This is the key secret sauce. So many companies build amazing products that can’t get that flywheel turning.
Peppy has achieved 10x growth since its Series A and is now trusted by over 250 enterprise businesses including Adobe and Disney. HR directors at these businesses have become huge Peppy advocates due to outstanding engagement levels and positive feedback within their organisations, supporting excellent retention.
More importantly, the net promoter score from end users is extraordinarily high and users clearly remain engaged over long time periods. The icing on the cake is that Peppy has a positive effect on patient outcomes.
The team are the heart of Peppy
Entrepreneurs, technology, market opportunities, and capital are in abundance - great teams are in short supply. It takes incredible teams to build great businesses. Peppy is led by such a founding team with backgrounds in healthcare and clinical operations. We have known the team since the beginning and it’s truly inspiring to watch them revolutionise the delivery of a basic human requirement – healthcare. They are fastidious about hiring great teammates and attack the market with a laser focus. We can’t wait to see where this team goes next.
Investment Associate
The Problem: Code testing and code health
Software was predicted to eat the world and, suffice to say, it has. We’ve seen software become critical to company operations, products and services in every industry. We are still seeing new developments and further complexity. This has led to huge volumes of code being written and it will only continue to grow.
All this code needs regular testing to help find and fix problems early to deliver better-quality software more quickly. Testing is required for code maintenance, and is important with the shift to agile development where development and testing happen concurrently.
The problem is the lack of software developers (the global shortage will reach 4m by 2025), and testing is time-consuming and manual. Currently, businesses are forced to trade off between building and testing. And where code quality is prioritised, developers can end up spending nearly 50% of their time on testing. Not the best use of this scarce, highly valuable resource but necessary where code is safety or business-critical.
Diffblue's solution: Autonomous AI-for-Code Software
Founded by researchers from the University of Oxford, its flagship product ‘Diffblue Cover’ can write tests 250x faster than a human developer. It helps improve code quality, expand test coverage and increase productivity.
Diffblue Cover analyses Java, one of the most popular coding languages, and can write a unit test in under three seconds, allowing developers to focus on writing the key unit tests that verify the intent of their code, while leadership can see the overall picture and address risks and gaps.
Their customer base already includes leading names across different sectors who have seen their testing processes fully automated and reduced from months to hours, with accuracy rates of up to 100%.
What We Are Excited About
The software testing market is currently worth £33bn and forecasted to reach £49bn by 2027. Growth is being driven by underlying secular trends in software development, such as digital transformation, cloud computing, cybersecurity, automation and AI.
The technology is unique and differentiated. Its unsupervised learning model requires no pre-training; it requires low memory requirements; and is fully automated and autonomous.
Diffblue is able to automate some of the most manual work for developers, writing a year’s worth of unit tests in 8 hours, at the click of a button.
Diffblue's CEO, Mathew Lodge, has over 25 years of cross-functional experience building and growing software companies across the U.S. and Europe. The team have unrivalled domain expertise, product knowledge and customer centricity.
Our investment in Diffblue reflects Albion’s focus on building category-leading software companies that are leveraging new innovations to disrupt sectors crying out for change. It follows our other investments into AI/ML companies such as Black Swan Data, Elliptic, Seldon and Speechmatics.
Investment Director
An industry ripe for disruption
Cohort-based analysis is powerful, but I remember the pain of building it myself in my previous role as finance director of startup Citymapper. I had to aggregate data from various tools into excel, then build a model, which would have dozens of rows for a basic monthly analysis. If I wanted more granularity like segmentation by platform or demographic data, the model would reach hundreds of rows, and this was before introducing weekly or daily cohorts.
You get it, doing such analysis in excel is manual, complex, hard to build/maintain and very time-consuming. As a result, this type of analysis is still not used enough by finance teams for historical analysis, let alone for planning and forecasting.
Generally, producing accurate revenue forecasts is hard and business critical, especially in a recessionary environment. While already complex to do for B2B companies with recurring and predictable revenue streams, it is even more so for B2C companies with non-subscription and fluctuating revenue. B2C revenue forecasting is done through manual and static spreadsheets, which leads to missed targets and opportunities, incorrect resource allocation and millions wasted.
Finance is typically not top of the priority list of valuable data science resources and CFOs therefore lack the tools to forecast quickly and accurately, a pain I experienced first-hand.
Enters Ramp Growth. They provide very granular cohort-based forecasts that is impossible to replicate in spreadsheets.
A differentiated model
Most of the competition is actually still excel spreadsheets. Others typically focus on B2B companies and are more generalist solutions.
Finally, we are very excited by the company’s vision of building the “source of truth” for the future, evolving from predictive towards prescriptive and proactive analytics.
Ramp’s advantage also comes from the domain expertise. The company’s model and approach is based on the previous work of Angus Lovitt, Co-Founder and ex-VP Marketing at King, where he helped drive an increase in revenue from $50m to $2bn. Angus cofounded Ramp with Dan Marcus (CEO) and Jan Pickard (COO). Dan and Jan are long-time friends who previously founded and exited a SaaS company. Dan and Jan complement Angus and each other well through their background in sales/go-to-market and product/engineering respectively.
Huge growth potential
We were impressed by Ramp’s growth and traction while being bootstrapped and very capital efficient. Due to the team’s background, Ramp is currently mainly focused on the gaming sector. It has been exciting to witness how Ramp was described as a must-have tool for company forecasting and strategic planning.