Prepared for the Grundon Board
Meeting Date: 25th March 2025
Prepared by: William Rundle, CEO, Soil Link Ltd
Executive Summary
Background
Soil Link has successfully completed the seed stage, validating market demand and product-market fit for our innovative materials exchange platform in the construction industry. Our current subscription pricing model, while providing initial financial stability, significantly limits growth and prevents rapid user adoption.
Our next phase focuses on reaching critical mass to unlock powerful network effects. Ultimately, our vision is to become the industry's first AI-powered brokerage and materials exchange platform for soil and aggregates. Achieving this positions Soil Link as the market leader, creating a defensible and expanding competitive advantage through proprietary data. In an increasingly AI-driven marketplace, our data advantage could become insurmountable, presenting an opportunity to dominate and potentially monopolize this emerging sector.
Key Challenges
- Our existing subscription model creates friction, slowing growth and limiting valuable data acquisition.
- Transitioning to a transaction-based revenue model will initially lead to a short-term revenue gap.
- The platform currently lacks key features and sufficient liquidity necessary to immediately support profitable transactional operations.
- Accelerating feature development and bridging this transitional revenue gap will require additional investment.
Strategy
Transitioning immediately to a transaction-based model will remove user acquisition barriers, significantly accelerate adoption, and boost long-term user lifetime value. By rapidly increasing user participation, Soil Link can substantially grow our proprietary data assets, further enhancing platform effectiveness and strengthening our competitive moat.
We seek investor support to accelerate product development, bridge the interim revenue gap, and expedite our strategic shift. This timely pivot positions Soil Link to quickly scale, become indispensable to users, and capture substantial long-term market value.
Proposal
Soil Link is seeking a £550k capital injection from Grundon for Phase 2 of our strategic roadmap at a valuation of £6.2m
Strategic Roadmap
Phase 1: Concept Development to Foundation
Timeline: Nov 2023 - March 2025
Summary: Focused on establishing the platform, validating market demand, building the core product, and initiating user acquisition. Laid the groundwork for innovation and positioned Soil Link as the first credible product to market.
Phase 2: Achieving Critical Mass and User Growth
Timeline: Apr 2025 - Feb 2026
Summary: As with every successful two-sided platform, user uptake is critical. This phase drives exponential growth to secure Soil Link's market leadership as the sole platform for construction materials exchange. Removing adoption barriers and leveraging network effects to enhance engagement are key focuses.
Phase 3: Commercialising the Platform
Timeline: March 2026 Onwards
Summary: Focused on commercial strategies. This phase enables Soil Link to influence the mass brokerage of heavy materials in the UK market and potentially beyond.
Phase 1:
Concept Development to Foundation
Phase 1
Our Product Development Journey So Far
November 2023
MVP Launch & Validation
We launched a marketplace-focused Minimum Viable Product (MVP), developed by outsourced software developers. This allowed us to quickly validate market demand, gain valuable early user feedback, test initial assumptions about our business model, and establish strong relationships with early adopters, proving the need for a dedicated construction materials exchange.
June 2024
Building for Scale
Following MVP validation, we established an in-house product and technical team, rebuilding Soil Link into a robust, scalable platform positioned for rapid growth. This strategic shift enabled us to significantly enhance platform functionality, improve performance, and implement foundational infrastructure necessary for future AI-driven capabilities.
Today
Solid Foundations & Early Traction
We've successfully onboarded significant customers, including major UK construction firms, under our current subscription-based revenue model. Our tech team has delivered a stable, scalable technical foundation, preparing us to transition into a more powerful, transaction-based marketplace model—unlocking extensive data to drive our next phase of AI-powered growth.
Phase 2:
Achieving Critical Mass and User Growth
Phase 2
Achieving Critical Mass
Our approach to attaining critical mass focuses on rapidly onboarding new members and reducing barriers to entry, thereby unlocking opportunities & driving customer value. Success in Phase 2 will be evaluated based on specific KPIs across crucial verticals, which include:
- Main Contractors
- Residential Developers
- Sub-contractors
- Logistics & Infrastructure
- Supply-chain
- Frameworks & Public Sector
Phase 2
Timeline
March 2025
Grundon Board Meeting to present investment proposal.
April 2025
Investment decision finalised.
