pirkx

If selected as a winner, the prize funding will enable our continued company growth with the generation of long- term sales and market expansion serving to ‘future-proof’ our business. Success will support further private funding to scale business operations across the UK and export globally to a number of new territories including South Africa, with prize funding acting as a crucial means to develop the product to meet the societal and customer needs that will support this future growth in revenue and scale.

pirkx was founded by Stella Smith who was frustrated by how needlessly complicated and expensive it was to source wellbeing benefits for the self-employed and contingent workers of her small businesses. So she set out to create pirkx to help businesses of all sizes retain and reward the best people by looking after their wellbeing, whether they employ them directly or engage them as a contractor. pirkx was founded to fill a sizeable gap for a significant, underserved segment of the global workforce that traditionally didn’t have access to any sort of wellbeing support. Historically, benefit portals and employee discounts have only been available to those working for large companies, with employees of many SMEs and the contingent workforce left out due to high cost, complex onboarding, contract inflexibility or lack of collective buying power. This sizeable market is missing out on valuable health and wellbeing support which is increasingly critical. pirkx seeks to disrupt this market by offering mental, physical, emotional, educational and financial support – to anyone, regardless of employment status. Our mission is to positively impact the wellbeing of one million people by 2025. We believe our mission is important and we are perfectly placed to deliver.

We believe it should be a fundamental right for everyone to have access to wellbeing - the state of being happy, healthy or comfortable. Large employers often provide 'Employee Benefits' to support the wellbeing of their workforce. The contingent workforce - contractors, gig economy and employees of smaller businesses often have little or no access to benefits due to ineligibility, complex on-boarding processes or high cost. According the global wellness institute, only 9% of the 3.2 billion global workers have access to workplace wellness programmes, leaving 91% of the world's workers underserved from a wellbeing perspective. This is a significant problem, with the rise of wellbeing being at the forefront of everyone's minds in a post COVID-19 world. 

COVID-19 has had profound negative impacts upon people’s mental and physically health, with wellbeing decline among women, BAME communities and key-workers particularly evident. Individuals face extended worries about their financial position, with the fallout of COVID impacting millions of workers and forcing many into insecure work via the gig-economy or unemployment. For those working in SMEs, the unlikely immediate return to pre-COVID-19 revenues will result in crucial employee benefits being under threat – making an accessible, affordable solution such as pirkx vital. 

pirkx is based on a scalable SaaS business model; providing its service via app and platform using self-serve technology. We are making brilliant, affordable wellbeing benefits accessible to everyone with our lightweight, fully customisable, self-service platform and loyalty engine. We provide the tools to support health, wealth and happiness for a huge segment of the global workforce that is very poorly served by current solutions. Unlike more traditional employee benefits solutions our platform was built with quick and simple self serve customer onboarding process with very little human interaction required. Once signed up, we offer businesses and members a menu based proposition with core product offering essential wellbeing services. Unlike more off the shelf solutions, the pirkx platform is end to end customisable for businesses, allowing them to personalise their benefits site to the needs of their workforce or customers. This customisation includes branding, curation of content, bespoke URL to name but a few. Finally, we offer the market disruptive and egalitarian pricing - most benefits platforms operate tiered pricing which excludes smaller businesses. pirkx has flexible payment options for corporates, associations or charities, meaning it can be utilised on either a no cost, or choice of cost basis.

Pirkx is a young, high-growth business whose aim is simple: to help support the wellbeing of workers globally through the provision of an industry-lead, technology driven benefits portal, accessible to all regardless of their employment status.

To date, we have worked with more than 351 businesses to deliver wellbeing to thousands of individuals by selecting pirkx as their employee benefit platform of choice. This has resulted in significant commercial success for pirkx and resulted in demonstrable wellbeing increases for those with access to the benefits on offer.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for wellbeing support in the UK workforce has only increased. With economic uncertainly and recession looming over the UK for some years to come, there is a real threat that an increased number of people are left without secure employment and, as such, very little by the way of wellbeing support. This project aims to ensure pirkx is able to fill the benefits void for a large portion of the UK, and global workforce.