He turns down three or four VC approaches a day and runs a £3m ARR business
Charles Preston has grown a Manchester cyber security firm to 45 staff and 10,000 customers with no venture capital, having politely rebuffed thousands of investors.
Charles Preston · usecure · Software and cyber security · Manchester
£3m
annual recurring revenue
How it was funded
Bootstrapped with a modest angel investment
The numbers
- Founded in 2016, at the age of 37
- £3m annual recurring revenue
- 45 staff
- 10,000 global customers
- Zero venture capital
- 3-4 VC approaches per day
Charles Preston founded usecure, a Manchester-based cyber security firm, in 2016 when he was 37. By January 2025 the business had £3m of annual recurring revenue, 45 staff and 10,000 global customers, and had taken no venture capital at all.
The only outside money was a modest amount of seed investment from an angel he had worked with earlier in his career at AppSense. He told BusinessCloud he had politely rebuffed thousands of VC approaches since, and still receives three or four a day.
His reasoning was not ideological. He said that when he started the business he had no idea how to grow a technology company, and that he could not understand a market in which companies with little or no revenue were attracting astronomical multiples.
Growth came from regulation and then from AI. GDPR pushed demand for staff security training, and the rise of AI-assisted attacks widened the problem the product solves.
“Companies with little or no revenue were attracting astronomical multiples. I didn't understand that.”
Charles Preston, speaking to BusinessCloud
What you can take from it
Not understanding the game is a reason to sit it out
Preston declined a market he could not make sense of, rather than assuming everyone else knew better.
Regulation is a growth channel
GDPR did more for demand than any campaign. Watch what is about to become compulsory in your sector.
Flattered is not the same as tempted
Constant inbound investor interest is a signal about your market, not an instruction to raise.
Source
Reported by BusinessCloud, 8 January 2025. All quotes and figures belong to the original interview.