Earlybird

Automating the employment support sector

07 Aug

Product

Outsourced private companies consistently win large government contracts, with $3.2 trillion spent across the UK, US and Europe. Reliance on sticky government contracts make these organisations a hotspot of inefficiencies, which is a greater problem when revenue is performance-based.

Governments spend $190bn on employment support alone. Employment support refers to programmes for unemployed or low-skilled workers to access sustained and better paid employment.

20% of the revenue received by the government is spent onboarding the participant due to manual and slow processes. Also, it currently takes at least three months to onboard a user with only 25% progressing to work.

In short, the employment support sector is riddled with inefficient, costly and time-consuming processes.

Earlybird is an insights platform that leverages conversational AI to automate the employment support sector.

Onboard - Automate the process using a conversational AI tool that leverages WhatsApp

Manage - Centralised web dashboard to provide detailed user profiles and help advisors prioritise

Analyse - Develop further insights and increase the number of participants in sustained employment

Founder

Claudine Adeyemi, Co-Founder & CEO - Previously founder at CareerEar and multi-award winning associate at Mischon de Reya. LLB - Law, University College London (UCL)

Boris Bambo, Co-Founder & CTO - Previously engineering lead at CareerEar and data scientist at Capgemini Invent. MSc - Data Science & Analytics, EPITA: Ecole d'Ingénieurs en Informatique

Spotlight Analysis

Strengths

  • Network effects: early participant data can guide future product features to provide an end-to-end employment support platform

  • Strong traction: with multiple annual contracts and enterprise clients acquired, there is promising early market demand with £2k MRR for initial pilots

  • Founder market fit: the founding team has experience building various employment support agencies and voice-based experiences

Weaknesses

  • Long sales cycle: with low digital penetration in this sector, the first phase will involve significant education about the benefits to the customer

  • Market size: whilst there are over 40,000 employment support agencies in the UK, the market is much more appealing if we consider use cases across government services i.e mental health provision

Market

Purlos - Raised £450,000 seed round from Ufi Ventures and others in October 2022

FutureFit AI - Raised £3.3m seed round from Acumen, JP Morgan Chase and others in March 2022

Why Earlybird?

Whilst selling to organisations that rely on government contracts is traditionally hard, it unlocks high ACV (Average Contract Value) sales and provides a natural moat by building in an overlooked industry.

Key Details

Year founded: 2023

Summary: Earlybird is an insights platform that leverages conversational AI to automate the employment support sector.

Raised to date: Bootstrapped

Currently raising: Raising £300,000 with 85% secured

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