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As the name of our publication suggests, we typically cover startups in their earliest stages.

But sometimes tech companies grow with little in the way of external investment, and take their first proper funding round when they’ve proven their business and are ready to grow.

That’s the case with today’s startup, but Deltabase have an interesting story and operate in an interesting space, so I felt I had to share them with you.

As ever, Premium subscribers get the full story.

– Martin

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Deltabase turns the intangible aspects of your company’s rivals into hard data

If you’re in the mergers and acquisitions game, understanding businesses in as detailed a way as possible is crucial. Financial, sales, and market data is easy to come by, but some information is far less tangible.

How do you make sense of a company’s people and culture? That’s where Deltabase steps in.

“What we also learned from our experience as management consultants is that actually it's people and culture that play a really critical role in determining which companies are successful in the long run or less successful,” explains Phil Spratt, co-founder and CEO of Deltabase.

“Historically, there was an underserving of data and insight on a company's people and culture, which meant it was difficult to bring those kind of things into strategic decision making.”

Designed not just for M&A, but also for strategy and transformation use cases, Deltabase is billed as a competitor intelligence product.

“We've built an AI platform that builds a really rich picture of a company's culture, its workforce, its talent, and its recruitment patterns… It provides direct comparisons of companies against their competitors, with benchmarking that levels up the people and culture agenda,” Spratt says.

The platform allows users to create a list of companies they’re interested in, and then compare them on points such as talent, workforce deployment, or culture. The platform automatically pulls together relevant data with visualisations, highlighting strengths, weaknesses and points of difference.

That’s all very good, but while financial, sales, or market share data is easily quantifiable, the kind of data Deltabase works with really isn’t. Something as nuanced as a company’s culture doesn’t translate well to a spreadsheet. So how does Deltabase do what it does?

“We draw upon both structured and unstructured data that's found in a really wide range of sources that are all publicly or commercially available. We're leveraging both paid and unpaid datasets,” Spratt says.

For unstructured data such as employees’ opinions about a company, Deltabase applies sentiment analysis algorithms to apply a data layer that is comparable between competitors.

“We’re able to process and understand the unstructured qualitative data, draw out signals from that and then quantify the sentiment that exists within that natural language,” Spratt says.

“That's part of what we've needed to do to turn the data from its qualitative state at source to a very quantified read that takes any subjectivity out of the comparison. That's really important for our users and our stakeholders, that all of the insight we're providing is completely objective, so that's why we process everything in a like-for-like way.”

The story so far

Spratt co-founded Deltabase with Alastair Whiteley and David Rowe. All three have backgrounds in the consultancy world, helping clients with decision making and business transformation.

Around eight years ago, they noticed data played more strongly into the way they solved client problems than they had in the past.

“There was a real potential for AI to both enhance and disrupt the consulting market. Of course, this is before LLMs. We wanted to be part of that change. We didn't want to sit there and watch AI disrupt the consulting market without us being a part of the change and being able to make sure that was a change that was a positive force for clients and for consultancies as well,” Spratt says.

The trio founded Deltabase in 2019, around the time Spratt relocated from the South East of England to Liverpool, which has become the company’s home.

Unlike many of the startups we cover on PreSeed Now, Deltabase has reached a relatively mature stage without much in the way of external investment. The company’s website lists KPMG, Mercer, and Capgemini among its clients.

“We're really at that stage of our journey where we've got really good traction and we've proven product-market fit with some of the world's largest consultancies,” Spratt says.

Go deeper on Deltabase

Funding:

Deltabase raised a friends-and-family SEIS round in 2020, when the company was only 10 months old, to help it through the instability of life as an early-stage startup during the pandemic restrictions.

Since then, the company has grown through revenue until it closed its first proper investment round at the end of 2025. The round consisted of £750,000, led by River Capital with participation from EHE Ventures.

“We want to really start scaling Deltabase, both in the UK and in North America as well. We've got some clients that are based in the United States and Canada, so we're looking to double down on growth now… So this year for us is all about turning that capital into scaling,” Spratt says.

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