Shaty Mohamed, ECI's summer intern, talks about how she prepared for the internship interview process, what she's learned about relationship management in private equity, and why she'd make a good Traitor.
Q: How did you come across the ECI internship?
I first got involved with upReach, ECI's internship partner, in my first year at UCL. I'd already joined a few social mobility programmes in sixth form, like SEO London and the Social Mobility Foundation, and once I got to uni I wanted something a bit more career-focussed, so upReach was perfect. There was a detailed pack on each company and role, so you know exactly what you're signing up for. I'd done a couple of private equity insight weeks in first year and really enjoyed them, so when I saw I was eligible for the ECI 6-week summer internship, I just thought, right, let's go for it!
Q: What was the interview process like?
Honestly? A bit scary! It was an hour and a half. For the first half hour, they sat me down with a laptop and Amplifind™, ECI's proprietary AI tool, and gave me a company to look into, and then I had half an hour to present my view on whether it was a good investment, followed by half an hour of competency questions. Tamsin and Skyler were lovely, and throughout the presentation there was a lot of back and forth so it felt more like a conversation than a formal presentation, but it was so different to anything you do at university.
My last exam was literally the afternoon before, econometrics, so already not ideal, and I was up at 5 am doing my final prep. It's a hard one to revise for because a lot of it you only really learn on the job, so I focused on what ECI looks for in a business: resilience, growth and a strong management team, and made myself a little checklist to work through. I still walked out completely convinced I'd bombed it. I even took myself off for a consolation matcha straight after, so getting the offer was amazing.
Q: What projects have you worked on that sparked your curiosity?
One of my favourites was a customer analysis for one portfolio company with the Commercial Team. It was really data-heavy, and honestly that played to my strengths, because a big chunk of my economics degree is basically staring at graphs and data and going, okay, what is this actually telling me? I loved that it was so practical too, you could see exactly how the business would use the findings to prioritise certain products or channels.
More recently I've been doing a little research project for the Investment Team on the health tech sector, looking specifically at regulatory affairs in pharma, so all the compliance you have to meet across a drug's life cycle. It's a genuinely fascinating, fast-growing space, and it's been really interesting to see how the whole industry is shifting in the wake of AI.
Q: What has surprised you about private equity?
Everyone tells you private equity is a "relationship business", but I hadn't quite appreciated how much actual work goes into managing those relationships. Amplifind™ is almost a bit scary to look at, in the best way, because you suddenly see just how many relationships surround a single business we might like, from the management team to the advisers pitching for it, to the experts who know the sector inside out. And all of those relationships need to be built, maintained and understood, because that context can genuinely be the difference between winning and losing a deal. Frankly, I could do with a personal version of Amplifind™ to tell me which friends I've forgotten to message in a while.
Q: What's next for you after the internship?
Back to uni for my final year, and then it's straight into exams and grad applications. A few firms have started running private equity graduate schemes, which is quite new, since PE doesn't usually take people at the really junior end, so I might try my luck there, and I'm also looking at M&A and strategy consulting. Either way, this summer has pretty much confirmed that investing is what I want to do longer term.
Q: Any advice for future interns?
Be proactive. About halfway through I sat down and thought, right, what else do I actually want to get out of this? Then I wrote a little list and messaged a bunch of people asking if I could get involved, and nobody ever said no. People are so keen to help, so if there's something you want to do, just ask.
Quick Fire with Shaty:
If you were a pizza topping, what would you be?
Green chilli. It looks like a harmless little green thing, and then you take a bite and suddenly need ten glasses of water. It's POW!
What's your song of the summer?
Ooh, I had a whole list for this! But the ones I'll always associate with listening to during this internship are All-American B*tch by Olivia Rodrigo and Can't Tame Her by Zara Larsson.
Are you an early bird or a night owl?
A night owl, without question. Everything feels more exciting in the evening, and I love having plans at night. That 5 am interview prep was very much a one-off…
If you could appear on any TV show, what would it be?
Definitely the Traitors. I reckon I'd make a great Traitor and I’m proud about that! As a Faithful, I'd be hopeless though, because if I like someone I just tend to take them at their word.
What are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?
In date order: Halloween, my 21st birthday and graduating. I'm a big costume person, and this year I'm doing angel and devil with a friend, and then maybe the Schuyler sisters from Hamilton, or Glinda from Wicked; it all depends how many of us there are!
Insights
27/08/2026
Read Time: Min
“Quick Fire” with Shaty Mohamed
TOPICS:
People & Culture
Avantia has taken another major step forward in AI with the launch of 'Lyra', a proprietary agentic AI orchestrator built for the next generation of home insurance claims.
