About Allentra
Entering the US market. Expanding your US operations.
Allentra exists to make you better prepared, less exposed, faster to revenue, and more attractive to investors.
Ian Collins · Founder
I started my first business in 1980. By the late 1980s I was running an AI company, Neural Technologies, at a time when most people thought artificial intelligence was science fiction. We built it, funded it, and exited it.
In the years that followed I bought and sold businesses, took NetSuite to market inside BT, launched SaaS products into the US, built distribution across more than fifty European partners, and co-founded GTM Global, which supported more than 3,500 companies through international expansion.
What I kept seeing, across every sector and every decade, was the same thing. Good businesses making the same avoidable mistakes. Not because the founders were not smart. Because nobody was watching the whole board.
Allentra is my answer to that.
What we actually do
Allentra works across the full span of a US expansion, and we mean that literally. On the commercial side: market entry strategy, proposition and pricing validation, route to market design, channel development, and outsourced sales execution. On the structural side: entity formation, C-corp and LLC setup, state registrations, tax and transfer pricing documentation, IP protection, employment agreements, contractor classification, localisation of contracts and terms, and corporate governance. We have built a 360 degree capability across in-house expertise and a carefully selected partner network with boots on the ground in the US, covering every workstream a serious expansion requires. Some clients engage us across the whole picture. Others come to us for a single specific piece of work and nothing else. Both are fine. The point is that whatever the task, from incorporating a Delaware C-corp to designing a channel partner strategy, we can do it or we have the right person to do it, and we stay involved to make sure it connects properly to everything else.
The team
Built around a team, not a person
Ian is building Allentra around a team of practitioners who share the same philosophy: that the decisions in a US expansion are interconnected in ways that category specialists rarely see, and that the cost of getting them wrong compounds quickly and quietly until it becomes very expensive indeed.
The people around the table at Allentra have operated businesses in the US, built and exited technology companies, run sales organisations across multiple markets, and advised founders at every stage from pre-entry planning through to scale. What they have in common is not a service line. It is a point of view earned from doing the work rather than describing it.
How we work, and why it is different
The health check framework that sits at the centre of Allentra's diagnostic work was not assembled from a checklist. It was built over two years as a structured knowledge architecture covering more than 400 factors across eight domains, each one informed by direct experience of what goes wrong and when. Every finding is grounded in that framework, which is why the output reads differently from what a founder could produce by pointing a general-purpose AI tool at the internet.
A large language model without a structured framework built from hundreds of real engagements will produce a plausible-sounding general answer. The Allentra framework produces a specific one, calibrated to your sector, your stage, and the failure patterns that apply to businesses like yours. The lookalike assessment is built on the same architecture. It is AI-powered but framework-anchored, and the difference is visible in the output.
We use technology to lower the barrier, accelerate the work, and surface things faster. We use experienced human judgement to interpret what it means for your specific situation and to have the kind of conversation that no automated tool can yet replace. That balance is deliberate and it will not change.
Where we are going
Allentra's ambition is straightforward. We want to be the firm that UK and European founders think of first when America becomes serious, not because we have spent heavily on marketing, but because the founders we have worked with tell the ones coming behind them.
That means being embedded where founders are. We are members of Manchester and Birmingham Chambers of Commerce and TechUK, and we are building relationships with the regional and sector ecosystems that sit closest to the companies making the US decision. It means working with channel partners, trade bodies, and professional advisers who share clients at exactly the moment those clients need what we do.
And it means the advice and the execution being good enough that the reputation does the work.
If you are thinking seriously about America, the right starting point is a conversation.