UK venture builder Blenheim Chalcot expands to New York

The Blenheim Chalcot
team.
Blenheim
Chalcot

• Blenheim Chalcot is opening an office in New York, it’s first
  in the US.
• The company is a “venture builder” — it seeds and then
  supports startups in everything from fintech to education and
  media.
• The business has 20 companies and thinks it can have an edge
  in fintech, where it says London is a leader globally.

LONDON — A successful British “venture-builder” business is
expanding to New York, hoping to show off Britain’s expertise in
financial technology in America.

Blenheim Chalcot, which was founded 20 years ago in London, is
opening its first US office in New York. The office will act as a
“beachhead” for Blenheim Chalcot-backed businesses looking to
expand to the states.

Blenheim Chalcot sets up startups and then provides support
services to them such as legal, recruiting, IT, and other
admin-type tasks, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on building
their businesses. Blenheim Chalcot currently supports around 20
companies across fintech, education services, and media. It has
assets of over $600 million under management and reinvests money
from successes into its other businesses.

“One of the real strengths of the Blenheim Chalcot model is that
we have a team of some 200 people that work across London, India,
and now the US to create an ecosystem that helps our businesses
to win,” Dan Cobley, the managing partner of fintech at Blenheim
Chalcot, told Business Insider.

A recent success is ClearScore,
a free credit checking service that Experian is in the process of
buying for $383 million, although UK competition regulators
are probing the deal.

“We decided we wanted to go into the US and formerly put that
capability on the ground so that as our businesses in London and
Nottingham want to go to the US, they’ve got a beachhead, a
landing pad, that gives them a lot of support,” Cobley said. “We
think that’s really powerful.”

Cobley was previously the managing director of Google in the UK,
and cut his teeth at Capital One before that. He joined Blenheim
Chalcot in 2014.

The US is already well served for tech startups, but Cobley
believes Blenheim Chalcot’s businesses still have something to
offer.

“While there are some areas in which the US is well served, there
are some areas in which the UK is leading,” he said.

“In fintech, London does have incredible strength. London’s the
only place where you’ve got the tech, the regulator, and the
banks all in the same geography all supporting each other and
you’ve got a big unified UK market, which helps them get to a
reasonable scale, versus the US situation where you’ve got
Silicon Valley, New York, and Washington as three important
geographies all quite well separated. And you’ve got different
regulation in the different states which makes it harder for
fintechs to get to national strength as quickly.”

Blenheim Chalcot’s new office will help launch two of its fintech
businesses in the US initially: SalaryFinance, which lets staff
borrow against future paychecks; and small business lender
Liberis.

SalaryFinance is already working with Legal & General in the
US, and Cobley said part of the rationale for expanding to New
York was client demand.

“We’ve got a number of clients who are international and they’re
asking if we can serve them in the US. That gives us an obvious
bridge,” he said.

Blenheim Chaclot is helping to bring over seven of its 20 UK
businesses to the US initially. Others include training platform
Avado Learning and publishing business Contentive.

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