Exited martech founder and angel investor Mark Kuhillow urged Northern tech founders to focus less on fundraising and more on execution during a fireside chat at Prolific North’s Tech Start-Ups to Watch event.
During the event, hosted on 15 October at Bruntwood SciTech’s No.1 Circle Square in Manchester, the entrepreneur reflected on two decades of lessons he has learned across agency life, tech start-ups, exits, and angel investment. Sponsored by Beyond Echo PR, the event united founders, investors and leaders across the tech ecosystem for an exclusive reveal of Prolific North’s 14 Tech Start-Ups to Watch for 2025.
READ MORE: The Prolific North Tech Start-ups to Watch list 2025
Now running his latest venture, Trimontium, Kuhillow shared his remarkable success story and had some savvy advice for early-stage founders in the room.
“Everyone’s obsessed with fundraising,” he told the audience. “But no one’s thinking about what they’re actually going to do when they get the money. That’s the problem I’m trying to solve this time.”
From school leaver to global exit
Kuhillow, who sits on the advisory board at UA92 and works with Innovate UK, shared his impressive career journey during the fireside chat with Alexandra Balazs, Prolific North’s managing director.
Although he doesn’t like to call himself an “entrepreneur”, he left school with no qualifications before launching his first business as a 16-year-old selling t-shirts to local restaurants, later selling advertising space.
Fast forward to his early thirties, he was soon running a £2m EBITDA division at a major media agency.
He later went on to launch one of the UK’s early affiliate marketing agencies in 2004, scaling to offices in Manchester, London and Berlin. At the same time, he “caught the tech bug” and launched his first tech start-up which was an AI-driven marketing value attribution platform.
But a period of rapid growth at the ad agency was followed by near-collapse when the company lost its biggest client, which accounted for around 75% of revenues.
“We went from 80 staff to 12 overnight. It was a car crash,” Kuhillow said. “It was the most complicated and painful experience of my career but it forced us to rethink everything.”
“Almost by accident,” that rethink led to the creation of a first-party data tracking platform, which soon became the foundation of a global SaaS business which was later acquired by Awin.
After successfully exiting both businesses, he reflected on the most difficult parts of the process.
“We had four layers of due diligence and the whole deal was done remotely,” he explained. “I was working from 9am to midnight, seven days a week. I was making 200 micro-decisions a day for six weeks straight.”
Rediscovering Manchester’s tech scene
After exiting, Kuhillow joined Innovate UK as an Innovation and Growth specialist and began investing in early-stage tech firms. Despite growing up and living in Manchester, he admitted he only discovered the city’s wider tech start-up ecosystem post-exit.
“I’d drive to work, go to my desk and then go home. I then discovered this wonderful tech scene in Manchester by accident, thanks to an introduction by Alice Pickersgill, who then offered me the role of entrepreneur in residence on the Bonded programme where I found all these amazing start-ups,” he said.
“It’s collaborative, open, and full of talent.”
He has since backed around ten start-ups and now advises founders across the North, combining lived experience with a willingness to be candid.
His advice for founders in the room? “To be a founder, you’ve got to believe your own bullsh*t,” he laughed. “The trick is helping people see where they’re going wrong without bursting their self-belief completely.”
Kuhillow’s latest venture, Trimontium, grew out of a project to use AI to evaluate early-stage businesses. After two pivots, the company is now focused on change management underpinned by technology, helping organisations align leadership teams and strategy around transformation.
“Developing AI software is as much about change management as it is about code,” he said. “There’s no global strategy helping companies become better versions of themselves and bring the C-suite along. That’s the gap we’re tackling.”
He added that the business is bootstrapped and is deliberately taking its time to find sustainable traction: “We’ve not rushed it. We’ve made two major pivots and brought in KPMG expertise. It’s about building something that delivers real impact.”
Asked for his advice to early-stage founders in Manchester, Kuhillow said: “Don’t be ashamed to throw an MVP out. Get something usable, get it into people’s hands, and start collecting data. Too many founders wait for perfection.”
He also encouraged entrepreneurs to tap into the region’s thriving network of events. “Manchester’s tech community is one of the best in the UK,” he said. “Everyone’s willing to help.”
