Pie

+85% MoM revenue growth by solving the privatisation of Digital Tax

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Quick Pitch
January 14, 2025

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Today’s feature is an early-stage start up democratising tax in preparation for tax self assessments going private in April 2026.

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The Market

  • Following the MTD (Making Tax Digital) announcement in 2015 that will privatise income tax filing. Third party solutions will be relevant for up to 40% of the UK’s population estimating a potential $300bn global digital tax opportunity.

This week's business solves one major problem: 

  • Government gateway will close down from April 2026. 12m taxpayers enrolled in self assessment will need to use a third party to file their tax returns after the 2025/26 tax year.

One Liner

  • Pie is democratising tax and simplifying the tax return process through seamless design and autonomous AI, creating a faster, easier process.

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Quickfire

  • Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland

  • Employee count: 28

  • Investors: None so far

  • Funding amount: £2,000,000 (bootstrapped with 2 years left of runway)

  • Business model: B2C (freemium model with 60% of sign ups purchasing in app services)

  • Traction metrics: 

    • Pie App launched in November 2023 (CIMA-registered and FCA regulated), following a successful three-month beta phase.

    • 40,000 downloads across 169 different countries since launch.

    • Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 75, indicating high user satisfaction.

    • Outperforming established competitors across all review platforms.

    • Named high growth potential startup by Google (app downloads have grown 489% MoM since)

Due Diligence

APPEALS

  • Scalable growth using AI: Pie is building the world’s first AI accountant trained from 25,000 real world customer interactions and is the UK’s first fully self serviced, self-assessment app.

  • Pricing Innovation: Pie is providing its software for free and is the first software developer to offer both software and accountancy services in one place.

  • Vertically integrated: Third party software services like Hubspot, Mailchimp, Pipedrive & Zendesk have been built in house = full automation.

POTENTIAL RISKS

  • Competitive Marketing environment: Personal tax is a crowded space with players who have a large marketing budget to find new customer profiles.

  • Run out of runway: Having been bootstrapped for the last 3 years the Pie team have 2 years left of runway.

  • Technical development risk: Deployment of the AI accountant is the teams only remaining challenge. The majority of the product is in market and performing well.

Competition

  • QuickBooks, Sage and Xero

  • Unlike other tax software providers who only cover self employment, the Pie App covers multiple income types as well as the full range of self assessment options including child benefits, pension contributions, student loans and tax reliefs.

Founders

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Written by Luke & Seb