A common question asked of founders pitching their business is: ‘Who is your customer?’
Joe van Gelder has two very different answers for his startup Powdr.
The Manchester firm was founded in 2023 by van Gelder, COO Nicola Jones (now van Gelder) and CTO Stephen Foster. It has quickly built a reputation for helping SMEs create funder-ready financial forecasts and models through intuitive software.
However, coming through the NatWest Accelerator opened up a whole new market – selling its software into banks, private equity houses and other financial institutions.
“We support SMEs: we define that roughly as at least seed-funded, or for unfunded businesses £3 million-ish of revenue up to £50m. Usually they are in the manufacturing, tech, retail, logistics, professional services or healthcare sectors,” Joe tells me before we play padel as part of my Founder Friday series.
@businesscloud.co.uk Padel is the new golf! Powdr founder Joe van Gelder says fast-growing sport #padel is his oasis when not working on his #startup or ferrying his kids around. “It’s like Gareth Bale – #RealMadrid ♬ original sound – BusinessCloud
“We’re really big in manufacturing and retail. That’s probably 60-70% of our book.
“Our SME offering is an alternative to a fractional CFO service – we give you the right people in the right places – and it’s our bread and butter.
“But the true FinTech part of our business is selling our software into banks, credit funds. That’s my long-term focus.”
Investment
Powdr bootstrapped for its first 15 months before closing a £1m pre-seed round in early 2025, led by Haatch and supported by angels, including former colleagues and customers.
The round was raised without a traditional pitch deck, using its own software, and the whole process was completed within three months.
Joe, who worked in corporate banking, leveraged finance and private equity as part of his consultancy career prior to starting Powdr, says raising was the easy part – it was using the money that he found more stressful.
“We’d grown to six staff organically and we’ve added another six with the investment,” he tells me.
“We’re too useful to too many different things, which is a problem because we’re always getting requests [for new functionality]. We’ve had to start saying no – we need to refocus on our big differentiator.”
He outlines how Powdr, which featured on our FinTech 50 ranking for 2025, saves these financial institutions time and money.
“If you’re a PE investment manager or in the origination team, you might receive many different types of financial models from companies – they’re not standard in any way, shape or form, and really hard to interpret.
“You don’t know whether they work. And worse, my model might be different from that of someone else working in the same company!
“I would spend two days building a financial model to check someone else’s; then two days building a model to layer on my loan structure and my covenants. It’s a mad waste of time.
“All of this Powdr can do in half an hour. So we save shed-loads of time for the internal teams at the bank; we standardise those processes; and we draw out the things that they need to look at.”
Joe has used his experience at NatWest as the inspiration for developing the platform. To add to this, during development, Powdr partnered with an asset-based lender (ABL) to get real-world customer feedback – and they are now rolling the product out.
Joe says there is a queue of private equity houses and debt funds looking to use it internally, and the plan is to repeat the ABL process by initially selecting one to work alongside.
It’s good up North
We’ve covered the story before of how Londoner Joe and his Wiganer wife Nicola – who ran a cheerleading academy in Nottingham – met their co-founder Stephen and launched Powdr. He says they chose to base their business in the North to reduce the fixed cost base and give their two children a better quality of life.
“When you have expensive costs down in London, even with savings, it’s so hard to start a business,” he says. “Moving north made it easier for us to live on a single salary, although the way that the consultancy went, we never needed to worry about it.
“We moved up here in 2016 – and I’m never moving back.”
Joe says Nicola deals with the procedural side of the business while he is in with the teams “pulling it forward”.
When he is not working or ferrying his children to clubs, he can be found on the padel court – a pastime he took up a year ago and now feeds his networking as well as his wellbeing.
ASCEND
Powdr is on the second cohort of GM Business Growth Hub’s ASCEND programme, an experience Joe describes as “fantastic”.
The third cohort is open for applications now.
“The community and the network is so good,” he says, before revealing that Powdr will be partnering with fellow ASCEND business Red Rock, a managed IT services and technology solutions specialist.
“Being around other founders who have gone through, are going through or about to go through the same things as you is incredibly valuable.
“On LinkedIn, everything seems so lovely and great. Yeah, you do have to celebrate the wins – but how do you grow as a company to get to that point?
“There are loads and loads of ups and downs. Everyone goes through them. Things can be really dark at points, and you have to work through it.
“With ASCEND, we are in a group of people who can say: ‘I’ve had this problem with this person and I’m gonna have to let them go’; or ‘we downsized this team because they were underperforming’.
“And someone else would be like: ‘Yeah, I had the same issue.’
“That’s normal. But you look at LinkedIn, and it’s like: ‘My business is amazing, I’ve hired 15 people…’ You feel like you have to be the same, but it’s not like that.”