Powered Now turns to Crowdcube to raise £350k

Aiming to raise £350,000 from the crowd, the pitch is open to anyone interested in supporting Powered Now’s disruptive technology. It will use the capital for marketing and further development of its award-winning mobile business administration apps for small firms of trades people, such as builders, plumbers and electricians.

Powered Now is a mobile admin application aimed at sole traders and small firms of plumbers, electricians, builders, and the like, who are mostly in the field at customers’ premises and working from vans rather than offices. They often struggle with paperwork and payment which wastes time, and therefore money.

The app runs on iPads and iPhones (with an Android version in beta) and computerises administrative tasks including customer communication, quoting, invoicing and taking payment by card or PayPal, as well as providing help with some of the complex regulation in this space. All information is held in one place and automatically backed up to the cloud whenever there is a connection, so even if you damage or lose your device, you can download the data to the replacement.

Soft-launched at The Next Web startup rally in 2013, it won best mobile app in the Microsoft Bizspark Startup Rally and has already attracted over 3,000 user registrations worldwide.

“The field trade industry is one of the last to see the real benefits of the computer revolution,” says Benjamin Dyer, co-founder of Powered Now. “And this is despite the fact that there are more than 900,000 such businesses operating in the UK alone. By providing our apps to help these companies and individuals manage their paperwork we have already demonstrated that we can make them more productive and profitable.”

Self-funded to date, Powered Now is looking to raise £350,000 on Crowdcube in return for 20.59% equity. The money will both scale the already successful marketing strategy and increase the rate of product development. New functionality can be added and further apps developed to suit larger field trade firms.

The team of six are based in the UK and Hungary and have been developing the technology for the past 18 months. The pitch is open for a month and will close on 31 July.