The Daedalus Origin Story

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Tesh came from a background in VC before moving to KPMG (financial services division) and then into a fintech startup in London; Kaz was a string theorist turned data wizard.

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Before our story starts, Kaz had already been responsible for building out a telco company’s global customer service engine, developing predictive customer call routing systems for the business’s financing function; he’d also created and developed a data decision flow system for SMEs, unifying logistics, production and sales. 

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Tesh, meanwhile, had been busy building a banking and consumer lending proposition, as well as developing a blockchain-based proof of concept for BNP Paribas, Unilever and Sainsbury’s. 

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They met at a startup ‘around 2017’ (memories are hazy), and quickly realised that they were (probably) a pretty good partnership.

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Lesson 1 - People always say ‘you need a cofounder’ - chances are, you know one already. Interrogate your network!

When Tesh and Kaz started working together, Kaz had been working on an early version of a product called Datawok for a few months. The basic idea was that it would allow small businesses a single, unified portal through which to interrogate all of their business data in a manner that would offer an insightful, flexible and responsive overview layer to the numbers underpinning their companies (sales, cashflow, inventory, etc). While this might not sound revolutionary to you reading this in 2025, back in the distant past of…ooh, 2019/20, this sort of integrated approach to data in the SME space was unheard of; SME data was split across multiple different, not-integrating platforms, and the idea of ‘unified dashboards’ for said data were still non-existent.

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The clever - and slightly-revolutionary - premise behind Datawok was that SME data is messy and fragmented. If we could stitch it together, we could (1) help small businesses run better and (2) we believed this standardised data approach would enable SME financiers to get a better price when it came to financing . In a world awash with spreadsheets, a tool that understood a CSV felt inevitable.

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Users could upload CSVs of any data which would then be subjected to software analysis to identify what said data was and parse the content. Through smart inference, Datawok could recognise unit multiplication columns, be aware of when a field referred to VAT, etc, and derive contextual meaning from relatively-raw unstructured data. This, in turn, could be used to generate (for example) sales forecasting and other dashboards depending on the information you fed it with. Put simply, the tool aimed to provide one holistic view of your business’ operations, regardless of what data you fed it.

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Oh, and the name? With a wok, you chuck everything in and a wonderful meal emerges in minutes - this was the same, but for SME data. Hence, Datawok. Makes perfect sense, right?

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Given Tesh’s background in VC and financial services, Kaz asked him for some advice on how best monetise Datawok (for more on this question, you can read our post on monetisation options here. This is now remembered fondly as ‘the first time we really argued’. (It for sure wasn’t easy at the time though)

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Kaz was convinced that a focus on SMEs was the key to success - after all, he’d come up with the idea after seeing the very real costs in terms of time, stress and money that business owners suffered when dealing with data.

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Tesh, by contrast, was of the opinion that the real value of the product wasn’t in fact to the SME owner who would buy it. But, instead to the SME lending market who could take the data generated by Datawok and use it to price risk within the SME lending market.

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This, in hindsight, was our first mistake - not the arguing (arguing can be healthy, and we firmly believe in the value of a…robust exchange of views between partners) so much as the fact that we proceeded without ever quite working out who had won that argument.

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Lesson 2: Be Clear What You’re Selling Before You Start Building

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Anyway, we decided to join forces and make Datawok a global success (without wishing for foreshadow too much, you might be able to guess where this is going).

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We bought two engineers from the Startup Tesh and Kaz met at and offered them ten‑percent equity each with salaries post-fundraise. We wanted to create a founding team that was bought in, incentivised and invested on the journey. (In hindsight, this was not the smartest thing we could have done). The equity we offered created a more difficult dynamic between the four of us than we anticipated and created unfair expectations on our part towards them especially when it came to the timeline we had to build and launch the product. Further, a number of tier-1 VCs questioned our approach to the cap table and saw this as evidence of our inexperience as founders - they were right.

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On reflection, we should have perhaps not brought in those two engineers so early and/or kept the relationship purely “consultative” until Datawok was on more stable ground.