'Lyra' builds on Holmes, Avantia's existing proprietary AI claims tool launched in 2025. Lyra provides a sophisticated orchestration layer that sits above Holmes and is built to work alongside other agentic tools. Where Holmes processes individual interactions in the claims process, Lyra can coordinate multiple AI systems in much the same way a senior manager directs a team of specialists. Crucially, Lyra introduces persistent memory across claims interactions, enabling the system to identify patterns, inconsistencies and anomalies over time that would be invisible when viewing individual claims in isolation. The result is an AI-driven claims operation - leveraging multiple AI agents and tools - that is able to scale faster and smarter, with fair outcomes for both policyholders and the business.
The introduction of Lyra does not diminish the human element of the claims experience. A dedicated human operator continuously monitors Lyra’s learning and decision-making, and final decisions on all claims remain with human experts. Homeprotect's model is built on a clear principle: AI handles precision and process, while human claims handlers provide the empathy, judgement and sensitivity that no technology can replicate.
The launch also underlines Avantia's position at the forefront of responsible AI in the sector. It is the first UK personal lines home insurance business to launch AI-enabled policy validation and orchestrated claims processing, and the only insurer taking part in the FCA's AI Live Testing initiative, which supports the safe and responsible deployment of AI across financial services. A robust governance framework keeps 'Lyra' aligned with FCA requirements and the Consumer Duty framework, built on human accountability, dedicated oversight, transparency and auditability.
Dan Huddart, CTO at Avantia Group, says, “Our strategy is to build a fully AI-led operating model that delivers a brilliant customer experience, and I believe Lyra represents the first-of-its-kind, live deployment of agentic AI within the home insurance market. We are continually enhancing our AI capabilities across pricing, risk analysis and customer experience, whilst building the scalability and resilience required to support our growth. We have strong momentum and a clear path to scale our customer numbers from 350,000 today to over one million."
Avantia is the first UK personal lines home insurance business to launch AI-enabled policy validation and orchestrated claims processing, and is the only insurance business participating in the FCA’s AI Live Testing initiative, which supports the responsible deployment of AI in the UK finance and insurance sectors.
Avantia has also implemented emerging web standard WebMCP within its website, reinforcing its market-leading position in the implementation of AI in the insurance sector. Homeprotect is the first UK insurance business to implement the technology, which enables AI agents to interact directly with parts of a website journey, as it prepares for a future where consumers are expected to increasingly use agentic AI to research and interact with insurers.
Consumer Intelligence’s Insurance Behaviour Tracker found that when AI tools and assistants were first included as a shopping channel in April 2026, 18.7% of home insurance shoppers said they had used them to shop around, compared with 17% using the telephone and 14.5% using brokers, suggesting that AI agents are now pivotal to the customer journey.
George Moss, Managing Partner at ECI, says: "Avantia continues to set the pace for AI in home insurance. Lyra’s ability to connect information across claims gives a level of oversight that wasn’t possible before, protecting customers and keeping premiums competitive. The introduction of WebMCP reflects their approach at the forefront of the customer journey, understanding how people look for home insurance today and expanding that into the future, helping Avantia stay ahead of the competition. Congratulations to Dan, David and all the Avantia team on these exciting developments.”
News
26/08/2026
Read Time: Min
Avantia cements its AI leadership in home insurance with the launch of ‘Lyra’
Many mid-market businesses still measure marketing success through impressions, website traffic, keyword rankings, and click-through rates. While these metrics still have their place, they are becoming less reliable indicators of whether your business is actually visible to your audience.
At our recent ECI Unlocked webinar, digital strategy consultancy OMMAX shared their expertise with our portfolio marketing leaders on how AI is reshaping the buyer journey. Their message was simple: "People don't want search engines anymore. They want answer engines."
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews… they are now sitting between your brand and your buyer. We look at the ways best in class marketing teams are adapting to the next era of discovery.
1. Understanding brand equity inside LLMs
Visibility within LLMs is now measurable. Tools like Croud's BrandCI can help businesses track:
Disruption – how much of your traffic could be at risk as Google's AI Overviews reduce clicks to traditional search results? New tools can track this, including brand sentiment (is the AI saying good, neutral or bad things about you?), presence (in what share of relevant searches do you get a mention?), citations (how often are LLMs linking to your site?), and disruption (how far Google's AI Overviews have already dented your existing SEO rankings).
Sentiment – is AI describing your brand positively, neutrally or negatively?
Presence – how often does your business appear in relevant AI-generated responses?
