iCruise Ltd T/A Widgety

Southampton

£35,500 Bridging the Gap Recipient - February 2015

Widgety, founded in 2012, is a white-label solution for providing local hotels and travel agents with great content about cruise lines. They began by providing ship information and live cruise lists to hotels and travel agents and have since branched out to providing great content to any website, about any business.

The company requested funding to support the development of software and provide more online features as part of their platform.

Damian Gevertz, Director of Widgety, said:

"Launched in 2014, Widgety was always an ambitious project: we were a very small team with a very big idea. Software development is expensive, hard to get right and requires that investment up front. Cash flow has been very difficult and although sales had increased fairly quickly, everything was getting eaten up with development costs. Getting the grant from Bridging the Gap genuinely and materially made a huge difference to the business. It provided the boost that we needed to invest in the software needed to get it to the next level by hiring two IT contractors, one accounts and a sales person. And we have since, on the back of that grant, secured further significant investment in the platform. It was also really important to have the validation of a group of people, independent of my business, to turn around and say “yes we like the idea and want to support it.” The business plan and financials we provided are still being used and were not just a tick box exercise."