pirkx

Our vision is to provide every self employed person and SME employee with amazing employee benefits that enhance their households health, wealth and social wellbeing.

In 5 years:

To have launched in the UK, Australia, South Africa, Canada and the US

To provide every household with additional disposable income "found money" of £500 per year and non-monetary benefits in excess of £1,000s

To help households save for the long term

To enhance household training opportunities and therefore social mobility through new online training services provided through the pirkx platform

To become an eco system for fellow FinTech, HealthTech, InsurTech firms to enhance the well being of both the employers, self employed and employees

Large companies provide their staff with an array of fantastic employee benefits ranging from insurances to discounts. However for the self employed, gig economy workers, free lancers and the employees of smaller companies there is little in the way of similar benefits. This is where our founders identified a gap in the market.

pirkx solves the benefits issue for the self employed, small businesses, charities and businesses with a contingent "gig economy" workforce. When a small business or self employed person approaches an insurer or discount provider they are a population of one. pirkx was built to enable SMEs and the self employed to access benefits, discounts and insurance at group pricing.

pirkx also provides a "found money" solution with members of pirkx receiving cash back on everyday expenses which is held in a savings account and which can be transferred to the member's bank account. This means household disposable income is increased through pirkx membership.

The gig economy workforce is growing in many countries as workers look to benefit from the flexibility that the gig work provides. The socio-economic characteristics of this workforce is that they often originate from low income households.

pirkx is designed to provide a platform to enable households to receive benefits that enhance physical and financial well being. By encompassing the concept of "found money" pirkx is enabling households to be wealthier. 

Future iterations of pirkx will help to promote using some of the "found money" to provide for long term savings. pirkx will also include a training service to enable pirkx households to access online training courses to help up skill and equip members for the digital economy and support social mobility.

Our business strategy is to ensure access to benefits to not just employees but to self employed people working in the contingent workforce, free lancers and gig economy workers.

Our solution enhances the health, wealth and social well being of the households who become members of pirkx.

We are perfectly placed to scale our solution. 

Our people have worked in listed organisations managing large teams and commercial budgets of tens of millions.

Our technology stack is built to scale to several million users. We are integrated into third party proposition providers using SAML SSO functionality which has been tried and tested with tens of thousands of calls daily.

One of our strengths is our ability to deliver a proposition and technology very quickly. pirkx was taken from concept to delivery in an enterprise scalable state within 4 months and for a budget of less than GBP 25,000. pirkx was revenue generating from day one and because of the meticulous management of development cost was profitable (excluding staff costs) after the first month of launch.

There are no direct competitors who offer similar benefits to the gig and self employed economy.

We plan to launch pirkx in Australia this year and have appointed our Australian MD. We have also been included in the UK and Australian government Fintech Bridge programme. https://www.crowdfundinsider.c...

We engage our users through the use of mobile. Our site is mobile responsive and shortly we will add to this with a native app. 

Our site is a platform aggregating various third party suppliers and we use our technology to integrate into third parties using SAML SSO.

We have been very effective as putting together both the UX and integration such that we have a simple to use interface with single sign on for our users.

In the future we will enhance our health, wealth and social well being proposition by including further FinTech, HealthTech and InsurTech who will complement our offering to both employers, the self employed and employees.

pirkx provides a method for the spread of health and financial prosperity amongst a large section of the community that are often missed from traditional workplace wellbeing measures. Large corporates have the funds to invest in wellbeing packages that extend individual’s disposable income and provide insurances to protect their families. For gig economy workers, the self employed and for those working for small businesses the traditional barrier to entry to access employee benefits has been cost.

This is why we founded pirkx. We wanted self employed people and those working for small businesses to be able to access benefits that improve their own and their family’s health and that extend their disposable income by 5% to 10% per year.

pirkx provides a low cost entry into wellbeing benefits by utilising technology to enable a self serve method. This means that costs with the pirkx business are kept to a minimum with the saving passed on to our users.

This means that for the first time, self employed individuals can access wellbeing initiatives through membership of the pirkx platform and small businesses can join pirkx to provide employee benefits to both their employees and contingent workforce.

pirkx is a young start up, we launched only 3 months ago however already in that short period of time we have helped 1,200 households and 42 companies with health, wealth and social well being. These families have the benefit of numerous non-monetary health wellbeing benefits. From a cash back/ found money perspective the amount of savings for those initial joiners who have had the time to set up the cash back benefits have on average been GBP 24 which annualised provides cash back of GBP 288 per annum.

We measure our success by the number of users who are able to access our benefits as this will be the first time many will have had access to employee style benefits whilst working for themselves or for small businesses.

Our top 3 goals for the next 12 months are:

To grow to 25,000 users in the UK

To form further relationships and partners in FinTech, HealthTech and InsurTech

Launch in Australia

Our main external risks are financial, specifically funding and sales from outside sources. Our internal risk is not having enough staff to scale however as a small team we share tasks and knowledge and work hard to ensure we deliver.