Citations – how frequently do LLMs direct users back to your website?
OMMAX has run around 250 of these assessments and found that many businesses appear in about 20–25% of relevant LLM answers. Strong brands can reach 80%, while some are sitting at 8%.
For mid-market businesses, sentiment matters more than the numbers. As OMMAX put it: "The only thing worse than not being visible in LLMs is being visible with a negative brand sentiment." They shared a client example where, in response to almost every prompt about their brand, the LLM responded with something along the lines of: yes, they exist, but I wouldn't recommend working with them. The culprit? Comment sections on old YouTube videos the company had long forgotten about.
2. Have you changed channel focus?
The channels that matter for LLM visibility are not the same ones that drove SEO performance, and your team's channel mix should reflect that.
According to OMMAX, LinkedIn is the most cited domain within ChatGPT, and YouTube is the most cited domain within Gemini. Facebook, on the other hand, is largely unreadable by LLM crawlers. So if your marketing team is putting energy into channels that LLMs can't access, that effort isn't building the visibility that matters right now.
Third-party content matters more than it used to. With the previous focus on SEO, a mention without a link-back counted for little. However LLMs work differently, they don't just crawl your website, they draw on press coverage, review sites, forum threads, and discussion boards. Earning mentions, even unlinked ones, across independent sources is now a core part of building what OMMAX calls ‘algorithmic brand equity’.
Paid search deserves the same scrutiny. The view from some leaders is that PPC has been performing for Google rather than for its clients, with revenue up on price even as click volumes fall. If your team's reports show costs per click rising against declining volume, that's the shift playing out in your own numbers, and it strengthens the case for rebalancing spend towards the channels LLMs actually read."
The practical question for your team is, are they actively pursuing coverage, reviews, and presence on the platforms LLMs read?
3. Has your content adapted?
This one might sting a little but since ChatGPT launched, the internet has been flooded with mediocre AI-generated content. The irony is that to be visible inside LLMs, you need content that stands out from all of that. As OMMAX said: "We don't just need to produce more content, we need to produce better content. Content that stands out from the clutter."
If you've invested properly in SEO over the years, you have a head start here. LLMs have learned which brands carry real domain authority, and strong organic foundations feed directly into that. But authority alone doesn't win the answer. LLMs then look for another level of insight relevant to the specific question being asked, so content that was broad enough to rank on Google now needs to be developed further and personalised to the questions your buyers are actually asking.
But there's also a structural issue, not just a quality one. The ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic bots all behave very differently from Google's crawler, and they're considerably less mature. One OMMAX client's website was fully readable by Google, but the ChatGPT bot couldn't access the news section at all, meaning ChatGPT was completely blind to every update the company had ever published. Machine readability across all major crawlers is now a basic technical requirement, not an advanced consideration.
Key takeaways
Having a clear view on LLM performance and adapting channel and content strategy accordingly should be front of mind for all marketers at the moment. Marketing teams are really refocussing on the fundamentals. As OMMAX put it, "Building LLM visibility isn't about tricking an algorithm or finding growth hacks. It's about having a great product, communicating about it effectively, understanding which channels matter, and keeping your content hygiene in place."
The good news is that when brands get it right, LLM referrals tend to lead to conversion rates seven to nine times higher than normal because users arrive already informed, looking to confirm a decision rather than gather information. The traffic is smaller in volume but dramatically higher in intent.
Insights
11/08/2026
Read Time: Min
How are leading mid-market businesses delivering on LLM marketing
What is a career in private equity like?
Beyond job security and attractive financial rewards, perhaps the most appealing feature of working in private equity is its fast-paced, ever-changing dynamism. Through managing a portfolio of different companies across a range of subsectors, the role continuously offers new opportunities and challenges. In other words, in the world of private equity careers, no two days are ever the same.
That variety keeps the job exciting. The ECI team might spend one day visiting an insurtech firm to discuss application of AI, and the next day help an IT Managed Services business round out its North American strategy.
In both cases, the central objective of working in private equity is the same. It is to build fantastic relationships with management teams and put every effort into helping them achieve their goals and deliver exceptional results.
Working in private equity is quite different from corporate finance or management consultancies. There, advisers may spend no more than a few weeks with a particular management team. Private equity investment, by contrast, typically moves through four separate stages:
- Identifying potential investment opportunities and initiating an open conversation with the management team to understand their ambitions and appetite for investment, preferably as early as possible. At ECI, the relevant leads from our Origination, Investment, and Commercial teams who would work with the management team if an investment happens are all involved from early on in this process.
