Capital and round formation
The primary need, and what determines whether anything else here happens.
- Pre-seed investment and follow-on capacity
- Introductions to co-investors
- Help forming a coherent round
Pre-seed at Specify
Building the commercial infrastructure beyond the catalogue
Specify turns difficult customer demand into structured commercial opportunities that a business can actually answer.
Every configurable, made-to-order and specification-led business can deliver more than its website exposes. The demand that falls outside the catalogue is large, high-intent and almost entirely unmeasured, and today it is handled by email, phone calls and individual memory.
We are raising a pre-seed round to prove the commercial model in selected sectors and build the foundations of a merchant capability network.
- Interpretable customer demand
- Structured merchant capability
- Accountable commercial decisions
Commerce beyond the catalogue
Metrics
What we report, and what each number means
These definitions are fixed now, before the numbers exist, so that they mean the same thing every quarter and cannot be redefined upward later. Figures appear here as the first implementations go live.
Commercial value facilitated
Reporting from launch
The value of merchant orders accepted through a Specify-supported process. Specify does not process payments, so this is merchant transaction value rather than revenue or payment volume. Excludes unaccepted quotations, cancelled orders, duplicates and any internal testing.
Merchants live
Reporting from launch
Distinct merchant organisations with at least one storefront in production. One legal entity counts once regardless of how many storefronts it runs.
Active merchants
Reporting from launch
Merchant organisations with at least one qualifying production interaction in the trailing thirty days. A merchant that is live but dormant is not counted here.
Storefronts live
Reporting from launch
Configured web storefronts in production. A storefront is a deployment, not a physical location and not a merchant.
Structured Opportunities created
Reporting from launch
Customer requests translated into a Structured Opportunity, cumulative. Excludes internal demonstrations and test submissions.
Decision Records created
Reporting from launch
Opportunities carried through to a recorded commercial decision, whether the outcome was an offer, an alternative, an escalation or a refusal.
Recurring revenue
Reporting from launch
Monthly recurring subscription revenue under contract. Excludes implementation and consulting fees, which are project revenue and are reported separately.
Average contract value
Reporting from launch
Annualised contract value per merchant across subscription and committed usage, excluding one-off implementation work.
Specify does not process payments, so commercial value facilitated is merchant transaction value rather than revenue. The full financial picture, including the model behind it, is shared with investors we are in conversation with.
The opportunity
The catalogue is the boundary of the sale, not of the business
A catalogue can only answer demand that has already been defined, priced, photographed and published. Everything else, the different dimension, the alternative material, the modification a factory could make comfortably, is invisible to the customer and unmeasured by the business.
That demand is not marginal. In configurable and made-to-order commerce it is routinely the highest-value part of the pipeline, and it is the part currently handled by whoever happens to answer the phone. Businesses know they are losing it and have no instrument to measure how much.
Specify makes that demand visible, structured and answerable. The first business to do this well for a sector does not win a feature comparison; it becomes the layer through which that sector's difficult demand is handled.
The full argument for where commerce is going, and the commercial objects Specify is built from, are set out on the Vision page.
Business model
A staged model that starts earning immediately
The software is the business: a merchant pays €1,000 a month plus 5% of qualifying commercial value facilitated, and keeps paying because their customers are answered through it. Getting there is paid work rather than a free trial, and that work builds the capability data the software runs on.
Current
Onboarding a merchant's capability
Capability modelling, constraint modelling, specification journeys, integrations and custom components, billed hourly. It is revenue today, and it is how the merchant's capability data gets built - the asset the subscription runs on and the reason switching later means changing how the business answers its customers.
Testing
Recurring platform subscription
A published per-storefront subscription. Once a merchant answers customers through Specify, the software is embedded in how the business sells rather than sitting beside it, which is the retention argument.
Planned
Transaction and usage expansion
A published 5% fee on qualifying commercial value facilitated, with the definition and the attribution test published alongside it. Revenue grows with the merchant rather than with a seat count, and the more difficult demand enters the system the more of it there is.
Long-term direction
Network participation
Connected specialists answering opportunities no single merchant could fulfil, with coordination and referral revenue on top. This is the largest of the four and the furthest out.
Why the shape is attractive:
- Land and expand by construction: the first piece of work is small, qualifies the merchant and pays for its own sales effort.
- Onboarding is not a cost of sale. It creates the asset the subscription depends on, and it is charged for.
- Revenue expands with merchant activity rather than with headcount at the merchant.
- Value compounds inside an account as more workflows, capability records and decisions accumulate.
