Bundle IQ is a community procurement platform that gives UK SMEs access to the buying power and professional procurement tools that only large organisations have ever had. Buyers join buying pools in their sector, IQ aggregates demand, runs competitive tender processes, and delivers savings of 12–22% on operational spend. Free for buyers. Vendors pay a success fee only on contract award. The platform is built to production standard. This document sets out the business case, financial model, technology architecture, and competitive positioning to support a £350k seed raise at £1.8M pre-money valuation.
UK SMEs collectively spend hundreds of billions annually on operational goods and services — energy, materials, insurance, professional services, consumables, fuel. Almost none of this spend is subject to a competitive procurement process. The result is systematic overpayment to incumbent suppliers at rates that reflect the absence of competitive pressure rather than the actual market.
The root cause is structural rather than motivational. Most SME operators are aware they are probably overpaying. The barrier is not knowledge — it is the time, expertise, and buying volume required to run a meaningful competitive process. A 340-cow dairy farm spending £173,000 annually on compound feed knows their incumbent merchant is not offering the lowest available rate. What they lack is the time to run a competitive tender and the volume to create genuine competitive pressure among suppliers.
Large organisations have solved this problem with dedicated procurement teams. A national care home group tenders energy contracts centrally and achieves pricing that independent homes cannot. A large contractor has a supply chain team that reviews materials agreements annually. The tools that deliver these outcomes — structured tendering, market benchmarking, collective volume — have never been accessible to the 5.5 million businesses that need them most.
Bundle IQ aggregates buying demand from SMEs into sector-specific buying pools. Combined volume creates the commercial leverage that individual businesses cannot achieve. IQ manages the competitive process end-to-end. Buyers join in ten minutes, see the competitive price, and decide whether to switch.
The key architectural distinction is that Bundle IQ operates annual buying communities rather than one-off procurement events. A farmer who joins the compound feed pool in 2026 is a member of that buying community in 2027, 2028, and beyond. Between cycles they receive monthly market intelligence bulletins, get 72-hour early access when the next cycle opens, and can track their pool's live progress on a magic-link status page. The results archive builds permanently — every completed cycle adds a documented saving that makes the next new member's decision easier.
This architecture creates retention that compounds. A buying group model that simply runs an annual tender has to re-recruit members every year. A buying community where members belong to something, receive ongoing value between cycles, and are invested in the community's growth retains at a fundamentally different rate.
Bundle IQ operates both sides of the procurement equation simultaneously. Every vendor on the platform can also participate as a buyer in buying pools. A scaffolding contractor wins contracts through the vendor marketplace and buys their own insurance, materials, and fuel through buying pools. One relationship, two revenue streams, compounding loyalty. This dual-side dynamic creates network effects that pure marketplace or pure buying group models cannot achieve.
Bundle IQ operates a seven-API vendor verification system producing a composite risk score (0–100) and RAG status (Green/Amber/Red) for every vendor. The entire free stack costs £0 per month to operate.
The composite risk score weights Financial health (30%), Certification currency (25%), Companies House status (20%), Sanctions screening (15%), and Platform performance (10%). Auto-suspension fires immediately on any sanctions hit. Certificate expiry alerts fire automatically at 60 and 30 days. The intranet verification dashboard provides staff with a full risk register, active alerts panel, expiring certificate tracker, API check queue, and monitoring log.
A nightly Edge Function harvests eight government data streams — ONS Producer Price Index, ONS CPI food, ONS average earnings, Bank of England base rate, DESNZ weekly fuel prices, ONS construction output prices, Ofgem electricity unit rate — and writes the latest values to a market_data table. Pool pages display live contextual market intelligence for the categories relevant to each pool. The intranet Market Intelligence dashboard shows all metrics with trend history, source status, and auto-generated market alerts for significant price movements. All eight data streams are free with no API keys required.
Charged to vendors on contract award. Nothing before. No subscription, no listing fee, no monthly charge.
| Contract value | Success fee | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Under £5,000 | 5% | £2,000 contract → £100 |
| £5,000 – £25,000 | 3.5% | £15,000 contract → £525 |
| £25,000 – £100,000 | 2.5% | £60,000 contract → £1,500 |
| £100,000 – £500,000 | 1.5% | £200,000 contract → £3,000 |
| Over £500,000 | 1% | £750,000 contract → £7,500 |
A named Bundle IQ procurement professional placed inside a client organisation. Manages all procurement end-to-end. From £1,200/month on a rolling basis with 30 days notice. High retention once embedded — the professional relationship is difficult to replicate. Average expected engagement: 18+ months.
As transaction volume builds, the IQ Benchmark Index becomes a standalone data product. Sector-specific procurement benchmarks subscribed to by trade associations, business lenders, and sector analysts. Pricing £500–£2,000/year per institutional subscriber. This stream does not require additional build — it emerges from the transaction data generated by streams 1 and 2.
| Metric | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active pool members | 500 | 1,500 | 3,500 |
| Platform spend volume | £25M | £75M | £175M |
| Vendor success fee revenue | £157k | £788k | £1.86M |
| IQ On-Site revenue | £0 | £216k | £720k |
| Total revenue | £157k | £1.0M | £2.58M |
| Operating costs | £320k | £680k | £1.2M |
| EBITDA | -£163k | +£320k | +£1.38M |
| Cash runway from seed (£350k) | ~18 months to revenue-positive · Series A before cash out | ||
The competitive landscape for Bundle IQ does not contain a direct equivalent. The platform combines capabilities from four distinct categories that have never previously been integrated:
Bundle IQ is the first platform to combine: AI-powered brief intake, sector-specific buying communities with annual lifecycle architecture, real-time vendor risk scoring using live government APIs, nightly government market data intelligence embedded in pool pages, payment escrow protection, and a dual-side vendor/buyer flywheel.
| Category | Amount | Allocation % | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| People | £180,000 | 51% | Founder salary · first operational hire (pool management) · employer NI |
| Growth | £65,000 | 19% | Trade press placement · sector events · LinkedIn · first 100 member acquisition |
| Technology | £55,000 | 16% | Supabase Pro · Creditsafe API · Comply Advantage · Stripe fees · Resend |
| Legal & IP | £30,000 | 9% | UK + EU trade mark · incorporation · T&Cs · GDPR compliance · ICO registration |
| Working capital | £20,000 | 5% | Runway buffer · unforeseen operational costs |
| Total | £350,000 | 100% |
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Member acquisition slower than projected | Medium | Medium | Personal outreach to first 30 members. Trade press placement. Sector event presence. Referral mechanics built into every pool page. |
| First pool fails to attract sufficient supplier competition | Low | High | IQ pre-qualifies suppliers before pools open. Minimum 3 qualified suppliers before tender goes live. Smaller pools can be merged regionally. |
| Credible competitor launches similar model | Low | Medium | First mover advantage in community architecture. Results archive cannot be replicated without transaction history. Data moat grows with every cycle. |
| Regulatory change affecting procurement activities | Low | Low | Bundle IQ operates as a procurement platform, not as a financial services or regulated intermediary. Legal review of T&Cs and escrow structure completed pre-launch. |
| Technology infrastructure failure | Low | Medium | Supabase provides 99.9% SLA. Netlify CDN provides global distribution. All data backed up continuously. No single point of failure in critical path. |
| Founder capacity constraint | Medium | Medium | First hire in Month 1 specifically to provide operational support. Seed funding provides salary for founder to focus full-time. Board support sought from seed investors. |
James Kenny, Founder
Bundle IQ Limited
📧 james.kenny@bundleiq.co.uk
🌐 bundleiq.co.uk
📱 Available for calls by arrangement