- Building a fantastic relationship with the management team, and working through a deal, either outside of a formal process or in an auction process in competition with other would-be investors.
- Once the deal is complete, our three teams (Origination, Investment and Commercial) all work together to ensure that the company has access to all the relevant support and tools that will help it to drive value.
- Typically an investment period is around 4-5 years. During that time, the ECI team works with the leadership team to remove pre-existing “value drags” that may have existed at investment, unlock further top-line growth and finally work through an exit process to deliver maximum value for all stakeholders. These are the investors, management team and employees.
So, how many hours do you work in private equity?
There’s no straightforward answer. However, those different stages mean there can be times when it is incredibly busy, such as in the run up to an exit, balanced with a gentler schedule in quieter periods. People contemplating working in private equity should understand there may be those peaks and troughs.
While there’s no doubt that those working in private equity work hard, work-life balance is often better than the likes of law firms or investment banks. Similarly, while a career in private equity provides some travel opportunities, it’s highly unlikely to be excessive and keep people away from home for extended periods.
What background do you need to work in private equity?
The educational backgrounds of the people attracted by a career in private equity are as varied as the work you face on the job. At ECI, we welcome talented individuals with degrees in subjects ranging from English to engineering. Generally speaking, these graduates will have complemented their university education with three or four years of experience in the financial or professional services sectors or in industry. Over the years, we’ve welcomed ex-consultants, start-up founders, and ex-tech developers to the team. This gives our team great diversity of thought – critical to deliver the best returns to our own investors.
The private equity interview process
Interviews for positions at ECI are usually held across three rounds:
- Round One: A preliminary, getting-to-know-you series of talks, giving ECI an insight into candidates’ personalities and allowing applicants to ask questions about ECI’s culture and strategy.
- Round 2: Candidates meet more of ECI's team and are asked more detailed questions about their career, expectations and aspirations.
- Final phase: Practical tests based on real investment case studies. In this round, applicants are given time to assess an individual company’s strengths, weaknesses and return prospects, draw conclusions on its suitability as an investment, and suggest ways in which private equity investment could add value.
Applicants progressing to the final hiring round are likely to demonstrate several qualities expected by private equity investors. These include:
- A lifelong learning mindset (there is always more to learn!)
- Lateral and structured thinking
- Commercial judgement
- Natural curiosity
- Teamwork and collaboration
- A competitive instinct
- An understanding as to why ECI might be a long-term home
How to prepare for a private equity interview
Perhaps the most important advice for candidates is to ensure that they have a thorough understanding of the firm’s investment strategy and recent investments. Increasingly, these include a commitment to sustainable investment and good ESG practice. A private equity firm’s website is usually a good place for information. ECI, for example, has detailed information about our portfolio companies, recent exits and our culture on our website.
Candidates should understand the cultural and strategic differences that distinguish a large buyout specialist, a mid-market investor or a Dragons Den-style business angel. All share the same broad objective: to generate a reasonable financial return both for themselves and for their end-investors. However, each has different risk-return expectations. This defines their culture and the way they originate, manage and exit their investments.
ECI, like many mid-market investors, aims to generate consistent long-term returns by focussing on growth. We work with portfolio companies on projects that deliver long-term, sustainable growth and help them with the challenges that arise from growing in scale. Examples may be international expansion, M&A or the launch of new products.
Culturally, we put a lot of emphasis on our values: Collaborative, Considered, Ambitious. This runs from our hiring processes to our appraisal programme, and are at the heart of every partnership.
The benefits of a private equity career
The financial rewards of a long term career working in private equity are compelling. The pay structure at private equity firms generally depends on individuals’ seniority. For junior staff, this will focus on a base salary with a bonus. As you rise through the firm, the emphasis switches to ”carry” and this is the most significant long-term economic reward of a private equity career. Carry means individuals can expect to receive a share in the capital growth of the companies that the firm invests in. It makes it all the more advisable for new recruits to take the firm’s track record into account. As well as incentivisation it may impact long-term prospects. This is because the rewards from carry, at the right firm, will likely dwarf base salary and bonus.
Private equity involvement in portfolio companies is long-term. That provides an unrivalled opportunity to work with exceptional management teams throughout the lifespan of an investment. It also gives you a unique perspective on the development of the company. It can and should be incredibly rewarding to support CEOs and their teams to implement strategic changes. Those working in private equity will see them realised, and help CEOs to achieve their business and growth ambitions.
Is a career in private equity for you?
