At a time when AI threatens to slash the value of almost all information except proprietary content, a UK-based data startup is helping B2B publishers to maximise their data resources – and subscription revenue.
Flare is a two-year-old-company which has been persuading B2B media that data content will protect them from the ravages of AI, by launching premium subscription services with data from public sources and the publishers themselves.
CEO and co-founder Magda Woods launched Flare in 2023 after selling Waive, her last digital venture, to Future. It was ‘an early trend detetion tool’, used by Future’s Cinemablend “to discover the next Squid Games”.
Her latest 10-person venture – founded with former financial editor Daniel Flatt and ex marketing and analytics specialist Sam Fairburn – raised some £100k (for a £2mn valuation) from Angel investors in 2022 and hopes to achieve £400k revenue this year. That may help it to get funding for new expansion on the back of its breakthrough business for UK publishers in 2025.
The Financial Times’ specialist division is Flare’s largest client so far and is rolling-out the data product across its brands, starting with MandateWire, Asset Allocator and The Banker.
For Metropolis B2B, Flare helped its Construction News to create a premium subscription product based on 12 dashboards offering new data and intelligence. The service (which took just eight weeks from concept to live) is claimed to have produced a 5x RoI within just three months of its launch in 2024, attracting more than 100 new premium subscriptions and 20 new corporate premium subs.
A similar product has recently been launched for the company’s Local Government Chronicle and more are planned for other Metropolis brands.
For all the fact that many publishers immediately see the post AI-benefit of subs-funded data content, Flare’s founders still have to work hard to convince B2B executives that intelligence product is a sound basis for premium subscriptions that can readily generate recurring revenues. They can even have trouble persuading some publishers that their own (plus readily-available public) data can be turned into viable subscription services on the Flare platform.
Woods and company may not like to see their livewire venture reduced to their simple ability to turn publishers into data providers quickly and cheaply. But there’s no doubt that Flare is doing for publishers something that once required months and millions of pounds of bespoke programming – and then only in larger companies. Flare’s marketing may be slightly basic (“Make Light Work Out of Data” and “We automate the boring to make time for the brilliant”) but you get the point.
The startup boasts impressive leadtimes of some 22 weeks from first data assessment to the launch of a new product generating revenue as an intelligence provider. The total costs of the journey are estimated as little as £10k (depending on complexity, of course) plus annual license costs of £40-65k.
That’s why Flare may soon be set for takeoff. But the trajectory may depend on its ability to raise anything from £500k to £1.8mn for an expansion plan in the UK and across Europe. That’s what they’re trying to do right now. What are you waiting for?
