GeoSpock, the Cambridge extreme data technology pioneer, is set to wrap up a megabucks and transformational investment round within weeks to underpin further international expansion.

We expect GeoSpock to close the new round towards the end of July or early August at the latest. I understand that the company has new lead strategic investors and that existing backers will all continue to support the business as it scales to fresh heights globally.

The new finance has been obtained despite the handicap imposed on negotiations by the coronavirus pandemic.

I’m told GeoSpock has some exciting strategic investors lined up that are well positioned to ensure the company represents the de facto database powering telco IoT and Smart City deployments globally. 

I’m further assured that the company has some major lines of business ‘cooking’ in Asia where appetite for GeoSpock’s technology continues to grow.

As Business Weekly reported in June 2019, GeoSpock leveraged growing demand in Asia by opening operations in Tokyo and Singapore. It plans to hire 30 staff in Asia by June 2021. The company raised a fresh £10m in January 2019; Japanese investors Global Brain and 31Ventures along with data tech company KDDI Supership chipped into the round which took the total raised by GeoSpock to date to £19.5m – just under $25m – and was designed to fast-track transformational GeoSpock engagement with the massive Asian markets of Japan and Singapore.

There is no gain without some pain and GeoSpock made an unspecified number of redundancies in February with a further headcount review in progress.

However, anonymous emails from disgruntled ex-employees sent to Business Weekly claiming that half the workforce have been laid off have been described as way off the mark by inside sources.

The lay-offs are said to be more to do with the company pivoting key elements of its technology offering away from visualisation and back towards a deep-tech core-database focus.

One reliable source told me: “Being able to articulate, sell and build mission-critical digital infrastructure for running future data and IoT platforms for nations, global telcos and automotives requires very deep technical training and is unfortunately not a journey for everyone. 

“Our recent benchmarks put us firmly ahead of Google and Amazon database offerings so we’re now in the process of hardening the product to be suitable for large enterprises – which will require quite a bit of extra work, but the potential payoff is huge.”

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