We are pleased to confirm a new seed funding round of £1.2m bringing the total raised to just over £3m, from ACF Investors, Mercia, and Scottish Enterprise.  The funding will be used to develop our proprietary Swoop brand protection technology and AI/ML to further extend capabilities, and to continue team growth to help an expanding base of global clients fight fakes and online threats.

The funding is a huge positive for female-led technology companies receiving investment, as according to Crunchbase figures, only 2.3% of venture capital went to female-led start-ups in 2020. This appalling figure becomes even more interesting as, when female-led start-ups do get funded, they’re more likely to be successful – delivering more than twice as much revenue per dollar invested!

We have also strengthened the team, with the hiring of Geraldine Kelly as Non-Executive Chair of the Board. Geraldine has previously held senior executive positions with Frame Technology (Adobe); Visio (Microsoft), Gartner Learning Group and Thomson Learning. Geraldine is a Chartered Director with the Institute of Directors and an experienced board chair. Angela Brown has also been appointed as Finance Director.  A chartered accountant with over 20 years’ experience, Angela was most recently with Symphonic Software as it scaled to a USD$31m exit in 2020.

We are hugely proud of everything the team has achieved to date, not least preventing over £100m of fake goods being sold in the last 12 months, and look forward to future growth and success. Tom Pellereau, one of SnapDragon’s current clients and Inventor and Founder of STYLIDEAS Ltd. with Lord Sugar following 2011 BBC’s The Apprentice, comments: “SnapDragon Monitoring has removed over 6000 copycats of my award winning STYLPRO makeup brush cleaner from Amazon, eBay, Instagram and Alibaba. It’s a colossal number, and something we would never have been able to do on our own. Copycats appearing on Amazon are an unfortunate reality of modern commerce, as an inventor you want to spend your time creating new products not fighting the constant barrage of fakes. SnapDragon’s algorithms constantly scan the net, searching for new infringers and every week they send us a list of those they have scheduled to remove. It’s that simple. I recommend SnapDragon to any innovative business.”