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Technology, Media & Telecommunications
industry
£5.6m
Aggregate investment by all Foresight VCTs
March 2023
Initial investment date
Growth capital
Investment type
Company background
Based in Manchester, Red Flag Alert has developed a business intelligence platform with modular capabilities spanning compliance, sales prospecting, risk management and financial health assessments which is sold into a growing corporate customer base. At its core, Red Flag Alert is a credit referencing agency (CRA) and is the most agile and up to date credit scoring tool in the market, predicting insolvencies in the next 12 months with 97% accuracy.
The concept behind Red Flag Alert began as a lead generation solution within Begbies Traynor, a listed insolvency practitioner, with the proprietary tool identifying companies at risk of insolvency before traditional CRAs. It was spun out of Begbies Traynor in 2012 and is now the only independently owned UK based CRA assessing company risk.
Investment
Red Flag Alert presented the opportunity to invest in a growing business with a well developed platform and product suite. Red Flag Alert had already moved from repurposing and presenting third party data to providing enriched data and value-add analytics, providing a compelling, premium enterprise solution.
The Foresight VCTs initially invested £3.5 million of growth capital in March 2023 to invest in the sales, marketing and account management teams to drive growth. In 2024, £2.1 million of follow-on investment was completed to support a data modernisation strategy to improve the way in which it ingests raw data, increasing the timeliness and accuracy of its insights, and to support development of additional products including international anti-money laundering and identity verification checks.
Since investment, the senior management team has been strengthened with the appointment of a new chief revenue officer, head of marketing and finance director.
Trading and strategy
Red Flag Alert has performed well since investment. It continues to execute on its strategic plans to shift towards enterprise value customers with a growing pipeline reflecting the success of the change in go to market strategy. The business is focused on delivering the data modernisation strategy which will further enhance its product offering.