To address our financial barrier, we have successfully closed our seed round of funding which is allowing us to employ a full time team in London and appoint our first Australia based employee. We are actively seeking the second round of investment. All our team help with sales and we have an immediate sales pipe of circa 484,000. To combat our internal barrier, we will ensure that we have in place a comprehensive training and mentoring programme.

Our founders were Stella Smith and Craig Caveney. Stella is the CEO of pirkx and her career spans financial markets, private enterprise, alternative investments, capital raising and private wealth. 

So far we have 5 full time employees, 4 in the UK and 1 in Australia.

pirkx operates both in London and Melbourne. We are a small tenacious team of 6 looking to make a real difference to the households of self employed and small business employees. 

pirkx was founded in London in 2018 and started with a team of 3 and expanded to 5 at the end of 2018. Our strategy is to expand into economies that have a similar growing gig economy and SME market as the UK. We identified that we would like to expand into the territories of US, South Africa and Australia. We have since appointed an MD for Australia, Ella Hamilton, who is working on putting together the pirkx proposition for Australia. 

We entered and were selected by the UK government to be included in the UK/ Australia Fintech Bridge programme. https://www.crowdfundinsider.c...

We are receiving support and help from both the UK Department of International Trade and Austrade to establish pirkx in Australia.

Once we have launched in Australia we will look to enter our next new territory.

We entered and were selected by the UK government to be included in the UK/ Australia Fintech Bridge programme.

https://www.crowdfundinsider.c...

We have so far had a low profile in terms of press coverage but now our proposition and infrastructure is ready for a mass launch in the UK we are looking to increase our PR.

We were revenue generating from day 1. We have closed a small first round investment of GBP 240,000 from both UK based and international investors. This is to fund our UK business and to launch in Australia.

We will seek further investment this year as we look to expand both the UK and Australian team.

We have a profit margin of circa 50% after paying for all costs except people and as we scale in user numbers this will enable us to become self sufficient and profitable.

Initially we will rely on funding to scale. We have closed our Seed first funding round which was GBP 240,000. This funded our UK launch and will fund our Australian launch.

We have opened our second Seed funding round for GBP 500,000. This will allow us to increase our team by adding in IT engineers and sales team.

We will look to raise our Series A funding next to scale the business further and to launch into South Africa and the US. 

We are a very disciplined team in terms of cost planning. As such we expect to become self sufficient on revenues following the Series A investment and will scale thereafter from profit. 

It would make our world to be a Solver. We would use the awards as a launch pad for us to increase our marketing and funding which would increase our team size.

In addition to IT engineers and sales team we would recruit a full time PR and marketing person. We would also recruit junior team members so that we can have an up and coming team of customer support, sales support and developers who would benefit from the experience and mentoring of our team. 

In technology we would like to develop the AI aspects of pirkx as we have a growing data set.

We would like to partner with large charities, associations, and corporates from a distribution perspective as we feel that this will allow pirkx to reach a wider audience more quickly.  This includes associations that serve the SME sector, pension funds and large financial services organisations.

pirkx has a bigger positive impact on households with lower income.  Therefore any organisations which reach a mass audience would be extremely helpful on our journey to improve health and wellbeing for more people.

Finally, we are a young company and intend to iterate our tech, collaborating with other tech sector participants will support improvement of our proposition for the end user. 

We plan to incorporate AI into our solution as we collect data and progress to a scale where we can have dedicated IT resource to analyse the data and create AI user cases.

There are a number of potential AI related uses with the pirkx data including refining the wellbeing initiatives to pre-empt and sign post those likely to resonate with an individual and their family.

pirkx provides a method for the spread of health and wealth prosperity amongst a large section of the community that are often missed from traditional workplace wellbeing measures. Large corporates have the funds to invest in wellbeing packages that extend individual’s disposable income and provide insurances to protect their families. For gig economy workers, the self employed and for those working for small businesses the traditional barrier to entry to access employee benefits has been cost.

This is why we founded pirkx. We wanted self employed people and those working for small businesses to be able to access benefits that improve their own and their family’s health and that extend their disposable income by 5% to 10% per year.

pirkx provides a low cost entry into wellbeing benefits by utilising technology to enable a self serve method. This means that costs with the pirkx business are kept to a minimum with the saving passed on to our users.

This means that for the first time, self employed individuals can access wellbeing initiatives through membership of the pirkx platform and small businesses can join pirkx to provide employee benefits to both their employees and contingent workforce.

pirkx is disruptor of the employee benefits markets because it democratises benefits that traditionally only large corporates were able to provide to their employees. For the first time employee benefits can be enjoyed by the self employed, gig economy and those working for small companies.

For gig economy workers, the self employed and for those working for small businesses the traditional barrier to entry to access employee benefits has been cost.

This is why we founded pirkx. We wanted self employed people and those working for small businesses to be able to access benefits that improve their own and their family’s health and that extend their disposable income by 5% to 10% per year.

pirkx provides a low cost entry into wellbeing benefits by utilising technology to enable a self serve method. This means that costs with the pirkx business are kept to a minimum with the saving passed on to our users.

Should we have the honour of winning this award we will use it to increase our team size by recruiting junior staff who we'll train.