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Lesson 3: Incentivise early hires sensibly—generosity ≠ seriousness

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Focusing on the B2B data analytics proposition, we built the first version of Datawok in four months. Fifty businesses started paying almost immediately; another 250 queued up.

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We firm term sheets from some tier-2 VCs to lead the fundraise, and interest from both tier-1 VCs and some Angels for the next round. We were looking at raising £350,000 for 25% of the business (we’d initially pitched for 15%, but that was perhaps a bit too punchy).

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Again, in hindsight, we didn’t approach this in the smartest of ways. We were young, we were first-time founders, we were naive, and we made two central mistakes - we should have raised more funds, and we wasted time pushing for a 15% figure that was never going to be attractive to potential investors.

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Lesson 4: Be realistic about how much money you will need to raise, and how much equity that is going to have to cost you

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So there were a few early barriers and the road to funding wasn’t entirely smooth - some investors were put off by our inexperience, others by the fact that Kaz wasn’t technically full-time on the business (the fact that he had a young family to support at the time wasn’t, perhaps unsurprisingly, something that interested VCs not one iota) - but, on balance, we were pretty pleased with how things were going; we had money on the table, we had a product, we had a small-but-engaged userbase and a roadmap to growth…things were looking good!

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Then - and you might have heard this line before - COVID happened and the world changed.

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Not only did the pandemic in 2020 create a huge degree of uncertainty for businesses of all stripes, particularly SMEs, but it was also a watershed moment for the evolution of ecommerce worldwide; all of a sudden consumers were forced to shop online, retailers were therefore forced to pivot to online sales…and that meant companies like Shopify effectively cornered the SME market overnight as a one-stop-ecommerce shop.

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Now obviously we couldn’t have predicted the pandemic - if we could we’d have gotten into PPE sourcing sometime in 2019 - but we probably should have seen the writing on the wall as soon as the big ecommerce pivot happened all at once and the Datawok proposition pretty much overnight ceased to be of serious interest to investors. Instead, though, we persisted.

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Lesson 5: If the market moves, pivot fast - and know when the game is up

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Invested as we were in the idea of Datawok - we decided to try a final ‘hail mary’ option.

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We were approached by a SME campaign organisation whose mission is to support the UK’s small and local businesses, with a view to developing and scaling the Datawok product to a point where it could potentially service a pool of up to 10,000 of their SME members. Long story short, but…this didn’t work. There were multiple problems - and the main one, the market having permanently shifted in a way that reduced our product’s relevance, was not going to be solved by a single partnership.

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Beyond this, the channel partnership’s status as our ONLY potential solution meant that we effectively became their outsourced dev shop. Rather than focusing on what we wanted to build in terms of product and features, we found ourselves instead at the whim of a channel partner whose wants and asks were broader, less-focused and left us subject to infinite scope-creep. This wasted time, engineering resource and so, so much energy. It was never going to be a solution to Datawok’s fundamental issues in the post-pandemic marketplace. We had a product that was focused on one specific workflow - but to make this partnership work and ‘save the business’, we had to abandon that and instead become an enterprise white label platform rather than a B2B SaaS offering. Obviously, since you’re reading this and presumably hadn’t heard of Datawok until approximately five minutes ago, this didn’t work out.

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Lesson 6: Focus on YOUR product and what YOU are building rather than bending to the singular vision or ask of one big client.

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So less than two years from birth, Datawok was officially dead. We parted ways with the two engineers - sadly 20% of nothing is, well, nothing - and prepared to pick ourselves up and go again. Before we tell you about the next stage, though, it’s worth reflecting briefly on the things we learned - the positives as well as the negatives.

