Before Matillion had a customer, it had one engineer and a decision.
In 2011 Matthew Scullion and Ed Thompson quit their jobs. Thompson went to work in a rural corner outside Manchester and wrote the first version of the product himself. Scullion set about writing down the principles the company would live by. There was no office tower, no Silicon Valley sponsor, just two people betting that data was about to move to the cloud.
What almost nobody outside the data world noticed was how awkward the job was.
Scullion was not new to the bet. By his own account he had co-founded his first startup at 18, which meant that by the time Matillion began he had already been through the cycle of building something, running out of road and starting again. Thompson was the quiet half: the builder, and later the company's chief technology officer.
What almost nobody outside the data world noticed was how awkward the job was. Companies were piling information into cloud warehouses, and then discovering that getting it in, cleaning it and shaping it into something useful took armies of people. Matillion's answer was software that did that work inside the warehouse itself.
Growth was patient. A first outside round of about $5M arrived in 2016. In 2018 came $20M, with a Silicon Valley investor, Scale Venture Partners, joining the Manchester-area YFM. A further $35M or so followed in 2019. Offices opened in Denver, New York and Seattle, because most of the buyers were American.
Then, in September 2021, General Atlantic led a $150M Series E with Battery Ventures and others, valuing the company at $1.5bn. It made Matillion one of the UK's unicorns, and one headquartered in Altrincham rather than London.
Scullion's reaction, in a later interview, was telling. The founders, he said, had never set out to become a unicorn. They had set out to do business with integrity and quality, and to take some risks. The headline on that interview quoted the line that they never had a vision this big.
That is the quiet lesson of the story. Scullion and Thompson did not start with a billion-dollar ambition. They started with a principle, a working product and a market that was moving their way. The valuation was what happened after fifteen years of not wandering off.
For a founder reading this, the point is to write the first version yourself, write the rules down early, and let the scale come later.