Innovate UK Round 20 submission closes.
May 2025
Expansion of sales, support and development teams begins.
July 2025
Innovate UK funding decision announced.
August 2025
Key milestone review of KPIs and growth trajectory.
September 2025
Phase 3 development launch (pending Round 20 success).
February-March 2026
Phase 2 completion review. Official launch of Phase 3.
Phase 2
Achieving Critical Mass
Critical Mass & Organic Growth
Reliable matching of supply and demand leads to .
User-Driven Growth
Natural platform adoption driven by demonstrable benefits & network effects.
Transaction Fee Revenue Model
Lower entry barriers with fees only on successful exchanges.
Infrastructure & Automation
Enhanced platform capabilities supporting high-volume operations.
Phase 2
Resource Allocation
Strategic Spend: The bulk of our Phase 2 budget will be directed towards expanding our human resources, recognising the pivotal role employees play in achieving our key outcomes.
Sales Team Enhancement
Increase staffing within the sales team to drive business development and expand customer acquisition efforts.
Customer Support Expansion
Strengthen the customer support function, ensuring users receive exceptional service and swift resolutions to queries.
Development Team Growth
Boost development resources to accelerate platform innovation, maintaining our competitive edge and adapting to user feedback.
Removing Commercial Barriers
Remove commercial barriers enabling users to join Soil Link with the view of commercialising in the future.
Phase 2
Capital Deployment
Phase 2 is fundamentally centred around improving user acquisition, enhancing user value, and ensuring user retention. This requires strategic investment to drive these core outcomes.
Focus Areas
User Acquisition
Deploy capital towards marketing and outreach strategies to attract new users and deepen market penetration.
User Value Enhancement
Invest in platform upgrades, ensuring users access cutting-edge features that optimise their experience and engagement.
User Retention
Develop initiatives to maintain user loyalty, such as personalised support and continuous user-driven improvements.
Phase 2
KPIs for Success
Active User Engagement
Measure organizational participation rates to ensure widespread adoption and platform utilization across client companies.
Corporate Contracts
Secure contracts within a targeted percentage of organisations, solidifying long-term client relationships.
Active Opportunities
Convert engagement into active opportunities and measurable interactions with the platform.
Critical mass represents the inflection point where our marketplace achieves self-sustaining growth. Users naturally gravitate towards Soil Link for its reliability and cost savings.
Our focus on simultaneous supply-demand growth fuels the virtuous cycle of network effects, establishing the foundation for continuous data-driven enhancements & revenue growth with minimal increase in overhead costs.
Funding Requirements
Phase 2
Funding Requirements
This phase requires £550K to achieve critical mass, covering £90K monthly operational costs over 11 months (April 2025 - February 2026). The focus is on driving growth.
Monthly Burn
Operational costs during critical growth phase
Months
April 2025 to February 2026
Investment Needed
To achieve critical mass and market dominance
- Capital Reserves: Strategic allocation of existing funds to maintain core operations whilst scaling
- R&D Tax Credits: Application in process to recover innovation investment costs
- Active Sales Revenue: Ongoing commercial transactions providing sustainable cashflow
- Strategic Investment: Grundon
Investment Overview
Current Valuation
Phase 2 Requirement
Support vital growth and expansion
Phase 3 Requirement
Commercialisation
Total Investment Required
Grundon Proposal
Phase 2
Support vital growth and expansion
April 2025
Phase 3
Optional
Innovate UK Funding Timeline
Key dates for securing funding to support Phase 3 product development.
April 2025
Round 20 Application Closes
July 2025
Panel Decision Announced
September 2025
Funding Release Commences
Pre-application assessment confirms Soil Link is well positioned to secure funding based on Innovate UK key principles. Early estimates suggest a funding value of £700k+.
Investor Transparency
Soil Link shares monthly reports for investors, offering clear visibility into our growth metrics.
User Growth
Visual analytics tracking new user registrations and organization onboarding rates
Marketplace Activity
Quantitative data on message exchanges, document sharing, and inter-organizational collaboration
Value Exchanged
Comprehensive statistics demonstrating the volume, diversity, and value of material exchange opportunities on the platform
Appendix:
Product Development Roadmap
Product Development: User Acquisition
Immediately following capital deployment, our product development team will prioritise features & functionality that remove barriers to user acquisition.