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• We realised that our maniacal focus on customers and users was a real differentiating point in a market (SME-focused) where winning business is notoriously hard - we won SME customers and knew how to scale this sales engine.
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• This taught us the benefit of how a specific and defined perspective or approach can build brand differentiation, eventually, market share, even in the face of a challenging marketplace.
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• We - or more specifically Tesh - learned how to sell. This may not sound like much, but for someone who used to have a pathological fear of Being A Salesman, the experience of simply having to go out to trade shows and events to pitch to actual small business owners - actual, potential customers and end-users - really was transformative. Direct sales is one of the best ways of both getting this feedback and refining your pitch/proposal.
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• We built fast. This was something that we really can look back on with pride - we delivered a functional, innovative product at speed which, in our experience, isn’t always something that founders excel at. This focus on speed has stood us in excellent stead in future projects, and is something we bring to all our work at Daedalus.
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• We had very defined roles between us as Co-Founders. Often one of the problems faced by founder teams is the division of responsibilities between individuals - we, though, knew from the outset what Tesh was good at and what Kaz was good at, and where it made most sense for each of us to focus. This helped us be efficient and effective - and still does.
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• The whole experience taught us that having a focus on revenue is vital for a new business to succeed - without revenue, in the end you have nothing. This was a huge learning for us, and one which has continued to inform our approach to work with clients at Daedalus.

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• We weren’t focused enough on the difference between customers and users - and this was a big miss on our part. We confused the two - the people that would have used Datawok the most (SME owners) were not the people who, fundamentally, should have been our core market focus (businesses who could make use of data we could have sold them) - and this made life significantly harder.
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• Downstream of this, our lack of specific focus on revenue was a big issue for us. We tried to plug the revenue gap through raising funding, but said gap was just too big for us to bridge at this stage. Admittedly we were very close - but ‘very close’ doesn’t, at the end of the day, mean anything at all. Beyond this, too much of a focus on raising through investment makes the funding brittle, which can lead to exponential problems further down the line.
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• We didn’t have a long-term strategy for the creation of a liquidity event i.e. company sale or IPO. This meant we weren’t able to offer concrete answers to investors on the timescales for their investments bearing fruit - which, in turn, didn’t help us in raising money, and didn’t help us when dealing with those we did raise money from.
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• Perhaps counterintuitively for a tech business, we probably focused too much on the tech. We spent far too much time on tech solutioning rather than building the business, and we overengineered to what is in retrospect a horrifying extent. We developed a machine learning-based solution to power Datawok when, in all honesty, a far simpler and less sophisticated solution would have satisfied user needs and allowed us to deploy to market in half the time and allowed for much more iterative testing. We were young, fresh-faced, arrogant and determined to prove a point - and we were obsessed with ‘perfect’ to the detriment of ‘good enough to ship’. We don’t make this mistake anymore.
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• With the benefit of (a lot of) hindsight, we were perhaps…too honest, or at the very least we thought far too small. Our initial thinking with Datawok was to build something which delivered a useful service to small business owners and which worked as a sustainable business - and we strongly believed that we could achieve that. Sadly, though, when it comes to attracting investment and building a business, that isn’t actually what anyone else wants. Investors want hypergrowth, and we learnt the hard way that if you’re not promising people a hockeystick then you are not going to be as attractive an investment as the people who are promising one. We have learned from that - now we work to build businesses that scale big.
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• Our cap table at Datawok was very imbalanced. On reflection, Kaz not being full-time was an error in terms of the picture that presented to investors and the wider world.
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• Beyond that, our incentivisation model was also all wrong - giving our engineers, as lovely and as capable though they were, a 10% stake each made us look naive to the outside world, and created understandable tensions within the business when they believed that they had an authority stake in the business which, to be candid, we as founders did not agree that they did. We tried to do the right thing - and we still always do - but this wasn’t the right way to go about it.
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• We - specifically Tesh - were terrible at prioritising which meetings were valuable and which…weren’t. There is, it turns out, an upper limit to the value of ‘meeting for a coffee’, and, in many instances, no value at all. Going on ‘blind dates’ with prospective ‘helpers’ takes time and a not-insignificant amount of emotional energy, both of which are finite and better-deployed elsewhere
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• We were too invested in Datawok and so we found it hard to kill our darling; now we’re not so sentimental, we’re happy to take brutal decisions when something isn’t working, and we work better as a result. We know that failure isn’t a reflection on us; we know that the projects we work on are projects, not technological embodiments of us as people. We don’t take things personally anymore - and that is vital.
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By this point, though, we realised that even if Datawok hadn’t, er, “wokked” out  we were a good team - and that the core idea of a lead-gen tool for SME lending was one with real product-market fit. So, we went again (fail once, fail better!).

