“Every organisation knows they have data, but nobody really knows what to do with it” says Dr. Raoul-Gabriel Urma, founder and CEO of Cambridge Spark. “If you don’t do anything with your data, your business will likely not survive.” It is this huge knowledge gap that Cambridge Spark was set up to fill. The company provides data and AI training to thousands of employees at dozens of businesses. Its mission is to wake companies around the world from their data inertia and provide them with “the right skills to be relevant”.
Urma’s educational mission began at an early age. At six years old he was already coding. “My dad gave me a book on HTML and I just got hooked,” he says. Way ahead of his peers in his understanding of computing and technology, Urma soon began creating websites which offered advice to other children on how to master video games. The teaching impulse came to him very early.
Later, as a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Urma decided it was time to address “the biggest skills gap we have ever seen”. It was then, in 2016, that Cambridge Spark was born. Since its founding, the business has upskilled employees at a range of organisations big and small, including JP Morgan, GlaxoSmithKline, Aviva and the Financial Conduct Authority. The training programmes cover a wide range of skill levels, but Cambridge Spark’s flagship offering is its first in market Level 7 AI apprenticeship. It has also developed accessible programmes for various professions, including healthcare administration and data journalism.
The business is now profitable and took £10m of revenue in the last year. But it was not an easy journey to success. From the off, Urma knew he had a strong idea but a realisation soon dawned on him: “I need funding to take things further”. While innovative, the business’s model was not yet at a point where it was entirely suited for outside investment, particularly from a purely commercially-minded sponsor.
The business is now profitable and took £10m of revenue in the last year. But it was not an easy journey to success. From the off, Urma knew he had a strong idea but a realisation soon dawned on him: “I need funding to take things further”. While innovative, the business’s model was not yet at a point where it was entirely suited for outside investment, particularly from a purely commercially-minded sponsor.
As a graduate student, Urma had plenty of experience applying for research grants, and had come across Innovate UK’s Smart Grants programme. The programme offers short term grants of up to £2m to projects in any industry that offers ‘commercially viable innovative or disruptive ideas’. “I was trying to figure it out. I thought that building a technical solution would help us scale.” For that he needed a flexible source of funds: “banks wouldn’t lend on IP, only on assets.”
Having tapped Innovate UK for the initial funding to get off the ground, it made perfect sense later when the business was looking for more funds to expand, to come back to Innovate UK, this time not for a grant but for a £1million Innovation Loan. This, he says, “really helped us scale.”
Part of the attraction for Urma as founder, was a desire to retain control of the company, and avoid the dilution that would have been an inevitable corollary of the obvious alternative – taking equity from VCs, as opposed to Innovate UK which spotted the potential of the business and was more aligned with his goals. Innovate UK was impressed by the progress the company had made, the fact that it was already generating cash, was well capitalized and had a good governance structure. The loan was used to support a high-quality late-stage R&D project related to the company’s disruptive AI-based learning platform. Urma, who still boasts full ownership of the company, is glad about this.
Having been given the critical support that has taken the business from its very beginnings to the point of market entry, Urma says thanks to that early-stage funding which de-risked those early innovations, Cambridge Spark is now at the point it can more readily access conventional sources of finance.
He remains however a devoted supporter: “I am a big fan of Innovate UK. They were very helpful. They took a risk. It is a great organisation. We need more initiatives to support entrepreneurs.”
Bowler’s quirky approach will work, he thinks, because “we’re not a business, we’re a start-up. We’re an idea in search of a business model.” He is reassured by his many links in the creative arts. “I’ve been working in the music industry for about ten years, so I have a baseline network in the industry.”
Cambridge Spark could not have scaled up without them. Urma says Innovate UK’s initial grant, and the further loan in the early years of business, “changed my life”.
By the start of 2020, Cambridge Spark had 20 permanent employees and a number of contracts with big companies. Then it faced its greatest test: the pandemic. “2020 was the hardest year of my life,” says Urma. “Come March, every client pulled out.” The sudden loss of confidence put the business in peril: “When you’re a bootstrap business, you live or die by the invoice.”
But after the initial panic subsided, Urma realised that the pandemic was a once in a generation opportunity to show the importance of data skills training. The challenge was getting this message across. “I read every single book I could on strategy and sales,” he says. While locked away at home, his small team made a Herculean effort to show big potential clients that they needed to upskill more than ever. The company invested more effort in providing apprenticeships and, after a loss-making period from March to July, the contracts started rolling in. “These ingredients helped us to literally explode,” he says.
Cambridge Spark’s adaptability paid off: “Our KPIs at the start of the pandemic were terrible – now it’s great.” Though those dark days in March 2020, when clients were pulling out, are ones he would rather forget, he reflects that in hindsight “the pandemic really accelerated everything for us.” The business now employs more than 80 permanent staff and a number of contractors. He has drawn talented new hires with a simple message: “come to Cambridge Spark, we will change your career and change the world!”
And while the business is sailing on much calmer waters now, with a raft of big clients, Urma is still an alert captain. To secure the future of the business he wants to ensure that “if something takes a hit, not everything does.” That means diversifying revenue streams by expanding into America, Europe, South Africa and, most recently, Asia.
Urma’s mission continues at pace. He maintains that the “biggest transformation of the decade is data and AI”, and Cambridge Spark intends to keep up with that change. The company’s apprenticeships alone have skilled up over 1,000 workers, and now Urma can brag that his training programmes have more students enrolling than most of UK university computer science departments. His old computing professors at Cambridge have even helped out, recommending Cambridge Spark to businesses looking to improve their data-handling abilities. Even Cambridge University itself is now a client of his company “which is really inspiring”, he says.
Since his early years, spent coding and creating websites, Urma has believed passionately in bringing computing skills to a mass audience. With the innovative success of Cambridge Spark, it seems his dream has come true.
