We recently read that since 2015 almost a third of European companies who expanded to the US did so even before they had raised a Series A. That’s a big step at such an early stage. Expanding to the US is a strategic decision for a startup, and expanding too soon could potentially be at the expense of continued growth on your home turf. But expand too late and you risk losing the US market to a competitor.

The ideal scenario for any scaleup is to get traction and to position yourself both in your home market and in further growth markets – at the same time. Getting your business to a place where you have users in a target market already engaging with you, rather than going in cold with full commitment and a big investment risk, can make executing your growth plan a lot easier. And that’s a strategy that can pay dividends if it’s executed the right way.

Axial Capital has established a presence in key markets including the US and Europe to support our portfolio companies with a lean platform for accessing these new markets, providing a soft-landing approach for accessing the international marketplace. The creation of a US subsidiary will immediately bring you within the US tax net in one sense or another, so a soft-landing approach can be the ideal way for ambitious business operators to spearhead in-country market testing and business development ahead of making a more substantial commitment.

By investing our resources in first phase US expansion for British and European scaleups – or vice versa for US businesses that want to enter the UK market – our portfolio companies can manage this expansion from their home operating base until it feels right to ‘follow that growth’ with a new corporate entity in-country. As the post covid-era of growth businesses increasingly have a tech-enabled bias and are scalable by nature, the obtainable market for so many of them is as exciting as it’s ever been!