I turned down $5m to move my business to America. Britain cannot expect others to do the same

An American investor offered my robotics company five million dollars on one condition: we move our headquarters to the United States. For a British business with ambitions to grow, that is a difficult offer to turn down. It also raises a question the government should take seriously; how many promising companies will Britain help to create, only to see them build their futures elsewhere? We gave the offer proper consideration. America has deeper pools of investment and considerable experience helping technology companies scale, and it could have unlocked a much larger funding round.

But our engineering team was in Bristol, one of Europe’s leading aerospace and advanced engineering hubs. Moving would probably have meant losing key people and rebuilding at significantly higher cost, and we had spent years bringing that expertise together. Our roots were here, and we wanted to build a British company capable of succeeding internationally. Fortunately, we secured the funding we needed elsewhere; it took longer, but we had a choice.

Other founders will face the same decision without an alternative source of funding. When the future of a business and the livelihoods of its employees are at stake, a determination to stay in Britain can only take you so far. Britain has a great deal invested in those decisions. We fund research, educate engineers and help entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses. If companies then have to move overseas to finance their growth, we risk losing the skilled jobs, investment and expertise that we have worked to develop.

The Chancellor should address this in the Autumn Budget. We rightly take pride in Britain’s ability to create innovative companies, but we need to give more of them a realistic prospect of becoming large, successful businesses while remaining based here. Having helped build businesses in hydrogen technology, advanced materials and now robotics, I know how much capital that requires. Equipment, testing, production facilities and skilled people all have to be paid for, often well before sales can cover the costs.

Even with a working product, winning a major customer can take longer than expected. The business needs enough funding to see that process through. Britain has a rich manufacturing history and the engineering talent to build on it. Turning that talent into the next generation of manufacturing businesses will require investors prepared to back years of development and commercial growth. At Q5D, our future funding requirements could reach tens, and potentially hundreds, of millions of pounds.

We want to build a billion-dollar British technology company. As those ambitions become more expensive to pursue, access to capital will again influence where we can fulfil them. Early-stage funding in Britain is stronger than many people realise. The difficulty increases as businesses need larger sums. Investors also need credible ways to realise a return, including through public markets capable of supporting growing technology companies.

Their willingness to fund a business today depends partly on the opportunities they expect to find further down the line. One Budget cannot resolve all of this, but it can acknowledge the scale of the challenge and begin making progress by improving access to patient growth capital and strengthening the conditions that encourage investors to keep backing British companies as they expand. Overseas investment will remain essential to businesses like ours.

America is already our largest market, and we expect our US subsidiary to grow alongside the British business, bringing opportunities that we are keen to pursue. But if Britain wants more companies to retain their base here as they expand, it needs to offer a more level playing field on access to finance. Founders weighing an overseas offer should have a credible, properly funded prospect of growing from Britain, so that staying makes commercial sense as well as reflecting where their people and expertise are.

We chose to stay because we believed in the people and expertise we had built here, and because we found investors who gave us that choice. The government should make it possible for more founders to do the same. ____________________ Stephen Bennington is CEO of Q5D. LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

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