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This time, though, we thought we had it nailed.

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This time we were going to focus on monetisation from day 1 - we knew who our market was (SME lending), what the value proposition was (automation of the decision making process based on better data) and what the potential market was for such a product.

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We had experience of fundraising - including lots of useful learnings from our many, many mistakes - we had some contacts, and we’d already done a lot of the baseline conceptual problem solving through Datawok. We were in a good place!

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And that’s certainly how it felt at the outset. We wrote a financial model that highlighted the exceptional growth and returns potential of the business and we started the investment cycle with VCs and family offices who were already specifically aligned with the SME lending market, This ensured strong initial interest and understanding of the value proposition. Within 6 weeks of starting out, we agreed a golden handshake deal with a family office who had offered £500k for a 30% stake, with potential for a £1.5m follow-on, with a potential sell-back depending on our hitting certain specific criteria (which we firmly believed were attainable). Even better, this family office had an existing relationship with an SME lender, offering us a direct way into the market from the outset.

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Everything looked great! We called the business Wathe, rolled up our sleeves, and got cracking.

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We started the tech again from scratch - and, if we’re honest, again we got a bit too caught up in pursuit of the perfect (or ‘perfectly clever’) solution This time, though, that was less of an existential issue as we were reasonably-well-funded and could afford to wear a bit more of the cost of both the development and the inevitable delay in deployment. Our focus on hard commercials from the outset meant that we were committed to getting the right SME lenders on board from the outset, and, thanks to our improved ability to pitch and sell ourselves - and the network we built during Datawok - we secured the right partnerships early on. Even better, we secured authorisation from the sector regulator - the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK - to operate, and did so quickly and cost-effectively, which was both a huge bonus to the viability of the business and an excellent learning that has since stood us in good stead with other clients.

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Everything was looking great. So, you might ask, why aren’t we writing this from an island having sold out in 2024, and why isn’t Wathe a known name in the SME lending space?

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Would you believe, COVID? Again?

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The UK government’s decision to hand out huge sums to businesses affected by the pandemic, in the form of ‘bounceback loans’ to SMEs, offered on very favourable terms, effectively kneecapped the country’s SME lending market overnight (at least in the short-to-medium term - which, as a startup with limited funding, was unfortunately exactly the sort of timescales we were working to).

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To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one startup to a pandemic feels unlucky, to lose two feels…not so much ‘careless’ as a bit like the universe hates you.

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That, though, is another learning in itself - in fact, we took some additional lessons from our experience with Wathe, which we’d also like to share with you:

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• We chose to launch with too large and complex an MVP - which, in turn, was determined by our decision to tackle a market of the sort of complexity which required a complex build. This wasn’t necessarily something we shouldn’t have done - but it definitely was something the implications of which we perhaps didn’t fully take into account.
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• While we raised some money, we probably didn’t raise enough; with hindsight we raised for a 12 month runway when we would have been significantly better off projecting an 18-24 month runway instead. This would have helped us hedge against the temporary bounceback loans market issue. And while it may not have stopped the issue from happening, the prevalence of the bounce back loans would have stopped being an existential issue for Wathe as a business.
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• Our vision for the business was still too narrow. We were smarter than we had been with Datawok, but we didn’t have a broad enough understanding of the market we were targeting, or the alternative parts of the value chain which we could potentially serve. Had we understood earlier that Wathe could be a tool for banks to track the performance of their loans we could have focused on that instead as an alternative avenue to revenue when the bounceback loans issue arose, which in turn could have prevented it from being existential for the business.
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With Wathe, we were very close. We were a good team, with a good product that had good market fit - and not quite enough margin for error available to let us ride out an unforeseen crisis beyond our control. It might sound like bad luck - and to an extent it was - but, also, it was bad luck which we might have mitigated had we known then what we know now.

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That said, without the failure of Wathe we wouldn’t have arrived at the success of Daedalus - so, on balance, it was all worthwhile.

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This is the bit of the story where we finally stop talking about the glorious ways we failed and instead start talking about things that have, so far at least, gone a bit better.

