01 Apr B.D.C launches the “Euratech in London” Programme

Last March 16th and 17th, B.D.C launched the “Euratech in London” programme, a Franco-British accelerator in partnership with Euratechnologies, one of Europe’s biggest start-up accelerators based in Lille, in the North of France.

Four French-based innovative start-ups, which are aiming to accelerate their development on the British Market have taken part in the first session of this programme.

• Ineat, which assists companies in the creation and set-up of bespoke digital solutions (in-store, mobile app…)
• Dartagnan, a SaaS solution to easily create responsive emailing campaigns optimized for all devices on the market
• Mazeberry, which provides a SaaS platform to help e-commerce professionals to measure each web marketing acquisition channel’s profitability
• Vekia, which develops Supply Chain Management software solutions for retailers based on Machine Learning to optimize inventory management

If these start-ups have already demonstrated a strong potential and are working with major retailers and pure players in Europe, it is time for them to boost their commercial activity in the first retail market in Europe.

With a strong growth in the past years, the British market is the largest European market for e-commerce. We estimate that it is 18 months ahead of the two other major European markets (Germany and France) in the connected commerce space.

The maturity of the British market makes it very competitive and that is why retailers need to constantly innovate to keep ahead of the competition. Thus, it represents a great opportunity but also a huge challenge for these companies. Every quarter, £1 billion are invested in start-ups and e-commerce which is twice more than in France. For all these reasons, the UK market has become a real source of inspiration for European leaders in connected commerce.

After 2 days of theoretical training in Lille, teaching them cultural specificities and requirements of the market, we received them in London for 2 days of collective pitch sessions and a first immersion in the British retail and digital ecosystem.

We gave them the opportunity to pitch in front of major retail actors in the UK, such as B&Q, Majestic Wine or Intu, but also to meet with incubators such as TrueStart to get different insights and advices on how to consider and tackle this market.

For the occasion, we also co-organised a Pitch & Networking event with our friends from French Digital in the evening hosted in Mozilla’s office near Charing Cross. More than 50 people from the French tech and entrepreneurial community in London participated. A great way to meet with the local ecosystem.

These meetings have been helpful for the start-ups in order to understand how challenging the UK market is, but also to get valuable and insightful feedbacks and advices in their future development.

A second session will be organised in April when each start-up is going to meet personally with potential partners.

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