Malvern Business Accelerator

Tailored mentoring and coaching, with the network and support you need to accelerate your business

Please express your interest using the form below

What is the MBA Programme?

8 weeks of acceleration with experienced experts in our Great Malvern incubator, finishing with a demo day to pitch your business to our network

What do you get?

  • Develop your business growth strategy

  • Identify key customer groups and strategies to reach them

  • Use established techniques to create a product or service that customers will buy

  • Access talent inside top UK universities

  • Gain an immediate, extensive business network

  • Become confident in business and IP Law, accounting software and managing your business finances

  • Workshops with experts in your field

  • Understand the funding landscape, where to go to raise investment and when

  • Develop an improved investment pitch deck using templates, tools and examples

  • Connect directly to investors with a personal introduction

  • Look at your business from an external perspective and avoid pitfalls which you may not be able to see

How will we do that?

For the person:

  • A personal mentor with regular 1:1 progress meetings

  • Advice from experienced entrepreneurs

  • Focus on personal wellbeing to avoid burnout

  • Meet-ups and events with experienced founders

  • Introductions to potential customers, collaborators and suppliers

  • Time to discuss ideas, strategy and analyse plans

  • Action Learning sessions in a supportive group

  • WhatsApp group for instant support

  • Community of like-minded entrepreneurs - scroll down for some success stories

  • Pitch deck coaching

For the business:

  • Workshops and clinics with industry professionals: Marketing, Legal, IT, Intellectual Property

  • Free office for the whole accelerator

  • Investor network - angels, VC funds, family wealth offices

  • Email dispatches - carefully curated content telling you about new funding that’s coming online, grants, support programmes

  • Free access to talent from top UK universities - paid student intern programmes 

  • Amazon Web Server and Google Cloud credits

  • Discounts on insurance, business cards, merchandise printing, legal help and plenty more!

 

Key Mentors

In our network, we have mentors from every business sector - check out the Team page for more

 
 

Adrian Burden

Experienced tech entrepreneur, author mentor, blockchain specialist and Maserati 100 Entrepreneur

Lillian Shapiro

Experienced multinational business MD, passionate, energetic and well-connected mentor.

John Spindler

CEO of Capital Enterprise, Co-Founder of AI Seed and Co-Founder of the London Co-Investment Fund

Jack Wratten

BLOOM.SPACE Founder and Lead Mentor, serial entrepreneur

Workshops with specialist mentors

Who’s it for?

  • Businesses from any sector - you do not need to be running a high-growth tech business to apply

  • Founders of small businesses looking for tailored personal mentoring and support

  • Startups struggling to grow their business

  • Companies that are ready to scale and looking for investment

Network and Support

Starting and growing a business is very hard work and it often feels like you’re doing it all on your own. We have experts from a wide range of businesses in our network and provide the mentoring and coaching you need to succeed!

 

Plan

  • Looking ahead - what’s your motivation for starting a business?

  • Evaluating the idea - is it likely to make money?

  • Choosing the right business structure - Limited Company? Partnership? CIC?

  • Registering the company, getting the right insurance

  • Setting up the accounting and payment systems

  • Planning and implementing your IT systems 

  • Setting up the right social media channels

  • Getting the business planning underway

  • Getting to your Minimum Viable Product

  • Selling to your first customers

  • Iterating and improving your product

  • An instant network of like-minded entrepreneurs

  • Wide range of mentors to support you

  • Training and workshops on key topics

  • VAT and tax planning

Start

  • Establish your team

  • Recruitment, job descriptions and contracts

  • Cost-effective ways to scale the company

  • Introductions to collaborators and partners

  • Applying for grants

  • Introductions to prototyping and manufacturing plants

  • Innovating and ideating - what’s your next product?

  • Meeting space for your business

  • A supportive network of like-minded business founders

  • Specialist mentors to support you

  • Marketing training, PR, strategy, accounting, IP Law

Grow

  • What do investors want to see?

  • Creating and presenting an effective pitch deck

  • Are you pitching for the right amount?

  • Valuing your business

  • Introductions to investors, both UK and international

  • A professional business environment

  • A professional office to meet investors in

  • Presentation suits for pitching

  • Recruiting the right team

  • Expanding overseas

  • Access to world-class talent from world-class universities 

Success Stories

 

Calipsa.io

Raised £1.1m while incubating in bloom.space

Calipsa.io is a machine learning startup who've developed systems to monitor CCTV feeds, reporting automatically when events like accidents, thefts, congestion, etc occur.

Calipsa.io joined BLOOM.SPACE after completing their acceleration at Entrepreneur First. They raised £1.1m in their seed round while incubating with us for 6 months. They were great to have around and we helped with introductions and promoting their roles to our network so they could recruit new talent. Calipsa.io was successfully acquired by Motorola Solutions in April 2022 for an undisclosed amount. 

Co-founded by Boris Ploix and Mohammad Rashid Khan 

Hanley Payment / LettsPay

A new startup created by Garrett Foxton from Hanley Swan. 

Garrett came to us with an idea, utilising the basics of a tech platform he created and his experience working in the financial technology and payments industry. He had quit his job to start his company with a short window to find early investment.

