Adzuna, the UK’s fastest growing job search engine, lists over a million jobs and receives over six million monthly visits. With a projected revenue of c. £5m in 2015, the company has been listed as one of London’s top 10 hottest start-ups and has expanded into 11 countries. Now you can join the team of former execs at eBay, Zoopla and Gumtree, in their mission to get Britain working.
Adzuna is a search engine for job ads that lists every job, everywhere.
Our mission is to be the best place to start looking for a job. We search thousands of websites so you don’t have to and bring together millions of ads so you can find every job, everywhere, via Adzuna. We provide smarter search options and powerful data about the job market, giving you the information you need to take control of your career.
In 2011, we started working out of our bedrooms and the local pub on an idea to bring together every job, everywhere in one simple search engine, and help get Britain working. We’d worked together before at Gumtree, as well as separately at eBay, Qype and Zoopla, so we thought we knew the market and might be on to something.
Today, Adzuna has 6 million visits a month, generates millions in annual revenue, offers job search in 10 international markets and some exciting tools like ValueMyCV. We have had hundreds of pieces of national media coverage and based on our calculations we estimate that we’ve helped hundreds of thousands of people find jobs. It has been an incredible growth story and it is only just beginning.
How do we see ourselves as different from every other job website out there?
How do we make money?
What highlights have we achieved since launch?
Why are we fundraising?
Your investment will help us improve our service, ensuring we can offer the best possible experience to job seekers and job advertisers. This will include improving our offering on mobiles and tablets, adding new tools and extending our existing ones to help match users to a better, more fulfilling job. It will also allow us to grow our team and extend our reach through additional marketing and advertising both in the UK and internationally. The market in which we operate is estimated to be worth $9Bn (Forbes/LinkedIn) and growing and we aim to grow our revenues substantially in the coming 4 years, so there is a lot to do.
Two years ago, we raised investment from three of the UK’s leading venture capital firms:Passion Capital, The Accelerator Group, and Index Ventures. That money has helped us expand our team, develop great features and grow our marketing spend to tell more people about our service, and we believe we’ve spent it wisely. We believe that with more money we can do even more. Our existing investors have already committed £300,000 to the round, and we also believe that a wider group of investors can act as cheerleaders for us and help get the word out even more.
As a shareholder in Adzuna, you would be part of our company’s journey to get Britain working, and enjoy the rewards alongside our team and existing investors as our business grows.
Market
We believe that the business of matching people to jobs is enormous, with the total cost of labour being a significant chunk of the whole economy. The global staffing market is estimated at $320Bn (Staffing Industry Analysts), of which the amount spent on online job posting advertising is around $9Bn (Forbes/LinkedIn).
Key macro trends affecting the market, that all work in Adzuna’s favour, are:
Competitors
We compete with many large organisations with a lot more resources than ourselves, however we consider ourselves to be nimble and technically innovative in a fast changing market.
The main types of competitors we face are:
LinkedIn has an enormous set of active user profiles, and great data about them. It is therefore extremely strong in headhunting, especially at the high end of the market, and in working with HR in large corporates. It’s job posting service is however very expensive and not performance-based, and still only reaches a small proportion of the market. We also have a partnership with LinkedIn where they show Adzuna’s jobs where they don’t have enough job postings to satisfy jobseeker demand.
* Job search engines
Indeed.com, a large US-headquartered but Japanese owned company, is the largest job search engine in the world, and reputedly worth well over $1Bn.
Other smaller competitors include Jobrapido, Jobisjob, Trovit, but we’re already bigger than all of these players in the UK. In international markets we encounter others like Jobijoba (France) and Kimeta (Germany).
* Job Boards
Job boards like Monster, Reed and TotalJobs are our customers who buy traffic from us, so we do not see them as direct competitors, however they do compete with us in some ways for consumer attention in the job market or rankings in Google.
Adzuna has assembled a top-class team of 32 dedicated experts in their fields (see picture) who are proud of what we do and determined to make job search better.
Founders
Doug Monro
Doug is our ‘jack of all trades’. He takes the lead on the overall strategy of the company, product vision and business model – as well as development of team and culture.
Before starting Adzuna, Doug was COO of property portal Zoopla, now a public company worth around $1bn. From 2008 he led the growth of the team from 5 to 100 people and the site to number 2 in UK property with 5M visitors a month, organically and through acquisitions. Previously he was MD of Gumtree.com, the UK’s largest classified ads site, where he built the team and business through a fun growth ramp after acquisition by eBay in 2005.