For anyone looking for a challenge and wanting to work with a breadth of businesses, working in private equity provides them with the opportunity to have a dynamic, varied career. No two days are the same, and the diversity of the industry means private equity professionals get to work alongside some of the most interesting and exciting people and businesses.
Insights
09/08/2026
Tom Wrenn
Read Time: 5 Min
Working in Private Equity: where no two days are the same
TOPICS:
Tom Wrenn
Summer 2026 has been a scorcher in more ways than one. Between the heatwaves and the World Cup heartbreaks, what have the ECI team been reading when they haven’t been spending their time ferrying tower fans from room to room or trying to stay awake past the second-half whistle...
Mia Smith
Land by Maggie O'Farrell
Land is a beautiful, sweeping novel set in the aftermath of the Irish potato famine, following one family across generations and continents as they are drawn back, again and again, to the same patch of remote Irish ground. At its heart are questions of home and identity, and the indescribable pull back to a place that is bleak yet somehow impossible to leave behind. A thread of magic and Irish folklore runs through it, but nothing ever feels far-fetched. I've read reviews that complain of it being too descriptive, but I personally loved the level of detail O'Farrell offers when describing the wild and rugged landscape, which feels less like a setting than a character in its own right. I hope this, like Hamnet, is adapted into a film - ideally also with Jessie Buckley in the lead role!
Jeremy Lytle
All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art, by Orlando Whitfield
If you are even vaguely interested in the art world I’d recommend this book. It’s a memoir of friendship but also betrayal at the heights of the contemporary art world. Whitfield met Inigo Philbrick when they were at Goldsmiths together, and while Whitfield’s own dealing career didn’t get anywhere, Philbrick went on to dizzying success, trading multimillion-dollar art works before pulling off the biggest art fraud in history. Whitfield uses his insider eye to show an industry that runs mostly on charm and with barely any regulation – a far cry from the world of the FCA. It’s this combination that means dazzling brilliance can cover a whole manner of sins. Part true-crime thriller, part an ode to a lost friendship.
Faye Maughan
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe picks up on the story of a 19-year-old boy who fell to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. His grieving parents discover that he'd been living a double life, posing as the heir to a Russian oligarch's fortune and moving into the orbit of dangerous people. In what's already a fascinating story, Radden Keefe uses his journalistic skills sensitively, digging into the background of a young man who emerged from his school years and very quickly became out of his depth. It's gripping, with an amazing pace, and raises questions about a criminal side of London that most people are happy to ignore. This book would not be as good as it is without the role played by his parents and their desperate search for answers.
Jeroen Sibia
Discussion Materials by Bill Keenan
Keenan's memoir charts his stumble from student athlete into life as a junior banker. It is a gloriously unglamorous account of life as a junior on the sell-side: the all-nighters, the endless reformatting of decks, the slow dawning that being brilliant at one thing prepares you for absolutely nothing about the next. Having come up the same way, I found it all very familiar, not least the special despair of an MD who wants the deck to "pop" at 2am. The bankers we work alongside every day are the ones who lived through that grind and came out sharper for it, and the best of them make a genuinely hard job look effortless. Keenan is wonderful on the small indignities and left me with a real affection for anyone who survives it all and still, somehow, cheerfully returns your call at ten on a Friday night.
Scarlett Salamon
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
I really enjoyed Lessons in Chemistry, which follows the indomitable Elizabeth Zott as she pursues her passion for chemistry in 1960s America and faces constant adversity navigating a male-dominated environment. Her colleagues find it simply unfathomable that a woman could be capable of advancing science. When she is fired from her research position, Elizabeth is thrust into a career she never expected: hosting a cooking show. Through this unlikely platform, she empowers women across the country, teaching them the chemistry behind cooking and spreading the message that women are capable of doing what they want, not simply what society expects of them.
The book delivers a poignant message about the progress made towards equality and challenges the reader to reflect on the work still to be done. Elizabeth's tenacity is admirable and her refusal to accept the limitations placed on her sets an example that resonates far beyond the world of science.
Insights
28/07/2026
Read Time: Min
What are ECI reading? Our summer 2026 reading list
ECI has invested from Manchester for close to three decades - as we mark our 50th year, Stephen Roberts, who has spent much of his career doing deals across the North West, reflects on why the region remains one of Europe’s busiest deal markets and why it is still one of the best places in the UK to build and scale a business.
ECI’s Manchester office has led almost a third of ECI’s investments in its latest Fund. Why is the Manchester office so important?