Self-service Onboarding
Self-service customer onboarding, guidance and AI-powered customer support; freeing our sales staff to focus on high-value leads, customer relationships & strategic partnerships.
Data Import Tools
Data import tools for bulk upload of project and material requirement data using AI data extraction to parse valuable data currently locked in PDF documents and other formats.
Market Intelligence
Automated market intelligence data collection systems, such as scraping local authority planning applications.
Sales Efficiency
Internal tooling to optimise sales team efficiency, including automated prospect research; generation of targeted sales material, and AI-assisted customer support.
Reporting Dashboards
Work with framework & public sector partners to develop sustainability reporting tools, data insights & dashboards for schemes; enabling streamlined reporting & tracking of material supply across schemes; thereby encouraging sub-contractor referral.
AI-powered Outreach
Automated AI sales & operations agent which utilises our market intelligence data to identify, qualify and send highly-targeted outreach campaigns to potential new members / suppliers; by actively working to fulfil material requirements on the open marketplace.
Product Development: User Value Enhancement
Following a customer-led approach; phase 2 product development aims to provide users with an end-to-end solution for sourcing and managing material exchange on the platform.
Enhanced Communication
On-platform communication tools to facilitate the full transaction process; managing bids, exchanging & tracking compliance information, making agreements and involving service providers.
Service Providers
Bringing service providers such as hauliers, geotechnical services & processing facilities onto the platform to enable users to find and engage all of the services needed in the materials exchange process; right within the platform.
Advanced Supplier Listings
Unlock tailored market access and a unique route to market for material suppliers with integration into our smart matching algorithms. Empower suppliers to effortlessly manage their facilities, coverage areas, and product listings.
Trust & Safety
Automated moderation ensuring buyer/seller interactions stay on-platform; enhancing safety & trust between parties whilst reducing disintermediation risk (fee-dodging).
Claimable Supplier Profile Pages
Our industry directory of suppliers & service providers will be opened up and SEO optimised to increase our presence in search results and provide an opportunity for suppliers to promote their services. Opportunity for additional revenue streams by selling premium paid services such as 'verified profiles'.
AI-Powered Recommendations
Enhanced data collection & AI training on material use cases to intelligently suggest alternative or new-to-market material options based on need & sustainability metrics.
Product Development: User Retention
In parallel with our other focus areas, our product team will develop features & functionality that make our product sticky and indispensable for users.
Intelligent Document Processing
Document processing & data extraction tools to intelligently surface critical information from uploaded documentation to assist users in informed decision making.
Enhanced Terra AI Co-Pilot
Continually enhanced Terra AI assistant 'Co-Pilot' with access to user context and data; enabling personalised & context-aware AI assistance; unlocking numerous use cases for users.
Advanced Real-time Dashboards
Advanced dashboards enabling organisations to monitor and manage their material needs across projects in real-time.
Sustainability Reporting
Sustainability reporting using proprietary algorithms; incentivising users to input data for off-platform material exchanges thereby contributing to our data collection efforts.
Invite-only Marketplaces
Invite-only marketplaces enabling group companies, schemes, or large infrastructure to transact in a private marketplace with the option to selectively publish listings on the open marketplace.
Appendix:
About Soil Link
Phase 3: Commercialisation
Growing User Base
More construction firms join our marketplace.
Increased Transactions
Greater platform adoption drives more material exchanges.
Enhanced Data Collection
Every transaction generates valuable industry insights.
AI-Powered Optimization
Our algorithms become more precise with increased data.
Higher Platform Value
Better matching creates cost savings that attract more users.
AI Outreach
Our AI agents automate outreach to uncover untapped opportunities beyond the platform.
Incentives
Soil Link creates substantial value by transforming industry inefficiencies into cost savings. We're positioned to become the definitive solution in this multi-billion-pound marketplace.
Excess Material Challenge
Millions of tonnes of reusable soil and aggregate sent to landfill annually.
Regulatory Pressure
Environmental regulations and carbon targets driving demand for circular solutions.
Commercial Imperative
Rising landfill costs creating financial incentive for material reuse.
AI-Powered Solution
Our smart matching platform facilitates optimal transactions at scale.
The Missing Link
in Sustainable Construction