Serve First, a customer experience and performance management platform startup, has raised £5m in funding from Pembroke VCT and the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II, through fund manager Mercia Ventures. The funding will be used to strengthen its sales and marketing function, including the appointment of a Chief Revenue Officer, and support continued product development, including further investment in AI capabilities.
Launched in 2023, it collects and analyses customer feedback from in-store surveys, online reviews and mystery shopping. Its software translates these insights into actions for frontline teams, enabling businesses to act on customer insight more quickly and improve service performance and customer loyalty.
Since its previous £4.5 million funding round in June 2025, Serve First has almost doubled its annual recurring revenue to over £2m. It has attracted customers including Brentford FC, The Sushi Co, Topps Tiles, The Body Shop and Spud Bros, and expanded into Europe with a contract covering over 2,500 pharmacies across 7 countries.
Founded by Erol Ayvaz, who has more than 20 years’ experience in technology and customer experience including roles at Asana and Market Force Information, it employs 25 staff. The platform also supports enterprise customers across retail, hospitality, health and wellness, franchise and facilities management, and has launched an offering to help UK venue and events operators comply with Martyn’s Law legislation.
The best investments reveal themselves quickly. Erol is a rare founder – someone who has both operated multi-site businesses at the coalface and scaled software companies, which means he understood this problem from the inside before Serve First ever wrote a line of code. That founder-market fit is showing in the numbers: since backing him in June 2025, Serve First has grown revenue at breakneck speed, deepened relationships with its existing enterprise clients, and secured a significant European rollout with a major client. When a portfolio company executes this well this early, increasing our support is an obvious decision. We're excited to back the team through the next phase.
The company’s growth over the last year is a clear indication of the market appetite for Serve First’s offering, and this latest funding injection speaks to both the future potential of the business and the strong delivery over the last year by our exceptional team. It’s an exciting time to be operating in this space, and there remains considerable untapped potential for Serve First’s offering. We expect market demand to accelerate rapidly with the rise of agentic AI, which is making customer experience far more critical to business performance than ever before.
The Serve First team have built a great product that is loved by their expanding list of customers. With market demand strengthening, this is an opportune time for them to accelerate growth. We are excited to support them on their journey.
