Seed23 October 2024

Keel secures £4.6m in seed funding from Earlybird and LocalGlobe to scale its operations platform

Earlybird and LocalGlobe backed the London startup to help businesses build custom operational software.

£4.6MSeed

Keel provides a user-friendly platform that allows growing businesses to build custom operational software and avoid traditional enterprise resource planning tools.

London-based startup Keel has secured £4.6m in seed funding from Earlybird and LocalGlobe to expand access to its customisable operations platform. The company aims to bridge the gap between rigid enterprise resource planning systems and basic no-code tools, allowing technical operators to build secure internal software without diverting engineering resources from client-facing priorities. The founders drew on their experience scaling an online pharmacy during the pandemic to develop a system that supports scalable internal tooling.

The fresh capital will support the ongoing development of the platform and its user experience as the team introduces the technology to a broader market of growing businesses. Early adopters such as delivery firm HIVED are already using the platform to manage shift patterns and other core operational functions. By offering an open-source architecture with strong developer support, Keel intends to provide an alternative to cumbersome software implementations.

From the founder

"stock ordering and inventory management for medication at scale wasn't solved by any off the shelf options. Like all good ops we started with a bunch of spreadsheets and a bit of app script, but it became clear that this wouldn't offer the robustness, security and level of integration we needed. We looked for a platform that we could build upon but it didn't exist, so the only option was to assemble an ops engineering team of backend and frontend developers."

Benoit Machefer

CEO at Keel

Investor perspective

"We saw something extraordinary in this team and the giant market they are tackling with a customisable solution. In order to disrupt this market with a more operationally-minded product, you need a team who built and scaled ops-centric organisations themselves, which we found in Benoit, Tom, and Jon. We are proud to have backed them since day 1."

Andre Retterath

General Partner at Earlybird, Earlybird