The Ask & Team¶
The ask¶
Shimmy is raising £1,000,000 via a SEIS/EIS-eligible priced equity round at a £5,000,000 pre-money valuation (£6,000,000 post-money). This figure and structure follow directly from the pitch materials previously prepared for this round; this document sets it in the context of the full strategy suite rather than restating the deck.
| Term | Detail |
|---|---|
| Raise amount | £1,000,000 |
| Pre-money valuation | £5,000,000 |
| Post-money valuation | £6,000,000 |
| Instrument | Priced equity round (ordinary/preferred shares per final legal terms) |
| Tax relief | SEIS/EIS eligible |
| Round type | Seed |
Company values¶
These values define how Shimmy builds product, operates internally, and scales internationally:
- User first
- Large scale, tangible positive impact
- Doing things differently and better
- Empowering and liberating others
- Conviction
- Straightforwardness
- Authenticity
- Astronomical thinking
Use of funds¶
Modelled against the headcount and tooling sequencing set out in Pillar III: Operations and the Forward Hiring Roadmap:
| Category | Allocation | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering & product headcount | ~45% | Covers the Phase 1 immediate hires (Senior Laravel Developer, ML Developer for content moderation, part-time UI/UX Designer) and early Phase 2 hires (Senior Flutter Developer) from the hiring roadmap |
| Trust & safety / moderation build-out | ~20% | Shimmy Shield Tier 1/Tier 2 build per the moderation brief — this is Shimmy's core differentiator and is treated as capital infrastructure, not a discretionary cost, consistent with Pillar III |
| Legal & compliance | ~10% | UK legal counsel (already flagged as a Phase 1 hire), Online Safety Act compliance groundwork, SEIS/EIS administration |
| AI tooling & infrastructure | ~10% | Budgeted as a percentage of the headcount cost it augments, per the tooling-as-infrastructure principle in Operations |
| Marketing & launch (UK beachhead) | ~10% | UK-first launch per the market sequencing in Pillar I |
| Working capital / contingency | ~5% | Buffer against the CAC and timeline uncertainty flagged throughout Pillar I's sensitivity bands |
Runway this buys¶
At the burn rate modelled in Financials — Burn & Runway, this raise is sized to fund the team through UK launch and the first Tier 1 international market (see Pillar I's four-tier model), with the milestone sequencing detailed in Roadmap & Milestones.
Team¶
Founder¶
Elliot Crabtree — Founder & CEO. Runs and operates across every function of the business — product and design, engineering and cloud infrastructure, data, moderation strategy, and the cap table — with hands-on involvement that spans Shimmy's Laravel/PHP backend and Vue frontend (currently leading the authentication-hardening security work on the fix/auth-bypass-and-shimmy-image branch) through to company-wide strategic planning and fundraising.
Leadership team¶
Samira Elhamy — Chief Technology Officer. Runs the technical team and engineering process at Shimmy, including infrastructure and operations — the direct owner of the architecture documented in Infrastructure and Shimmy Shield's V1 implementation.
Current team¶
Shimmy operates with a small, fully remote team.
- Aswathy Gopan — Backend Developer
- Sahar Elhamy — ML Developer
- Mitchell Ward — ML Developer
Governance¶
Board composition and decision-rights structure are under active definition and will be published as part of the final fundraising pack.
Hiring plan¶
The Forward Hiring Roadmap sets out two phases:
- Phase 1 (immediate, pre-launch): Senior Laravel Developer, ML Developer (Content Moderation), UK Legal Counsel, part-time UI/UX Designer
- Phase 2 (growth phase, 5,000+ users / +12 months): Senior Flutter Developer, ML Engineers, Distributed Systems Engineers, Infrastructure & Security Engineer, Cloud Architect, Security Engineer
Hiring sequencing beyond Phase 2 follows the pod-outstaffing logic in Pillar III: resource whichever pod is currently unable to own its outcome end-to-end.