A tech company founded by Gary Lineker’s son George has been valued at £5.5 million after completing its latest funding round.
The City based start-up, YourBusinessNumber, provides customers with a virtual phone number they can use to keep in touch with their clients through WhatsApp Business.
It secured £400,000 with the Match of the Day presenter among the investors. The firm has now raised £795,000 in total since launching last year.
George Lineker, 31, said: “I didn’t originally want him to invest, because of the backlash you get from it,” adding Gary was “not tech savvy at all”.
“When we launched we went down the sole trader route, working with London-based personal trainers, hair and beauty, traders and electricians who have a lot of clients on one phone and want to separate their work chats from their personal chats. But we’ve since got a bit of traction from estate agents, accountancies and recruitment firms.
“We self-funded the first six months from launch in June 2021, and then from January we got our first bit of funding. Since then it’s just been growth.”
Lineker said the funding will be used to recruit new staff and support international expansion amid a boom in the global use of WhatsApp for business communications, especially in countries with less developed IT infrastructure. WhatsApp is the most downloaded app of the last 8 years, with 5.6 billion downloads, according to research from smartphone retailer, Mobiles.co.uk.
“Everyone uses WhatsApp so if you can have a service where you can contact people on a service they’re already on, it’s much quicker to use than email,” Lineker said.
We launched an international service in August so people can sign up for a UK number from all over the world, and we’re going to expand into the big WhatsApp players like Brazil, India and Germany, to provide those countries with local numbers using their local languages.”
