The arrival of Basho to Shoreditch has taken the number of digital and tech businesses in East London to over 3200 according to the latest data from the Centre for London. Their arrival coincides with a major push by the Mayor of London to promote the capital as the prime destination for more leading digital businesses during the Olympics.
Basho is recognised as a world leader in distributed systems and plans to be employing twenty staff by the end of 2012 at its London based European HQ.
Their move follows in the footsteps of recent arrivals from Silicon Valley to Tech City including Airbnb, Yammer, Twilio, and Eventbrite as well established global players already in the area such as Google and Cisco.
In total, some 392,000 staff now work in the tech arena in London, with approximately 48,000 (12%) working in and around East London’s Tech City. Across London, digital firms such as Yelp, Living Social and Facebook are all seeing their headcount numbers grow with figures having risen into the hundreds at LinkedIn and Skype over the last two years.
In addition, the world’s fastest growing business intelligence software company, Tableau, is now on track to double its headcount at its London-based European HQ London. Tableau is ranked by Gartner and IDC as the world’s fastest growing business intelligence company for 2011. Its software helps anyone quickly analyse, visualise and share information, some 9000 organisations now using its software. Having opened its UK office in South West London (Richmond) in 2011 with just five staff, it now employs 30.
The Mayor of London is using Games-time to attract leading digital businesses to the capital. This involves a curated programme hosting hundreds of business leaders including from technology companies and the use of City Hall as London House, a business networking hub.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, commented:
“My number one priority is creating jobs for Londoners by attracting investment and supporting growth. So I am pleased to welcome Basho to Tech City – where access to the ‘buzz’, the skilled people and the rich mix of firms of all sizes will help them grow.
“As this latest good news shows, London is now teaming with digital talent with the greatest concentration of businesses in this thriving sector of any European city and I want to ensure all global tech firms base their European HQ’s here. This is a success story I am broadcasting to the world during Games-time.”
The importance of the digital industry in East London’s regeneration was further underlined by the recent decision by the Mayor’s office and the London Legacy Development Corporation to appoint iCITY as the sole preferred bidder for the Olympic media centre. iCITY aims to convert the building into a leading centre for technology, design and research with the potential to generate more than 4,000 jobs.
With offices in San Francisco, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Reston, Virginia, Basho has grown from 10 to 100 staff in the US over the last 2 years and now provides database and cloud services to over fifty organisations including Rovio, the Danish Government, and Yammer.
Don Rippert, Basho’s president and CEO, stated “For a fast growing software company like Basho with a worldwide user base, London is the destination of choice for establishing our European Headquarters. Being in Shoreditch is like home-from-home for us with many of the organisations we know and work with in Silicon Valley being on our doorstep here. We are perfectly positioned in London to develop a key local market as well as reach out into continental Europe.”
Basho’s office in London, U.K. is located at 61 Rivington, London, EC2A 3QQ, U.K. They were supported by London & Partners and UKTI in locating their European HQ in London.