“Because on some measures Manchester is the second most active private equity market in Europe, behind only London. It is a busy market, with a strong population of PE and VC funds based here, and that activity is particularly strong at the lower-cap end, with many deals which gives us sight of opportunities early. It also has a particular character: it is big, but small too. Everyone knows everyone, it is less transient than London, and that fosters a supportive and collaborative culture, which matters a lot when you’re building a business. And lastly, but most importantly, there’s a lot of innovative growth businesses here. We have been investing here for close to thirty years, and across every fund we have done two or three good deals out of the Manchester office.”
Does being on the ground change anything for the Founders and management teams you back?
“I like to think so. For a founder, having your investor around the corner is valuable. It means we can meet for a coffee at short notice to talk through a strategic issue, rather than everything being a formal, diarised set-piece. Those informal touchpoints often matter most.”
The North West is often labelled a tech region - is that how you see it?
“I would call it a growth hub rather than a tech hub. The perception that it’s all tech undersells the breadth we see. Partly that’s because some of the biggest success stories have been tech or tech-adjacent - the North West has produced a remarkable run of success stories, from Boohoo and THG to AO and On the Beach, and more recently Matillion. But that’s a real range; e-commerce has always been strong here, as have tech-enabled services. Our own track record reflects that breadth: we have backed businesses like Citation, Great Rail Journeys, Clarke Energy Services, TMG, CPOMS, Moneypenny, CMap and Mobysoft across the North, and what they have in common is that they’re strong, well-run, growing businesses, which is what we look for.”
What has changed in the market over the years you have been doing deals here?
“The biggest shift is how the advisory community has matured. It is no longer a case of regional teams covering regional deals - senior, nationally focused advisers at the major firms are now based in Manchester rather than London, across corporate finance but also legal and broader advisory. Manchester has become a national deal-doing centre in its own right, not just a regional one. That is true for us as well – personally, I lead the HRtech sector nationally, combining that sector expertise with genuine local presence. We also deliver national and international deals from here. A good example is our recent investment in Paragin Group, the Benelux leader in high-stakes assessment software, led out of Manchester, just as we support TAG on its international growth from here. Being based in the North West does not mean only doing North West deals.”
Do you think there’s a growing confidence in the region, is that translating to deals?
“There’s a huge amount of foreign direct investment in Manchester - it’s now in the top ten large European cities in the Regions of the Future rankings. You can see it on the ground (and in the amount of cranes across Manchester!) - real money going in from the Good Growth programme, innovation hubs, and a funding ecosystem built around the universities. VC investment in the North West was £2bn in 2024.”
What would you still like to see strengthened in the region?
“Connectivity remains top of the list. International travel out of Manchester is excellent, but it can be quicker to reach Amsterdam than Newcastle. We’ve said this for years and progress has been slow, but it’s still the biggest single thing that would help the North build on the past decade’s growth. One of the more dramatic changes that you could expect to strengthen the region is Andy Burnham becoming PM. This will help to shift the country’s centre of gravity away from London, with Burnham talking about a 'Downing Street North', a permanent government base here in Manchester. It is an interesting challenge to the London-centricity of the UK, and I’d expect a renewed focus on devolution with Manchester and the Northwest front and centre, which should be genuinely exciting for businesses and investors in the region.”
What’s your message to Founders?
“That we are very much open for business. We have backed growth businesses from this region for the better part of thirty years, and we intend to keep doing so for a long time yet. I’m passionate about the success of the North West and North West-based businesses”
Insights
22/07/2026
Stephen Roberts
Read Time: Min
Q&A: The investment outlook for the North West
A year ago, the question we heard most often from the software teams in our portfolio was some version of “how do we get AI to write more of our code?” It’s amazing how quickly that question has become out of date.
We recently brought together technology leaders from across our portfolio - CTOs and engineering heads from businesses spanning insurance, communications, professional services software and more - to hear what AI is actually doing inside their teams, not what the headlines say it should be doing.
If coding is no longer the bottleneck, what is?
The clear message from the group was: code generation is largely a solved problem, and the constraint has moved. The hard part - and the one that determines whether AI is an asset or a liability - is no longer writing the software, it’s all about verifying it.
Engineers writing lines of code used to be the main bottleneck but now an agent can produce a working feature in an afternoon. The new constraints are testing, quality assurance, security review, and the broader question of whether you can trust what has been produced enough to put it in front of a customer (and let’s not lose sight of the product question either - are we building the right things in the first place?). As one CTO put it, generation has improved so dramatically that every other part of the pipeline is now comparatively slow.
