About Glasswall

Glasswall is a UK based cybersecurity company founded in 2010. With offices in London and the US, Glasswall provides organisations with a unique defence against known and unknown cyber threats in files and documents through its innovative, patent-protected zero-trust CDR (Content Disarm and Reconstruction) technologies.

Rather than searching for known threats, CDR assumes every file a company receives is suspicious. It disassembles them and then rebuilds them to known manufacturer specifications. Glasswall’s solutions conform to security industry standards, including the US NSA’s Inspection Sanitization Guidelines.

The challenge

Glasswall was looking for funds for expansion, and approached HSBC about its Growth Lending proposition, launched in July 2022. This is a £250m fund targeting high-growth scaleups early in their growth journey, under which HSBC takes a security interest over a successful applicant’s IP.

The solution

As part of its credit underwriting process, HSBC UK works with specialist IP services firm Inngot. Applicants use its online valuation tool, Goldseam and Sollomon, to quickly and easily identify and then obtain an indicative valuation for their IP and other intangible assets.

Steve Roberts, CFO/COO of Glasswall, says the idea of a lender taking security over specific, identified IP, as opposed to a general charge over all assets, was new to him, but made perfect sense. He also recognised that HSBC was using Inngot and its tools to provide its lending team with “a third-party view on the actual IP valuation, which will give them some comfort over the security charge that’s contained within the loan.”

Inngot’s online platform helps a company map the complexities and inter-relationships between its IP and intangible asset portfolios using the Goldseam tool to build an IP profile. The output from Goldseam, plus easily-accessible financial and market data from company accounts and business plans, is then fed into Sollomon to produce indicative IP valuations in language that lenders and investors can easily understand and that gives them the comfort they need to make an offer.

When it came to using Inngot’s tools, Steve Roberts says “I found the platform very intuitive. The way we were led through each of the stages, the information that was captured, throughout I could see that the Inngot platform was asking for the key data points, and you could see the logic of all the questions and that the system has been designed to capture enough information without being over-bearing in terms of the amount of data.”

He adds that the IP valuation didn’t just cover Glasswall patents, trade marks and copyright: the company also has considerable expertise in “the way we can scale our technology – that’s something we have worked on considerably in recent years, and we’ve made massive strides. We can now deal with petabytes and petabytes of data. So we’re very much aware we’re making advancements in our technology that sometimes don’t fall into the patentable area. We’ll patent what we can, but obviously we’re still going to develop and improve our technology and protect that the best way you can in terms of confidentiality and trade secrets.”

With the help of Inngot’s IP evaluation tools, Glasswall, a dynamic, innovative company was able to use its IP to obtain vital funding from HSBC to move to the next phase of growth.

It wasn’t too time consuming and, for a company at our stage in our sector, we had all the data to hand, so it was a very efficient process. The valuation was a prudent one, but it was still more than sufficient to give HSBC the comfort they needed.

Steve Roberts - Glasswall

The result

Glasswall was able to get a package of financing facilities worth £5m, supported by the Inngot online platform and Sollomon valuation.