£250k to prove the machine works.
Not to scale an unproven business. To put the founder full-time, launch, get the first employed Simma Local Partners into the field, and earn the evidence for the pre-seed. Fund the proof before funding the scale.
- Founder full-time, launch
- Hire and train the first Local Partners
- 30 paying customers by month six
- Prove the Partner unit
- Raise the pre-seed from evidence
Ordinary shares in Simma Labs Limited (UK) at £3m pre-money, so the whole £250k is 7.69% of the company after the round. Minimum investment £10k, lower by agreement. The documents and the investment itself are handled through SeedLegals. SEIS advance assurance will be applied for before first close; it is not yet granted.
Built for UK angels: the whole round under SEIS.
£250,000 is the most a company can raise under SEIS, the most generous tax relief available to a UK angel. Investors can claim 50% income-tax relief on up to £200,000 a year, and gains on the shares are free of capital gains tax if held for three years. It's a priced round: ordinary shares are issued at close, so there's no conversion to wait for, and investors claim relief once the company's SEIS compliance statement is approved. Later rounds are planned under EIS; that depends on the company qualifying at the time.
Relief depends on each investor's circumstances and on HMRC's rules at the time of investment.
Exactly where the money goes, and what each line proves.
Six months of spending on the proof, and about three months kept back to raise the pre-seed, because a raise takes months and the evidence should arrive before the money runs out. People are the founder and two Local Partners; the engineers start with the pre-seed, and no sales team or agency is hired in this round.
Local Partners cost about £45k a year each, fully loaded, at 20 hours a week (£30 an hour, holiday, employer costs and pension, plus their leased laptop and expenses on the lines above). Not counted: revenue from customers in the period, and the Employment Allowance, which can take up to £10,500 a year off employer National Insurance once Simma employs Partners.
Month by month.
Ready before loud
Founder full-time. Finish launch: live payments, customer websites, onboarding tested end to end. Both design partners fully live. Recruit Local Partner #1.
Partner #1 starts
Trained on Simma so they can train customers. The first paying customers, through Simma Pay.
Partner #2 starts
Partner #2 in a second area of the UK, using what Partner #1 has learned.
Ten each, and start raising
Each Partner working towards about 10 customers in their first three to four months. The pre-seed (about £1.5m) is raised from here, on the evidence so far.
30 customers and the evidence pack
30 paying customers, and what each one cost and kept doing. The pre-seed is planned to close in month 7. Its timing is the plan's main risk.
What you can hold me to.
paying customers by month six
About 10 per Local Partner (Partner #1 starts in month 3 and Partner #2 in month 4), the rest self-serve and founder-led, so this is mostly built in the last four months. Counted by source. The full month-six checklist →
And reported every month, as the evidence for the pre-seed:
- Monthly recurring revenue and Simma Pay volume
- Customers per Local Partner against the 10 target, and time from a Partner's start to their first customer
- Retention at 90 days, Partner-supported versus self-serve
- Human hours per launch, and time from signed to live
- Cost to win a customer, by source
- Work done by the AI team as the teammates ship (see Status)
The first step of four, each unlocked by evidence.
£250k isn't meant to fund the whole plan. It buys the evidence that justifies the next round, at a higher price, and so on. Each round is unlocked by what the one before it proves, not by a date.
SEIS Angel round
Prove the commercial model: the founder full-time, launch, the first employed Local Partners, 30 paying customers.
£3m pre-money
Pre-seed
Prove the UK machine: the core team, more Local Partners, the AI team doing more of the work, and Simma winning and keeping customers repeatably until the UK business grows profitably.
Seed
Take it international, starting with the US. In the base plan the business doesn't depend on it; it does not cover the combined downside case.
Series A
Global scale, sized by the opportunity once the US is proven.
Later round sizes are indicative and depend on the evidence and what the company needs then. Only the current round has a price. The Angel round, pre-seed and seed (£6.75m in all) fund the five-year model's cash plan, which needs no Series A. Cash after amounts owed to HMRC is lowest at about £120.0k in month 6, just before the pre-seed lands; without the seed (the pre-seed still arrives; costs and countries as modelled), about £4.0m would still be in hand at the end of year 3: the scenarios.
The price, the risk, and what you get.
Why £3m
It's the going rate for a first round, not a stretch. Over the past year, companies raising their first round on SeedLegals were valued at £2.89m on average. UK companies at the earliest stage, which the British Business Bank calls the seed stage (a company stage, not a round name: the typical round there was £0.6m), had a median pre-money valuation of £3.2m in 2025. £3m sits at the first-round average and below that median, with no AI premium, for a platform already in production. The round is sized to SEIS's £250k limit, so it buys 7.69%.
Sources: SeedLegals Termometer (first rounds on its platform, past 12 months); British Business Bank, Small Business Equity Tracker 2026, pp26 and 32–33 (2025 data; its stages are classified by Beauhurst). UK pre-seed data is thin; treat any single figure with care.
If the pre-seed is late
It's planned to close in month 7. If it lands three months late and nothing changes, cash after amounts owed to HMRC goes about £9.7k below zero in month 9. So the plan is to hold the hires it pays for (the engineers, the Head of Local Partners, customer success and Local Partner #3) until it lands, and keep marketing going: cash then stays above about £87.4k. Raising starts in month 5 to leave that room.
Reporting you can rely on
A short update every month (the numbers, what changed, what's broken, what's next and one ask), as on Investor updates, sent with Simma's own email newsletter tool, because Simma is run on Simma; SEIS3 certificates as soon as HMRC approves the company's compliance statement, which can be filed once it has traded for four months; and an annual meeting.
How investors get paid back
Most likely through a sale of the company. The businesses consolidating this market are vertical software and payments companies (Mindbody and ClassPass with EGYM in 2026; Fresha raising at $1bn), and an operating system with its own payments and customers is the kind of asset they buy. Shares can also be sold in later rounds. Neither is promised, and SEIS shares must be held for three years for the relief.
The five-year model is on How we make money. Its customer and revenue plan is unchanged, and its funding rows follow the roadmap above.
Build. Partner. Scale.
Build · Partner · Scale is both the order Simma rolls out in (on Go-to-market) and, as it grows, how the company is organised: three operating groups, not departments. Build makes the product better. Partner makes businesses successful with it. Scale makes the whole system repeatable. AI, data and knowledge run across all three. Today the founder does most of all three; the bench below have asked to join as it grows (nothing is agreed in writing, and none is in this budget).
Make Simma better
Product, engineering, design, AI, data and infrastructure, in small pods that each own an engine.
VT (engineering) · JG (product) · coding agents, already building Simma
Make businesses successful
The employed Partner Network (Local, Industry and Strategic Partners), central sales for larger accounts, and community and Simma Sparks. One relationship across the whole customer lifecycle: no sales-to-success hand-off.
PH (sales) · DI (customer success) · ST (content and media) · Maya, Sam, Charlie
Make it repeatable
Finance, people, Partner recruitment and training, legal, compliance, operations and international readiness. The CEO sits here, while staying deep in Build and Partner at this stage.
MS (operations) · Molly, Oli
Marketing spans Partner and Scale: brand, performance, content and Partner enablement sit centrally; local activity happens through Partners (LO, marketing). It replaces the earlier BARS model (Build, Acquire, Retain, Scale), which kept winning and keeping customers in separate teams. Build · Partner · Scale on Go-to-market · Meet the people.