We worked with Garrett on how to present his idea and created a pitch deck for investors to understand his business model and what he needed investment for. We invited Garrett to our London office to network with our mentors and present the early version of his technology.

After that meeting and with the feedback we had gained, we spent several coaching sessions improving and refining the slide deck, then send it to one of our mentors who is an investment specialist (John Spindler) then arranged a face-to-face meeting with Garrett and John to discuss the business further. After that input, Garrett was able to pivot the business and find the first market to attack - the letting agents market.

Garrett’s platform “Hanley Payments” provides a solution for letting agents to communicate with their tenants and collect rents in a more efficient, reliable and cost-effective way, this helped clarify the type of investor he was looking: Fin-Tech, Prop-Tech or Retail-Tech.

Having pivoted the business to focus on this market, Garrett received his first round of investment and was able to employ a full-time developer based at The Grange. 

With further coaching meetings, Garrett refined the deck further, raised a further round of investment and then went on to have his business acquired by a large firm of domestic landlord agents.

Bloomsbury.ai

Raised £1.4m while in bloom.space and sold to Facebook for around $30m

Co-founded by UCL Machine Learning specialist Guillaume Bouchard, Bloomsbury AI had a mission to make it easier for people to talk to their computers using natural language. They created a system which reads your website and documents, learning about the topics contained in them, then you’re able to ask it questions. They were one of BLOOM.SPACE’s first members, joining because of the proximity to the UCL talent pool, the location (in Bloomsbury!) and our flexible approach - their team expanded and contracted frequently during their journey as they acquired different skills sets.

Bloomsbury AI spent a year with us and we were pleased to provide them with space, support and help with recruiting new team members form the tech startup world. They joined straight after finishing the Entrepreneur First programme, having formed their team and were looking for an inexpensive, flexible and supporting co-working environment.

Guillaume’s father owns a vineyard and his wine was always an integral part of our meet-ups!

Aiden.ai

Raised a $750k seed round while incubating in bloom.space.

A virtual colleague for marketing execs, utilising Artificial Intelligence to make marketing faster, affordable and more effective.

Aiden had a small team which formed during Entrepreneur First and came to BLOOM.SPACE straight after to incubate and grow for around 6 months before raising $750k in a seed round and moving to larger premises as their team expanded. We helped them with recruiting talent, promoting their roles to our networks and providing flexible low-cost office space. Aiden made use of our hot desks and their team grew fast!

They were voted one of the Top 5 Digital Companies in London in 2017 and have seen the likes of Nicolas Pinto (now Deep Learning Lead at Apple) invest in their company.  They secured a second seed investment of $1.6M in November 2018 and finally, Twitter acquired Aiden for an undisclosed amount.

Co-founded by Marie Outtier - one of London’s leading female AI entrepreneurs - and Pierre-Jean Camillieri

Feedback from others

 

“What sets Jack apart is his highly personable and charismatic character. In an industry rife with sneaky money-grabbers, Jack is a breath of fresh air owing to how trustworthy and genuine he is. Indeed to be mentored by Jack is to know you have a loyal friend who is genuinely passionate about your ideas and responsive to your professional needs.

I would have had no idea where to start without Jack, and I hope to maintain our professional friendship for as long as possible. Thanks Jack!”

— Benjamin Leggett, Director at El Grito

“Jack helped us find relevant grants, put us in touch with investors and helped us get into a pitching competition. Jack mentors us on an ongoing basis on the development and funding of our business, and is an absolute charm to work with. Highly recommended!”

— Mark Florisson, Founder and CEO of Urban Mobility Labs

“I like your holistic approach to mentoring. You’re non-judgemental, patient, and encouraging and have a great sense of humour. You are fast and efficient. You also come up with very useful advice and far-from-obvious solutions. You are great at connecting people from different backgrounds. You also know exactly whom to connect with. You can easily get to the gist of a problem, even if it’s something technically obscure. Instead of just giving one-off advice, you stay helpfully involved until something is resolved.”

— Dr Oleg Volkov, Founder of Xitific

“Your knowledge about potential support, be it from grant funding through to debt and equity financing is considerable and I am now far more aware of possibilities than previously.”

— Simon Davis, CEO of Clearwave Air UK Limited

“What I found most valuable from Jack as a mentor was not his knowledge and expertise in how to refine and focus an investment pitch deck, but the fact that his own background as a scientist and someone who has taken that skillset to the international entrepreneurial level provided true genuine experience and insights into common problems to avoid..”

— Prof. David Lowe

“Jack has been a real mentor to me and my business. What makes him such a great sounding board is that he knows how to listen deeply, fully grasp your business model, and quickly identify potential areas for improvement. He is very well connected and the introductions he has made have consistently added value..”

— Manu Wachter, Founder and MD of equal.plus

Pricing

£ FREE

The MBA Programme is fully funded by BLOOM.SPACE so you don’t pay a penny!

Value

£25,000

When we added up the value of the offices, mentoring, workshops, training, support and time with experts, it came to over £25,000 per startup.

But remember BLOOM.SPACE is funding it all, so you don’t pay.

Express your interest:

Process:

  1. Complete the short form

  2. We’ll contact you for a chat and we’ll decide how we can help

  3. If we can make a real difference to you and your business, we’ll offer you a place on the MBA Programme