Free and a better UI, claims founder Damien Kimmelman
The Companies House website is a vital tool, but it’s a pain to use. If you want to find out a firm’s net profit, or how many shares a director holds, you’ll need to download – and pay for – a PDF.
Duedil is the new alternative. It has digitised all the information on Companies House and hosted it on an intuitive, attractive website. Oh, and it’s free too.
It also includes other data from other sources, making it Duedil the UK’s largest database of free company financials.
Having raised more than £1 million of angel funding and now with two new backers, Tom Hulme of IDEO and Sherry Coutu, Duedil is well on its way to becoming the “number one place for business information”.
Founder and CEO of Duedil, Damian Kimmelman, talks to us about data science and the importance of understanding private companies.
Owing to recent new funding, you mentioned how you’re keen to expand your team and focus on growing Duedil’s data science department. Can you tell me a bit more about this?
In the 1850s a man called John Snow mapped out all of the incidences of cholera. He realised that they all derived from the water, in fact from one pump in Broadwick Street. He advocated removing the handle from the pump. Eventually, they removed it and the cholera cleared.
This is data science; looking at data and trying to find a higher understanding. It’s about looking at financials to find things like fraud. This is one of the things our data science department does, looking at the traits that make good businesses and bad businesses, and how we can add value to that understanding.
So what are the ways that Duedil adds value?
One of things we consider is, how do you define what a business does? Businesses are defined by SIC codes, these codes are used for government statistics. Most of the economy is made up of private businesses. But how do you know how your company fares in relation to other companies?
So what we’re doing is crawling websites, looking at social profiles and the kind of social backgrounds that are involved and pricing these things together.
Some businesses will always stay the same, for example, mining companies probably won’t go into consultancy. All of the new economy, online economy, changes very quickly, and what we’re focusing on is giving these companies insight.
Google, for example, could be an advertising company, mobile or video streaming company; all these definitions are true in different contexts. We provide a better understanding rather just than categorisation or tagging.
You said in the Telegraph recently that “accounts receivable need to become like sharing photos on Facebook,” in relation to small private companies’ financial performances. Can you elaborate on this?
What we’re trying to do is create transparency in business, allowing businesses to become their own data providers. That’s why Duedil needs to be a platform and network rather than just a directory.
You’re originally from New York, and I believe you want to bring Duedil to the USA. What kind of road blocks do you anticipate moving overseas?
In the UK there are several million companies that provide publicly available information. It’s not as straightforward as simply going overseas as there are different laws and different governing bodies in every state in the USA.
But are you still planning to go?
Absolutely.
Duedil has been nominated for an Orange Innovation Award (congratulations!), which will be awarded next month. Will you be at the ceremony?
We’ll definitely be there, thanks for the chat.
Thanks, and good luck!
Written in association with Duedil.com
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