When looking back on the early years of building software firm Adventoris, James Clarkson can still recall the company’s exact weekly turnover.
£6.93.
Fast forward to today and Adventoris is flying with a 40-strong team based in Huddersfield, now working with more than 230 customers including PepsiCo and AG Barr.
Its flagship b2b ordering platform, SwiftCloud, helps trade, wholesale and manufacturing businesses digitise how they take and manage orders through branded mobile apps and web portals. Customers can access live stock, personalised pricing and repeat ordering, with the system integrating into existing ERP (enterprise resource planning) platforms.
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After being ‘profitable for five years’, Clarkson is now firmly eyeing the future with international expansion plans in sight as Adventoris has quietly become one of Yorkshire’s rising scale-ups, recently featured on Prolific North’s 2026 Tech Scale-ups to Watch list.
But it has taken a lot of “blood, sweat and tears” in those early days to get the business to where it is now.
It all started in the shower
So where did it all begin? Clarkson moved to Huddersfield with his family when he was just two and later went to Royds Hall Grammar School — the same school as former Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
After studying economics at the University of York, he soon found himself rising the ranks through senior roles at the likes of KPMG, Marshalls Plc, Ultralease and CP Group.
Back then in his former role as group finance director for tile import manufacturer CP Group, he remembers going for his usual lunchtime run on Brighouse Canal.
“When I came back for a shower. The idea for SwiftCloud popped into my head,” he explains.
It came after CP Group had just acquired another tile business serving small retailers and the ordering process was “inefficient”.
“At the time, we had to employ people in customer services to take calls from a shop to deal with customer enquiries about stock. They would ring us to check availability, then take the order from the customer, and ring us back.
“So in the shower, I thought: ‘hang about, if we had a mobile app that had all the stock in it, the shopkeeper could just scan the fixture with their phone and with a click, the order goes through?’”
That idea would later become the start of SwiftCloud, a B2B ordering platform, which he immediately saw would plug a gap in the market. The challenge was how he’d turn it into a business.
‘£6.93 wasn’t even enough to buy everyone a drink’
When CP Group was sold to Warren Stephens, who he namechecks as Donald Trump’s current US ambassador to the UK, he took an 80% pay cut to focus on building out the idea he had for Adventoris and SwiftCloud.
He set about raising investment for his new idea, eventually assembling a group of angel investors, including one who would later become chairman of Adventoris.
One of those investors left him a voicemail offering financial support, even without hearing what the business did first. “He heard from somebody else that I was wanting to set up a business, we’d worked together and I’d looked after some of his interests in the past. So he backed me, rather than the business,” he explains.
In 2012, it was a promising start, but just three years into building out a team and developing the SwiftCloud platform, that was all about to come crashing down.
“We had just £6.93 weekly turnover. At that point we had to make everybody redundant, other than our CTO Aman Shergill, who is effectively my co-founder, and me. It was a classic start-up – we ran out of money.
“I used to have to type out an invoice for like 89p when previously, I’d been used to dealing with £40m on deposit and all sorts of stuff. It was a real come down to earth moment.
“And with just £6.93, it wasn’t even enough to buy everybody a drink to say thank you. It was very dark days. At that point, we weren’t getting paid at all.”
As the financial pressure on the business intensified, so did the impact on family life.
“It was horrible. It was like a dark cloud was over me. I remember getting lots of calls saying: ‘You’ve lost all our money’ when I was away with my kids camping.
“As a family, we were under a lot of financial pressure because I was the main breadwinner and we weren’t getting paid. I had two little kids with my wife, and I remember her being frazzled.
“We’ve really had some troublesome scrapes but my wife’s been very, very, supportive in what’s been a tough, tough journey. I used to say I wouldn’t wish a start-up on my worst enemy.”
Despite the business difficulties, he never considered walking away.
“I had the belief that we would get there in the end. There is that point when you’d like to quit, but you can’t quit. A lot of people might quit and start something else, but I really did believe we would get there in the end, and we did.”
Rebuilding, winning customers and the future
The turning point came gradually and he still remembers a key moment while on holiday with his family.
“On the last day of the holiday when we were by the side of the pool at a villa, an investor, Mercia, put half a million into the company. We could then pay some back salary,” he says.
After securing that investment from Mercia and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund in 2017, the business has now raised around £2m in investment to date, which has since helped the business to scale up after securing numerous client wins.
“It meant we could start to build a team, then start to scale up, and as we won more clients, we could bring on more people. Because we stuck with it, we started to get some commercial traction, we’ve just grown organically since winning clients.”
He believes his business journey also highlights a wider challenge for UK tech founders when looking for financial backing.
“In America they’ll give you a pair of trainers, a tracksuit and a personal coach and say: ‘go for it’.
“In the UK, you get one trainer, or maybe just a shoelace, and see what you can do with that. If it goes really well, you might get another trainer in future. That’s really been our journey, we kept getting the trainer so we could build the platform and scale it.”
But despite those earlier challenges, SwiftCloud’s proposition has remained consistent, giving B2B customers a customised platform that lets their customers order 24/7, increase order values and boost sales, with the “click of a button”.
And today, Adventoris is now a very different business to the one that once struggled to cover its costs for a week. And it’s a long way on from those “dark cloud” days.
“This year’s revenues are up 13% year-on-year, which for a tech start-up is fairly unheard of. We’ve now built out our sales, marketing, customer success, implementation, finance functions now, so we’ve invested all of our revenue growth into building a scalable, robust business,” he says.
“And as we keep onboarding customers, we continue to grow the business.”
Looking ahead, there are “exciting developments” on the horizon this year to give the SwiftCloud app a “new look” as well as testing out a new AI module to assist with orders and sales suggestions.
And he’s eyeing international expansion too, as the SwiftCloud platform sees increasing demand from outside the UK,
“We’ve started extending our focus beyond the UK after winning more clients overseas, so we want to roll out across Europe and North America, that’s our next step, and at some point it will mean boots on ground.
“We can spin up a stack of technology in different locations within a couple of hours, but at some point you need boots on ground to support and deal with clients, and we’re not at that point yet. But in due course, that’s that will be the next logical step for us.”
