The UK’s fastest-growing employee engagement platform has doubled the size of its tech team and appointed a new CTO as the company gears up to scale in the UK and internationally.
Perkbox has made a name for itself with a service which offers around 250 ‘perks’, including discounts and freebies to employees of subscribed businesses. Its clients include OpenTable, Nandos, Hawksmoor, Rentalcars and Levi Strauss & Co.
The London and Sheffield-based firm has announced the appointment of Paul Schulz, ex-head of mobile technology at Yahoo!, as its chief technology officer.
Co-founder and CEO Saurav Chopra described Schulz, who has more than 27 years of experience in the tech sector, as “the obvious choice given his track record and our focus on building mobile-first solutions”.
“Paul and I first worked together 13 years ago at Yahoo! where Paul led the mobile engineering platform globally building some of the most engaging mobile products touching hundreds of millions of users worldwide,” Chopra said.
Schulz said that going global is “a big ambition” for Perkbox, which plans to serve 10 million employees by 2020 and 100 million by 2025.
“We expect to be a £100M+ run rate business in 2020 which would be on par with other $1bn+ valued companies,” he told BusinessCloud.
Schulz has worked for companies such as Nokia, Yahoo! and also created an industry-leading Open Source video advertising product called Open Video Ads, acquired by JWPlayer.
Most recently, he has been operating as CTO for very early stage tech companies in London.
“Having worked at these global brands equips me with some great experiences to learn from,” he told BusinessCloud.
“At Yahoo! for example, while working to deliver mobile products and services such as mail, messenger, finance, the FIFA World Cup site and supporting services – I learnt to create and deliver online software products/services that automatically scale to support a large scale global audience.
“I was schooled in believing that success comes from scale, where audience sizes are in the 10s to 100s of millions of users on a regular, retained basis.”
Schulz will be responsible for the platform architecture, technology strategy and global engineering roadmaps at Perkbox.
He will also complete the firm’s “transformation into a mobile-first platform delivering amazing user experiences for employees and HR teams”.
“When Saurav first discussed Perkbox with me, I was impressed by how quickly it had scaled in the UK and how it had democratised employee engagement,” Schulz said.
“I am confident that with the right technology infrastructure it has the potential to become the market leader globally. It’s a privilege to be part of this journey joining a highly talented and experienced team to bring new energy and accelerate its growth.”
Over the last three months, Perkbox has grown its tech and engineering team from 32 to 65 employees.