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If Parts One and Two (Datawok and Wathe) were the obligatory “two founders learn pain” montage, the next three years are the bit where the montage ends, the music swells and we discover the joy of getting paid on time (or even ‘at all’).

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As we often like to say to clients and, honestly, anyone who will listen, we understand founder pain because we have personally been in a position where we literally didn’t know how we were going to pay our mortgages.

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Rewind to Spring 2022, six months after Wathe’s funeral. It’s a grey Tuesday, there’s a mortgage payment due in three weeks which, if we fail to meet it, makes homelessness quite a real possibility, and the joint current-account balance is closer to zero than is comfortable. Out of nowhere, a lifeline appears: a dual-hire interview loop at a blue-chip that happens to be run by Tesh’s ex-boss. We sell ourselves as an inseparable product-and-engineering two-for-one. Everyone nods along.

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Offer day arrives. The phone rings…for Kaz only. They’ll take him, with a signing bonus, but “haven’t budgeted” for Tesh. Kaz asks one question: “Have you seen Top Gun? You never leave your wingman.” Offer declined.

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(Just so we’re clear: Kaz actually said this line, too. And watching Top Gun 1 and 2 is obligatory onboarding material for any new hire we make.)

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So, we’re still broke - morally upright, but broke. The following Monday the company calls Tesh to beg Kaz to reconsider. Tesh says “it’s his decision” and phones Kaz just after instead: “To hell with it [or words to that effect]. Let’s build something ourselves. No clue what, but something.”

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Then the call came in. We were asked to ‘help out with something’ for a hedge-fund friend, which resulting in five 20-hour days in which we delivered an entire proof-of-concept for a new business - NatureAlpha, which you can read about in more detail here.

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Tesh spends every moment of every day with the client, distilling their needs and refining their thinking, while feeding back to Kaz who delivers documentation and architecture at a frankly ridiculous pace.

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Friday arrives, we refresh our bank accounts - we have £6k in the bank each, and it no longer feels like we’re going to be homeless. Another couple of weeks takes us to month-end, and sees us bank another £6k apiece. End-of-month, another £6k. A second retainer follows; suddenly we’re grossing £20k a month for work that, compared with our previous two-year death marches with Datawok and Wathe, feels almost civilised. When the same client signs a £1 million annual retainer a few weeks later, Daedalus is born.

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And here we are, 3 years after that.

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So now that we’ve experienced this rollercoaster, we thought it might be helpful to talk to you briefly about how we’ve approached each year with Daedalus, what we learned at each phase of development, and what we hope comes next.

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Year 1 – Back to Zero

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Our Mission: Pay back our debts and get something new established.

• Perseverance pays. Having two founders who will happily pull alternating all-nighters is an underrated asset. We don’t want to fetishise long hours culture - we would always prefer ‘smart’ to ‘busy’ - but, equally, at the outset especially, having a core team that knows what hard work looks like and what it can deliver really does make a tangible difference.
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• Choose your partner wisely. We - Tesh & Kaz as founding partners - know each other, understand each other and, crucially, like each other (this last part is undervalued, we think). Our skill sets are complementary, we can split our workloads, we know what our strengths - and weaknesses - are, and can compensate for each other appropriately. All of this saves both time and potential lawyer’s fees should everything go wrong. Picking the right partner(s) is important, because for much of the time there’s more thin than thick.
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• Tell, don’t ask. Consulting muscle-memory made us over-polite. The moment we started telling clients what they should build instead of asking what they wanted built, the invoices got bigger and the feedback kinder. We are good at what we do because we understand how to evaluate, conceptualise and solve problems, and how to build solutions that deliver - once we realised that this was more valuable than just being acquiescent, clients began to as well.
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• Price the pain. A proof-of-concept for a Tier-1 bank isn’t “quick” or “cheap”. We learned to quote MVPs at low six figures, version 1s at seven, because that’s reality. One of the things we’ve learned over the years is how many people working in and around tech don’t always necessarily have the best understanding of the practicalities of, well, tech - specifically, budgets and timelines. We understand that things that are hard and complicated problems require solutions that either take a lot of time to architect and build, or which you will need to pay a lot of money to deliver - or both. That understanding means we can advise clients appropriately, and price our work accordingly.
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By month 12 the debt is gone, cash flow is positive and—crucially—we have the confidence that comes from a couple of “silly-money” invoices clearing.