- Switching means changing how the business answers its customers, not swapping a tool.
- The subscription is priced to fund quality rather than to win on price, which narrows the market deliberately and raises what each customer is worth.
The near-term business is software and implementation for individual merchants, and it stands on its own. The network is upside on top of a model that works without it.
Market
A large market defined by commercial shape, not by industry
The relevant market is not all of ecommerce. It is every business whose real capability materially exceeds its published catalogue, which is a specific and very large set.
The conditions that define it:
- The product is configurable but not infinitely flexible.
- Dimensions, materials, drawings, installation or phasing matter.
- Commercial viability depends on capability and explicit constraints.
- Several teams may need to approve an outcome.
- The catalogue regularly represents less than the business can deliver.
That is configurable products, custom interiors, personalised goods, made-to-order manufacturing and specification-led B2B supply. It is a commercial shape rather than an industry, which is what makes it both large and addressable: the same product serves a locker manufacturer and a fragrance house.
Three directions of expansion, in order:
- Within a merchant
- From one workflow to several, from one storefront to the whole group, from the sales team to production and procurement.
- Within a sector
- Capability models, constraint structures and integrations built for one business make the next business in that sector materially faster to serve.
- Across the network
- Once enough specialists in a sector are represented, demand no single merchant could answer becomes addressable by several of them together.
The market model is built bottom up: relevant merchants in the target sectors and geographies, multiplied by a blended annual opportunity across subscription, implementation and usage. The model, its sources and its assumptions go out with the deck.
Differentiation
Why this is a system, not a feature
Several categories of software touch one part of this problem. None connects interpretable demand to structured capability, explicit constraints and accountable decisions, which is what turns a difficult request into something a business can safely answer.
| Begins with customer intent | The customer describes an outcome. They do not have to understand the merchant's catalogue structure before they can ask for anything. |
|---|---|
| The request becomes a commercial object | A Structured Opportunity persists, can be enriched, assigned and decided on, and survives long after a chat transcript would have been closed. |
| Represents capability, not just products | What the business can responsibly deliver, rather than only what has already been published as a page or a SKU. This is the part nobody else models. |
| Constraints are first-class | Knowing what is possible is half an answer. Knowing under which conditions and with whose approval is what makes it sellable. |
| Interpretation separated from authority | A model structures the demand; the business decides what may be offered. That separation is what makes the output usable in a commercial setting rather than merely impressive. |
| Demand becomes commercial memory | Accepted, rejected and unresolved requests accumulate in the Opportunity Ledger, so a business finally has data on what customers tried to buy and could not. |
| Many responsible outcomes | Standard, configured, modified, made-to-order, alternative, combined, escalated or refused, instead of a binary in-stock answer. |
| Connects specialists | The architecture is built so that several businesses can eventually answer one opportunity together. Nobody starting from a catalogue can retrofit that. |
What accumulates, and is therefore hard to copy:
- Merchant-specific capability and constraint models, which take real work to build and exist nowhere else.
- Decision Record and Opportunity Ledger history inside a merchant's operations.
- Integration depth: removing Specify means changing how the business answers customers.
- Implementation method that gets faster with every sector engagement.
- Sector knowledge about how a particular kind of business actually decides.
How this sits against adjacent categories:
- Ecommerce platforms and search distribute what has been published, and cannot represent what has not.
- Chatbots and AI shopping assistants interpret language, with no authoritative model of what the business may commit to.
- CPQ and configurators model constraints inside a defined product, and start from the product rather than the request.
- CRM and workflow tools track the process around a decision without representing the capability it depends on.
- Custom development builds any of this once, for one business, without it becoming reusable.
Specify's innovation is not one AI feature. It is the commercial model that connects interpretable demand with structured capability, constraints and accountable decisions.
Network effects
Four loops, and one of them is a real network
Three of these compound inside a single merchant and start working from the first implementation. The fourth is the one that changes the shape of the company, and the architecture is being built for it now.
- Building
Merchant learning
- More Structured Opportunities
- More Decision Records
- Sharper picture of recurring demand and constraints
- Stronger capability representation
- Better decisions, faster
Which produces more of the first step.
Compounds inside one merchant from the first month, which is what makes the account stickier over time.
- Building
Workflow expansion
- More teams and workflows on Specify
- More complete commercial context in one place
- Higher value to the organisation
- Expansion across storefronts and teams
Which produces more of the first step.
The land-and-expand engine. Each additional workflow raises both the value and the cost of leaving.