Why this should worry (and excite) leaders
Research from Veracode found that close to half of AI-generated code contained at least one of the most common security vulnerability classes, and that figure barely improved as the underlying models got more capable. A separate 2025 study of several hundred pull requests found materially more vulnerabilities in AI-assisted code than in human-written equivalents. Google's DORA research, the most authoritative longitudinal study of software delivery, has been blunt about this: AI speeds up development but it amplifies problems where team’s processes are weak.
Point a powerful generation engine at a team with strong testing, automation and review, and you will see real value in your acceleration. Conversely, if you’re pointing it at a team without those foundations in place, you’ll get more code and more defects.
AI will make your engineering faster and cheaper but has a knock on impact on verifying that work.
Automation isn’t the full answer (yet)
The group was unanimous that scaling quality assurance to match the new pace of generation is the challenge they are all focused on. Agents and automation are clearly beneficial, but trust and demonstrated failure cases are the challenge. Established test and security platforms were variously described as too slow, too narrow, or too expensive to keep up with code now arriving at pace.
CMap, the professional services software business, used AI agents to rebuild a core product written in a niche legacy language - a rewrite estimated at well over a year of manual effort - in a matter of weeks. In the process, the agents generated roughly 15,000 automated tests. That number is the tell – for automated testing to be effective, there needs to be significant scale, and you need to ensure that the machine hasn’t learnt how to mark its own homework highly. The scope of the testing depends on the scale of the change and the risk of the application (we’d all like to think the software that runs our cars has a higher trust hurdle than our favourite casual mobile game).
The businesses making the most progress treat evaluation, where testing of AI is automated against real scenarios, as core engineering work, not a “vibe check.” They actively guard against models gaming their own tests. They apply a risk-tiered quality bar: “good enough” for low-stakes internal tools, full validation for anything customer-facing or regulated. One CTO stated that getting it wrong in those contexts is not just an embarrassment but a genuine harm. The unglamorous plumbing of integration and automated testing is also changing the shape of teams. Product, dev and design roles are merging, and everyone is looking for “builders” who carry the end-to-end skill set, and we are also seeing a renewed appetite for QA engineers.
Great examples of this are at Avantia, where the AI claims tool “Holmes” improved fraud-detection accuracy 3.4x and completes payment calculations with 98% accuracy - and it works in a high-stakes, regulated setting precisely because verification and human escalation were designed in from the start. Similarly, Moneypenny filed patent-pending guardrails into its AI communication tools to keep responses accurate and compliant. The teams making the progress are focused on treating “can we trust the output?” as the first question rather than an afterthought.
What is front of mind on cost?
It’s worth being honest that this is not free. A standard AI seat might cost around £90 a month, but a single power user running agents at full tilt can consume several thousand pounds of tokens in the same period. Token spend is not immaterial, and cost management is going to be a top focus for tech teams going forward. We are also not yet experiencing the full cost of the tools we’re using, and that pressure will only increase as current subsidies are removed.
What does this mean for your business?
Don’t fixate on how much of your code is being written by AI. Focus on the full software development lifecycle and quality of output (DORA being a useful framework for that).
The good news is that this is a problem of operational discipline. The businesses pulling ahead are simply the ones who have accepted that shift from creating code to verifying it, and acted on that change.
At ECI, working through these questions with our portfolio is something we take seriously - through our Data & AI Maturity Model, our Commercial Team, and our dedicated Data & AI Growth Specialist. Getting the technology leaders in a room together is part of that. If you would like to compare notes on where AI is moving the bottleneck in your business, we would be delighted to hear from you.
Insights
20/07/2026
Duncan Ramsay
Read Time: Min
Software development: Code is no longer the bottleneck
Tomorrow, Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated retelling of the Odyssey arrives in cinemas, and one of the oldest stories we have will meet a new generation. It is a story I know well. Long before I joined ECI's Commercial Team, I studied Classics, and while we tend to remember the monsters and storms, beneath the spectacle, it is a study of resilience, the tale of one leader trying to make it home against immortal will and mortal temptation.
In our 50th year, having backed more than 250 businesses, the theme of resilience continues to feel close to home. Growth is rarely a straight line. The companies that have the most successful stories are rarely the ones that dodged every storm, but those that pulled through despite the odds and were stronger for it. Here are five key concepts from the epic tale of Odysseus and what they might teach us about building businesses that last.
