Professional services startup secures £1.7m to open up marketplace

A co-created professional services enterprise has secured £1.7m funding from Innovate UK to bring its platform to market.

Professional services consortium Engine B, which aims to create a standard access methodology to client data, has secured the investment from the government’s national funding agency.

Founded in 2019 by KPMG’s former head of digital disruption Shamus Rae, Engine B aims to create industry standards for data access that will open the marketplace to greater competition and innovation and allow for a more diverse range of clients to gain access to professional services.

Shamus Rae, founder and CEO of Engine B, explained: “For the UK’s professional services firms, investment in data access is crucial to securing their future and maintaining their global leadership position.

“We are hugely excited about enabling our current leading professional services firms to digitise and, more importantly, to open up the market to new innovative tech startups.”

Professor Lisa Webley at University of Birmingham, one of the firm’s academic partners, added: “Professional service firms are making ever greater use of sophisticated digital technologies to transform the work that they do.

“Access to high quality data is the key to harnessing the power of these technologies, but data transfer and use also poses real ethical and regulatory risks that are yet to be fully assessed.

“This funding allows us and a consortium of other partners, led by Engine B, to drive our research forwards in this area, to assist with secure access to data, new ways of using it, and an assessment of the ethical and regulatory framework needed to support all involved.”

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