Winton Labs

Winton is a British investment management firm which specialises in statistical and mathematical inference in financial markets.They trade on over 100 global futures markets in a variety of asset classes as well as  on global equity markets.

In 2016, Winton partnered with L Marks to establish Winton Labs, an innovation lab aimed at remaining at the cutting edge of technological advancements and unearth data-driven startups with the potential to enhance and optimise Winton’s operations, focusing on three key areas: 

• Compliance Reg Tech 
• CRM
• Data Visualization

A “Wildcard” category was included to capture startups working on agile technologies capable of advancing Winton’s operations in another way.

“Since being part of the first Winton Labs cohort in 2016, the Winton team have continued to offer invaluable advice which has helped us to more than double in size. We have increased our client base by over 300% and have won a number of awards and accolades including being named ‘Best UK Security Startup’ by WIRED UK and ‘Best Machine Intelligence Startup’ by LegalGeek.”
Tim Sadler – CEO, Tessian (formerly CheckRecipient)

Throughout the programme, the startups received expert mentoring from Winton teams and a number of external mentors who work across L Marks programmes. Startups were also connected with a range of business support providers. Three of the participating startups secured trials with Winton, while one won investment from Winton Ventures.

“London is home to world-class academics, startups, data scientists and innovators. By bringing these ingredients together
into an organised acceleration programme, Winton Labs is helping entrepreneurs to build new, value-generating companies that are able to compete on a global scale.”
Matt Ridley (Formerly) Investment Manager, Winton Ventures

Startups from Winton Labs’ 2016 programme have enjoyed subsequent success and have grown significantly.

Results

Cognism

Cognism specialises in identifying, organising, and evaluating sales leads sourced from high-quality news outlets, web platforms, and social media channels. Their services empower businesses to locate, connect with, and successfully convert their ideal prospects. They took part in the Winton Lab program under the CRM category.

Collaboration

Having a pre-existing product Cognism got the opportunity during the programme to demonstrate the integration and application of their solution to Winton’s CRM in preparation for their market launch.

Results

Following the end of the programme Cognism closed a $500K seed round in January 2017 from investors including FINTECH Circle and South Central Ventures

Tessian

Tessian is a cloud email security platform which protects organisations against advanced threats and data loss on email. They use machine learning and behavioural data science to automatically stop threats that evade legacy Secure Email Gateways, including advanced phishing attacks, business email compromise, accidental data loss and insider threats.

Collaboration

Tessian’s primary objective was to establish a Proof of Concept (PoC) for their solution with Winton while enhancing and perfecting their overall product offering.
Results

After participating in the program, Tessian secured a £300K investment from Winton in July 2016 and successfully onboarded its first FTSE 100 client