1. Nostos (Homecoming): Never lose sight of the mission
Everything Odysseus does bends towards one fixed point: Ithaca and getting home. The landscape might change, but the destination stays the same. CEOs will recognise this - markets shift, and strategies change, but the core reason a business exists, its "why", is what keeps it steady when everything else is in motion. Bionic is a good example of this. When we backed it, the mission was simple: help Britain's small businesses get a better deal. Almost everything else was reinvented, as a telephone-based energy broker became a multi-product digital marketplace across energy, insurance and finance. We also see this in the Tech for Good businesses we back – not only does the mission drive the strategy, but it also motivates employees and helps them retain top talent. For example, Peoplesafe’s focus on worker safety across their products - whether that was on their commute, when working remotely or in lone worker situations. Know your Ithaca, and keep sight of it even when things change around you.
2. Metis (Cunning): Strategy beats resources
Christopher Nolan described Odysseus as "an amazing strategist and a very wily person", and the Odyssey is careful about the kind of intelligence it admires. Homer’s Odysseus is not “sophos”, learned or wise. He is “polymetis”, a man of many wiles: resourceful, quick, able to solve the problem in front of him with whatever is to hand. That distinction travels well into business. The strongest companies are not always the ones with the most capital or the biggest teams, but those able to think on their feet and problem-solve quickly. We see this in many of the companies we’ve backed, where they face much larger incumbents. It isn’t likely you will be able to outspend such a rival; however, you can out-think them, focussing relentlessly on a particular target customer, or building a better service that services a need ignored by larger competitors. They are the ones who make better choices and use the tools they have more cleverly. Auction Technology Group is a good example. Rather than pushing more spend into the traditional auction world, where it had its origins, it backed a simple but powerful insight: that the future of auctions was online and data-led. It built the marketplaces and the technology to match, turned a smart idea into a category-defining platform, and in 2021, we took it public on the London Stock Exchange, realising our remaining shareholding in 2024, generating a 4.4x return.
3. Atē (Folly): Don’t be tempted by the easy route
The Lotus-Eaters, Circe, Calypso and the Sirens all try to pull Odysseus off course, and the danger is not always obvious. The Sirens sing the sweetest song of all. In business, the Sirens are the easy answers, and success often depends on saying no more than yes, and on interrogating what looks attractive rather than taking it at face value. One of our investments, Avantia, does this very deliberately through OKRs, the objectives-and-key-results framework popularised by Google. It sets three a quarter, and leaders from across the business have to debate and agree on the top priorities that make the cut. Its CTO, Dan Huddart, has said that implementing OKRs forces you to prioritise, which requires commitment but can be hugely valuable. That discipline keeps a whole organisation pulling in one direction, rather than chasing every passing opportunity. Knowing what to say no to is as valuable as knowing what to say yes to. Another area where this is common is M&A; deciding which acquisitions not to do is often just as important as the ones you do acquire. Duncan Painter, the Founder of ClarityBlue who went on to pursue c.30 acquisitions at Ascential plc before joining ATG, put this succinctly: “It’s not something we would want to do too often, but we have pulled out of a couple of deals where we’d spent six to nine months on them, on the last night. We don’t see that as a failure. We see that as making the right choices.”
4. Homophrosunē (Like-mindedness): Build the team that stays the course
Odysseus gets home in part because the people who matter stay loyal: Penelope, Telemachus, even his old dog Argos. Long-term success depends on that kind of trust, because culture is what drives commitment. But the Odyssey tells a subtler story about teams too. Most of Odysseus's crew never makes it home. Some are reckless and do not listen. Others are lost precisely because he does not trust them: they open the bag of winds because they have no idea what is inside, and he keeps the danger of Scylla to himself. Trust, in other words, runs both ways, and a more open or trusting Odysseus might well have reached Ithaca sooner. The best businesses understand this. At MiQ, they described this two-way communication as radical transparency, creating an open and inclusive culture became a genuine driver of growth. Mark Eastham, CEO of Avantia, puts it well when he says a good leader is one who asks the right questions rather than always having the right answers. Teams that trust each other and leaders who are open with them tend to go further and faster.
5. Moira (Fate): Control what you can
Storms, gods and sheer luck shape Odysseus's voyage. Poseidon sends the waves, and no amount of seamanship stops them. Leaders face the same truth. You cannot control interest rates, geopolitics or regulation, but you can control your culture, your strategy, your talent and your execution. Tusker is a clear illustration. It couldn’t control changes to BIK tax rates, interest rates, used-car residual values or a pandemic-hit car market. What it could control was its response: the decisive pivot to electric vehicles, the strengthening of its leadership team and the rebuilding of its technology. It was those controllable choices, not the weather, that carried it through to a sale to Lloyds Banking Group. When the storm comes, and it always does, the businesses that endure are the ones that pour their energy into what they can change.
Insights
16/07/2026
Mia Smith
Read Time: Min
5 case studies in resilience
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