Andrew Threlfall of Malinko Exits after 20 years to Civica.

Andrew Threlfall exits from Malinko 20 years after he founded the company. Andrew will stay on to see a smooth handover to Civica.

News already broke out yesterday, but here goes.

Civica acquires healthcare specialist Malinko

I met Andrew in late 2005 or early 2006 when I was building my first tech startup, ebdex (Fintech – electronic invoicing hub). We met at Tiger Tiger (now Hardrock-Cafe) in Manchester, where Mike Southon ran Beermat Events.

Humble Beginnings

Andrew was a one-man band building software applications for others. Later on, Paul Robinson and Ian Moss played contributory roles.

Malinko’s real journey started when they helped Asda improve gritting on their sites during winter. Malinko digitised whiteboards by creating a software application that Asda could use over and over again, without having to rub out the whiteboard to recreate a new gritting plan.

Andrew was one of the first to join Northern Tech Startup 2.0 which later became Techcelerate. Andrew was one of the 35 or so who attended our very first tech entrepreneur and friends event on 23rd November 2006 at IoD (Regus) Manchester, which KPMG sponsored. This event kickstarted the development of Manchester’s Tech Ecosystem. I went on to run over 100 tech founder-centric events from 2006 to 2013 bringing together tech founders, investors and friends from the North, London, Europe, New York and West Coast of America.

According to my wife, Nishani who helped me organise and run Techcelerate events then,

“Andrew was one of the nicest people who attended our events. He helped carry beer upstairs and always a pleasure to chat with.”

Malinko was one of the first companies in Manchester to adopt Ruby and used Ruby on Rails framework and continued to use it on Malinko Healthcare Application(s).

Winning Awards – Northern Tech Awards

Antony Quinn and Andrew accepting an award from the King of European Accelerators, Jon Bradford in 2012 at Northern Tech Awards, I founded and ran for the first three years before acquisition by Hugh Campbell of GP Bullhound.

Raising Equity Finance

Andrew met David Smith and Rupert Wingate-Saul at Techcelerate Events. This led to AXM Ventures backing Andrew & co with a £100k investment that led Malinko to create their first Subscription-based application, which later became popular in the domiciliary care market. It had a wider appeal but was also prone to churn due to systematic problems in the domiciliary care market, where companies go bust quite often.

Andrew started to look for a solid market not prone to regular churn.

InnovateUK to the rescue

Malinko won a number of InnovateUK grants (I’m an InnovateUK Independent Assessor since 2011 – I have not assessed any of Malinko’s grants) which helped them to develop a robust scheduling application for the NHS.

Rob McGovern walks in

Andrew met Rob – as they say, the rest is history. But let me shed some light for you!

Sometimes for a business to be successful, you need a man with a black book. Rob was that man! He knew the NHS and NHS procurement. Rob had significant experience in selling software applications to the NHS.

At the same time, Malinko won a small grant of £25k from the local Academic Health Science Networks (AHSN), now called Health Innovation Manchester. The company used this grant to secure a pilot project with Salford Royal, one of the best leading hospitals in the UK.

Around the same time, I was trying to flog UniffiedVU Health to Salford Royal. I failed to win the SBRI grant I applied for. And in no uncertain terms, I was not going to fly in and secure a NHS contract.

It was hard to get into the NHS those days for a new tech company, even though Malinko had the age behind it, but still, a very tiny company, when compared with the size of companies NHS procurement dealt with.

Rob and Andrew battled ahead and slowly started to win one NHS entity after another. Today, they have a large customer base including a major contract to supply the whole of Wales.

Techcelerate 2.0

I have been on and off an advisor and confidante to Andrew over the years.

Ant Chisnall, CEO of Driver Net said

“I had the fortune to be introduced to Andrew by Manoj many years back, in which time he has offered me plenty of his time and guidance without ever asking for anything in return whilst guiding his own company through a pandemic and onto an Exit. I’d also like to be  able to call him a friend who in the future I hope to work with, a man best described as an old head on young shoulders.”

Clubhouse – Andrew, Stewart and Manoj Show

Since February 2021, Stewart Townsend, Andrew and I have been running a weekly Clubhouse session on Monday at 12 pm GMT.

What’s next

Andrew and I often discussed what he likes to do once he exited from Malinko. The start to finish of the whole exit process took 6 weeks (a lot shorter than my last Exit), which was a demanding time for Andrew.

I’m planning to catch up with Andrew once he had a good rest. I’ll try my best to get him to throw a little party, after all, he finished off the champagne at mine. Sadly he took the picture of everyone together, so I can’t share the pic as he is not on it.

Update: Whilst not 100% confirmed, motions are put in place to organise a party.