Prior to Gumtree, Doug worked for eBay UK, Bain & Company, Unilever and also as an entrepreneur. Doug has a BA in English from Cambridge, an MBA from Kellogg, and hates to admit he is a qualified accountant.
Andrew Hunter
Andrew leads on all things marketing at Adzuna, taking charge of growing our audience and getting the word out there, from optimising digital marketing channels to brand and PR strategy. He’s been to Number 10 to represent us, works closely with Doug on all the big decisions, and is a big cheerleader for company culture, including organising poker nights!
Andrew was mostly recently VP Marketing and General Manager of local review site Qype, during which time the site grew its user base to over 17M monthly unique visitors in 2 years.
Before Qype, Andrew was Head of Marketing at Gumtree.com and ran Search Marketing for the Thomas Cook Group. Andrew has a Bsc from Oxford Brookes University and is our very own SEO Ninja.
Management Team
George Karpodinis, Tech Lead
James Neave, Head of Data Science
Ievers Shier, Head of Product
Matt Gregory, Head of Sales
Martin Sutherland, Head of Finance
All permanent members of our team are compensated with stock options on top of their base salary (the total maximum pool of which is set at 10% of the company’s shares pre funding). This means they act like owners, and their interests are completely aligned with our founders and investors.
These notes should be read alongside the Financial Snapshot
SALES:
USE OF FUNDS:
EXPENSES AND PROFITABILITY:
EXISTING DEBT OR EQUITY INVESTMENTS:
CASH:
We believe that if we do a great job of delivering on our mission and therefore building a fabulous job search engine with unique technology, a large audience and satisfied advertisers, then we will all be owners in a valuable business.
Our existing investors are highly supportive of building long term value in the business, but ultimately would likely be looking for an exit in perhaps a 3 to 7 year timeframe from 2015.
These investors have previously backed a number of successful household name exits for $1 billion+ in recent years, such as Skype, Just Eat, King and Zendesk, as well as other highly valued startups like Transferwise, MindCandy and GoCardless. Zoopla, where Doug was COO for 3 years, also went public in 2014.
There are a number of large media and internet businesses in our space that have been highly acquisitive in recent years. However, as was the case with Indeed.com which was bought by a Japanese conglomerate, acquisition offers can come from the most unlikely sources. Alternatively, in order to maximise value to shareholders, we might consider a public listing in the future. The timing of such an exit and evaluation of any offer would be decided by our experienced board, bearing in mind the interests of all shareholders.
We would encourage investment from people who do not have a definitive timescale in mind and can afford to wait for liquidity from their shares until the company reaches its full potential. We will aim of course to make exit opportunities available if possible when they arise, but it may well be the case that there is no opportunity to realise value from Adzuna shares in the next 5 years or more.
This company is offering Series B Preferred and B Ordinary Shares.
Series B Preferred shares are available to those who invest over £100,000 (to be held directly) and B Ordinary shares are available to anyone else who invests via Crowdcube which will be held via a nominee. The Series B Preferred Shares carry voting rights, pre-emption rights and other rights. The B Ordinary shares carry voting rights but do not carry pre-emption rights. Please see the attached documents entitled Disclosures and Nominee Structure and Articles of Association for full details of the rights attaching to shares and the implications of holding shares via a nominee.
Adzuna has submitted their plans to raise money, details of their structure and trade etc. to HMRC and is awaiting advice on whether or not the proposed share issue is likely to qualify for Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) tax reliefs relating to their shares.
Tax relief is available to individuals only, who subscribe for shares in an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS). Relief is at 30 per cent of the cost of the shares, to be set against the individual’s Income Tax liability for the tax year in which the investment was made.
If you sell, give away, exchange or otherwise dispose of shares, tax reliefs can reduce your Capital Gains Tax bill. Your shares must meet certain conditions to qualify for these reliefs.
Please visit the HMRC website for further information on EIS tax relief
The availability of any tax relief, including EIS and SEIS, depends on the individual circumstances of each investors, and may be subject to change in the future. If you are in any doubt about the availability of any tax reliefs, or the tax treatment of your investment, you should obtain independent tax advice before proceeding with your investment.
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