Alongside our bi-annual Silicon Gorge Investment Pitching Competition we’re publishing profiles of a few of the companies that have made it through the heats. Our first Silicon Gorge winner is Lyfe Technology.
The Silicon Gorge Investment Pitching competition returns for the 2022 Autumn Edition, and offers an opportunity for Tech & Creative companies based in the South West of England and South Wales who are looking for up to £3 million in equity funding. It will offer 12 of these companies the chance to pitch to a virtual room full of investors and enablers of investment on 10 November 2022. Any investors interested in attending the final event on 12th May should contact abby@techspark.co to join the invite list.
1. What does your company do?
How would you like your business to be promoted to over 15 million high-spending customers? Well look no further than Lyfe Technology. We work alongside major financial institutions, airlines and enterprises to help them to run effective and engaging reward schemes for their customers.
2. What problem are you trying to solve?
Businesses often struggle to reach, engage and retain groups of higher spending customers. Lyfe provides them with a route to reach these customers via trusted enterprise programmes, engage them with offers and retain them with rewards.
Enterprises that have rewards programmes are often battling with low engagement, hefty operations and legacy technology. We help them to curate merchant offers for their audience and build a more engaging reward scheme using our technology.
3. What makes your solution unique?
Our relationships with global financial institutions allow us to have a unique insight into the challenges faced by the rewards scheme sector and innovate to solve these issues. These long-term relationships put us in a highly-defensible position to grow the number of offers we provide and the technology we implement.
4. What are you most proud of so far?
The persistence and perseverance of the team. It hasn’t been an easy journey at times, especially with the pandemic decimating our revenue (we were solely focused on restaurants at the time). But we have bounced back and the leadership team were hand-selected for Hurun’s 30 under 30 Entrepreneurship Awards last week in recognition of this.
5. How much are you raising and what do you want to use investment for?
£2m of investment. The majority of this will go towards growing our B2B sales team. We already have 15 million customers that we can promote offers to and take a sizable commission (10-15% on average) from those transactions. This represents a huge revenue opportunity and we simply need to sign up more businesses to reach millions of pounds of annual revenue.
6. What tools/people/services/organisations helped you most?
Without the Enterprise Team at the University of Bath, the business would never have been started. The Business Plan and Dragons’ Den competitions gave me the impetus to put pen to paper on the idea. So hats off to Siobain Hone and Rosie Bennett for their early support.
We’ve had tremendous support from accelerator programmes including SETsquared, Just Eat and Natwest. And of course, I have to mention our early angel investors, especially those in the very first round who backed the team and the vision, even when we didn’t have revenue and traction.
7. Where can we find out more about you?
Connect with me on LinkedIn! If you’re an investor, then you can book a call with me here, you can see our website here, you can email me at james@lyfetech.io, OR you can watch our investor pitch here.
This article is written as part of the Investment Activator Programme (IAP) in the West of England. This programme is run by TechSPARK and is kindly sponsored by TLT LLP, delaware, West of England Combined Authority, UWE, Sanderson, Engine Shed and Rocketmakers. Find out more about the IAP here.
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And finally, if you are raising investment for your business and you would like to submit your one page proposition for the next QIB event, please find more information at the bottom of this page.
