Adviser St Helen’s Capital has raised £50,400 at 8p for London-based IQ, valuing the company at £450,400. Well-known City figure Tim Hearley, chairman of AIM-quoted Reflec and director of Oakdene Homes, chairs IQ. Chief executive Julian Green, 36, is the former head of business development at Euromonitor Publications.

Green set up IQ last year as holding company for IQ Research, which he founded in 1998 and which has built up a client list including Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank, HBOS, FEDEX Corporation and accountant PricewaterhouseCoopers. He says the overall market is growing at between five and ten per cent a year, but he wants IQ to grow faster.

To achieve this, IQ, which turned a £5,300 loss into a £2,000 net profit in the year to last May on revenues of £270,000, intends to diversify into professional and financial services, such as carrying out due diligence for private equity groups. Green maintains the other path to growth is through acquisition and says IQ is in the middle of ‘relatively positive’ negotiations about buying three target companies with a mixture of cash and shares.

Green suggests IQ hopes to compete with the likes of Datamonitor, specialising in business-to-business market research. He says, ‘at this stage OFEX is ideal’, but says the company might well contemplate a move up to AIM in the future.