R&D tax credit specialist Amplifi Solutions hails Capital gains

Research and development (R&D) tax credit specialist Amplifi Solutions has scaled up its Edinburgh operation, with a senior hire and a move to new offices, as it stressed that Scotland is its fastest-growing region in the UK.

Jan-Michael Kochalski joins as regional manager from Leyton UK, while the company has moved to the Kingsford Business Club on Dublin Street in the Scottish capital.

Mr Kochalski, a former downhill skier for Team GB, has spent the last decade working in business-development across the financial services and technology sectors in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, including with chartered accountants’ industry body Icas, and Samsung Electronics.

He will work alongside Amplifi’s commercial director Jamie Watts, and fellow regional manager Roger Daynes who joined the company in 2020. The appointment follows the firm hailing Scottish business wins 18 months after its Edinburgh launch.

From left: the firm's Jamie Watts and Jan-Michael Kochalski. Picture: Stewart Attwood.

Mr Watts said: “Scotland is our fastest-growing region in the UK, we’re building a strong client base here, and our pace of activity and local investment means it’s a good time to bring on someone with Jan-Michael’s experience and network.”

Mr Kochalski said: “Amplifi is supporting so many exciting companies around R&D tax credits, and when you look across Scotland as a whole, there is so much innovation taking place. I’m greatly looking forward to building on the relationships that the team has established and contributing to the local business ecosystem."

Amplifi has seen increased activity across sectors including property and travel tech. “In property tech, against a backdrop of a rise in Scottish house and rental prices, Amplifi is seeing an increase in technologies underpinning these trends and recently won a new client, Let Tech Solutions, that streamlines the letting process,” the firm said.

In travel tech, Amplifi was engaged by Maison Sport, which connect skiers and snowboarders with top-rated instructors across Europe, and it has also worked with Continental Traveller, an online portal that showcases holiday homes, vacations, and holiday rentals.

The UK government has now completed a consultative review of R&D tax credits incentives and Amplifi said it was hopeful that the outcome would result in the government widening the scope of qualifying R&D activity to include data and cloud costs.

Encouraging

Mr Watts added: “The government has expressed its desire to raise total investment in [R&D] as a proportion of UK [gross domestic product] by 2027. It’s encouraging to see the importance being placed on how closely tied tax reliefs are to innovation and we look forward to the findings of the review.”

Amplifi has recently widened its services and rebranded as an entrepreneurial tax incentive specialist company. It has boosted its offering with a land remediation relief product for companies that own land, and a service around HMRC's Patent Box that aims to encourage innovative companies to develop, keep and commercialise their intellectual property within the UK.

The latest R&D tax credit statistics were reported last week, revealing that Scottish businesses received £330 million from the R&D tax credit incentive in 2019/2020, a 20 per cent increase from 2018/2019.

Amplifi Solutions was co-founded by Jeff Drennan and Chris Maylin in Belfast in 2014. Its Scottish office was launched in 2019 and its client base north of the Border includes venture capital-backed start-ups Exizent, an online probate platform, and Quorum Cyber, a cyber security service provider.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers.

If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.