- Next
Sector reuse
- Capability and constraint models built for one business
- Reusable schemas and integrations for that sector
- Faster, cheaper implementation for the next merchant
- Better margins and shorter sales cycles in that sector
Which produces more of the first step.
This is what turns services-led delivery into a product, and it is a primary objective of this round.
- Long-term direction
Capability network
- More participating specialist merchants
- More capability available to answer difficult demand
- More of the market's demand receives a real answer
- More reason for the next specialist to join
Which produces more of the first step.
The genuine cross-side network effect and the largest prize here. It needs density in one sector before it starts, which is why the go-to-market is deliberately concentrated.
The near-term business does not depend on the fourth loop. It is the option on top, and the product is being architected so that taking it later does not require rebuilding what comes first.
Why now
Both halves of the solution arrived at once
The problem is old. What is new is that it became solvable.
AI makes demand easier to interpret. The commercial opportunity is connecting that interpretation to real capability, constraints and authority.
- Language models can turn an informal request into structured requirements well enough to be commercially useful, which no previous interface could do at a viable cost.
- Production and fulfilment are increasingly software-controlled, so what a business can make is finally representable.
- Merchants have accumulated enough operational data for a capability model to have something to be built from.
- Customers increasingly start from an outcome rather than a product name, which catalogue navigation handles badly.
- Publishing every valid combination as a product page has become uneconomic at modern levels of configurability.
Interpretation is now commodity. Authority is not, and authority is where the durable business is.
The round
The pre-seed round
We are raising pre-seed funding to prove the commercial model in a first sector and build the reusable core that makes the second one profitable.
Target, instrument and terms are shared directly with investors we are speaking to.
Where it goes:
- Product and engineering
- Turning capability and constraint modelling into a repeatable product rather than a bespoke exercise per merchant.
- Merchant implementation
- Doing the first implementations properly, including the parts that will not scale, because that is how we learn which parts those are.
- Commercial development
- Establishing pricing, the charging unit and a sales motion that works in the target sector.
- Sector focus
- Concentrating on one beachhead hard enough to reach the density the network loop needs.
- Data infrastructure and security
- Capability data is commercially sensitive. Handling it credibly is a precondition for mid-market adoption.
- Key hires
- The first hires after two founders decide more about the outcome than anything else on this list.
What this round is intended to produce:
- Paying merchants on the recurring platform, not only on consulting.
- A validated pricing model and charging unit.
- Implementation effort per merchant down measurably, sector by sector.
- Demonstrated expansion across workflows and storefronts within accounts.
- One beachhead sector proven well enough to concentrate on it.
- A sales and onboarding process a third person can run.
This round turns a working product and its first implementations into a product business with recurring revenue and a repeatable motion. Revenue today comes from that implementation work, which is stated plainly rather than dressed up as anything else.
Who we want
Capital, context and access
The strongest investors for Specify understand that this sits between commerce, operational capability and AI. Capital is the point of the round; the rest is what makes an investor especially useful.
Customer access
The most valuable non-capital contribution at this stage, by some distance.
- Introductions to merchants with the commercial shape described above
- Introductions to producers and suppliers
- Insight into how a sector actually buys
Commercial experience
Selling software into businesses that buy carefully.
- B2B and mid-market sales
- Pricing and packaging
- Partnerships and channel development
Technical and product depth
The genuinely hard parts of this problem.
- AI systems and data architecture
- Product configuration and manufacturing systems
- Marketplace and network infrastructure
Company building
Two founders becoming a real company is the transition most likely to go wrong.
- Recruitment and leadership
- Governance and finance
- Future fundraising
Sector insight
Depth in a sector matching the shape Specify is built for.
- Configurable and made-to-order products
- Construction, interiors and industrial supply
- Specification-led B2B supply
An investor who wants to provide capital and stay out of the way is entirely welcome. Nothing below is a requirement.
Investor enquiry
Discuss the pre-seed round
Three short screens. It goes to the two founders and there is nobody else in between.
Submitting this form is a request for a conversation. It does not reserve an allocation, create an investment agreement or oblige either side to proceed, and it does not automatically release confidential materials.
- How you invest
- Fit
- Confirm
How you invest
Enough to tell whether there is a plausible fit before either of us spends an hour on a call.
Next step
Discuss the pre-seed round
Tell us how you invest, what you know particularly well and what you could contribute. Investors we take further receive the deck, the financial model and the market analysis.
About this page
This page is provided for general company and investor-relations purposes. It is not an offer, a solicitation or investment advice, and statements about future plans and markets are forward-looking rather than guaranteed. Any investment would be subject to separate documentation, eligibility requirements and applicable law.