I built Founder Compass because I know how confusing the UK founder journey can be.

I build businesses in the UK. My current company, Renti Rewards, is a “Rent-to-Points” loyalty engine built on Open Banking that verifies rent payments and rewards good tenant behaviour — a finalist for Best Startup / New Entrant at the Scottish Financial Technology Awards 2024, with SEIS Advance Assurance from HMRC and 500+ tenants signed up across three property-management trials.

Before that I co-founded CAIRT, a platform rewarding credit-card users for paying on time, and Reducto, the UK’s first reward-based reduced-food app tackling supermarket surplus. Earlier still I ran Startup World UK, writing about British startups and the investors backing them. I have been through Edinburgh Business School’s incubator and the Founder Institute, and spent a year as a banking consultant at Nationwide, which is where the insight behind Renti Rewards came from.

I held the UK Start-up visa from 2023 to 2025 and built through it. I first came to the UK in 2019, studying and then working on the Graduate visa until 2023, so I have been operating in this market for years rather than arriving with a business plan.

When I went through the Innovator Founder endorsement process myself, something became unavoidable: the business case and the business are two different things. It isn’t enough to have a workable business. You have to be able to explain — clearly, and under questioning — why it is genuinely innovative, why the numbers behave the way you say they will, how it grows beyond you, and why you are the person to build it.

I was not endorsed under the Innovator Founder route. I could dress that up, but it is the most useful thing I have to offer: I know exactly where a founder case gets thin, because I have had mine examined.

Founder Compass is the result. It is not a business-plan factory. It is a structured way to interrogate your own case — innovation, viability, scalability and founder fit — before you spend money and months finding out what an assessor thinks.

I work with a small number of founders at a time, mostly still outside the UK when we start. Everything is delivered over video and in writing.