Now established as one of the North’s tech giants with a valuation of over $1.5bn, cloud data company Matillion has had a meteoric rise.
Set up by CTO Ed Thompson and CEO Matthew Scullion, the company has grown to 650 staff with a major presence in Denver, but its heart remains in Altrincham in Greater Manchester.
That’s a source of great satisfaction to co-founder Thompson.
“We’re very proud of the fact that we were able to launch a tech business in Manchester, with Manchester’s tech heritage behind it,” Ed Thompson, Matillion’s co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), told Prolific North.
Matillion works with global organisations of all sizes from Slack, Cisco and TUI to integrate and transform data.
In a nutshell, he explained the key driving force behind Matillion is to “help customers make their data useful by improving the productivity of data teams”. He explained there’s “a real crunch in all businesses that want to compete with data”.
Although more than 70 percent of Matillion’s customers are now based in America, which has helped the company to unlock investment from Silicon Valley to expand into those territories, the company champions its roots as a Manchester-founded company.
“There’s really a great tech ecosystem in and around Manchester,” he said. “We definitely didn’t want to lose that, that’s what drives the dual headquarters decision.”
Since securing $150m last year in a Series E funding round led by global growth equity firm General Atlantic, it marked an “incredibly proud moment” in the company’s history.
It led to the company reaching a key milestone with tech ‘unicorn’ status, where a ‘unicorn’ is a tech company with a valuation of over $1bn, cementing its position as a leader on the Northern tech scene.
But there are equally “important things” happening across both locations in Denver and Altrincham.
Whilst both co-founders live in Manchester and are primarily based in its Northern HQ (for the most part – Scullion spends a large amount of time in the US) the engineering team operated solely out of the UK until recently.
“During the pandemic, that became a little less true. We started to take advantage of remote working, not just in the UK but Ireland and other locations in Europe. Since then we’ve doubled down on that, we want to open a development centre in Madrid, for example.”
The evolution of Matillion, striving for success and how the company works with customers
Fresh out of school, Thompson kicked-off his career as a software consultant and first met Matthew Scullion at a small consultancy firm in Altrincham.