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Year 2 – Getting the Band Together

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Our Mission: Bring back the A-Team

• Culture first, CVs second. We hired on attitude, curiosity and humour. Technical chops can be taught; being kind at 3 a.m. cannot. Cultural fit is something we hadn’t thought about previously, but we had to learn fast. This is our business and it has to work for us - and there’s only so much flexibility you can have when you’re very small or a startup. People have to be able to be ok with that (and if they’re not that’s fine, but we’re probably not for them)
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• Define “a Daedalus build”. We standardised a methodology that delivers enterprise-grade MVPs in five rather than seven figures, and in weeks, not quarters. This gave us a position of comparative competitive advantage against other, larger consultancies which necessarily moved a little bit slower than we are able to.
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• Learn to say no—politely, but quickly. This is about working out who you are, and who you want to serve as a business, so you can more easily decide who you don’t want to work with or for. Some clients simply aren’t right for us - but, at the outset, we weren’t always good at working out which ones. So we built a prospect-scoring rubric that kills bad fits early. Two acquisition approaches landed in the inbox largely because we finally looked like a real business with boundaries - we didn’t take them, but it was nice to be asked.

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We built a team and we implemented systems and rigour, we were finally clear about what we were and what we were not, who we would work with and who we would pass on. And we were, at last, able to take a breath (and, on rare occasions, actual weekends off) to plan year three.  

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Year 3 – Building to Growth

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Our Mission: Grow, without forgetting why we exist.

• Build outside the hype cycle. Every era of tech has a particular obsession driven by hype and (over)investment - we are currently living through the age of the obsessive introduction of generative AI into everything. Because of the way that we approach client issues - we do the thinking working first and only when we have understood the shape of the problem do we begin to consider the architecture of the potential solution - we are tech agnostic, and this applies as much to AI as anything else. Just because everyone seems to want to sell you a hammer it doesn’t mean that everything else is a nail.
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• Relationships beat funnels. We A/B-tested every paid, automated lead-gen gizmo on the internet. Turns out revenue still comes from someone you helped ten years ago saying, “Call these two, they’ll fix it.”. Beyond that, keep it simple. Our tech stack for ‘relationship management is’ a two-part combination of Tesh’s Email and WhatsApp - and that has taken us to a seven figure revenue pipeline. We don’t believe in overengineered solutions, and that applies to our own internal processes as much as what we build for clients. It’s a strange truism in tech that, in many instances, you probably don’t need quite as much tech as you think you do - and ‘automation’ doesn’t always mean ‘better’.
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• Risk as a service. A healthy balance sheet lets us co-invest in client upside—shared-savings contracts, revenue-share pilots, sweat equity. Year 3 is where Daedalus starts writing cheques into projects, not just billing out. Or at least that’s the dream.

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We wanted to tell you how we got here because we want to show you that we really do understand how it works. We have broken the 100-hour-week barrier, we’ve eaten the ramen, we’ve stared, terrified, at the bank balance that doesn’t quite meet the mortgage payment…and so we know that the work is hard and there are no fairytales, and that sometimes hard work and a great idea aren’t always enough.

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We wanted to try and explain why we have moved from building our own products to helping other people build theirs better. It’s not because we don’t believe we can - or that we will again one day. It’s because we have been on the journey together - more than once! - and know that without a compelling unifying vision behind it, a new product won’t fly. We don’t want to build for the sake of building; instead, we’d rather use our hard-won expertise and the knowledge accumulated over years of hard work and, occasionally, failure, to help others realise compelling visions of their own.

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What comes next? Well, we’re going to keep on helping build new products and businesses and supporting corporate innovation. There may be new products in our future, but equally we may decide that our most useful role in the tech innovation ecosystem is to become institutional investors, using our operational experience developed across DataWok, Wathe and now Daedalus to inform our decisionmaking and guide the businesses we have a stake in.

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Want to know how we can help you? Get in touch. The next three years are going to be exciting.