When I founded Transformify (TFY) in London in 2015, I didn’t set out to build a unicorn.
I wanted to build a sustainable technology company that solved real problems for businesses and created opportunities for people regardless of where they lived.
More than a decade later, TFY operates across 184 countries, our revenue has grown from €5.9m to €25.9m in three years, and recent independent benchmarking suggests the company may now be worth more than $1bn.
What makes that milestone particularly meaningful to me is how we got here.
We didn’t raise hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital firms. We didn’t build the company around successive funding rounds.
We built it through revenue, profitability and, most importantly, our customers.
Being funded by your customers is different
Venture capital has helped create some extraordinary companies, and I have never believed there is anything inherently wrong with raising external investment.
But it isn’t the only way to build a technology company.
When your growth is funded primarily by the revenue your customers generate, you develop a very different relationship with the market.
You have to listen.
You have to understand why customers are willing to pay for your product, what problems they genuinely need you to solve and which features actually create value.
There is less room for vanity metrics.
At TFY, that discipline shaped many of our decisions. We focused on developing technology that helps companies hire, onboard, manage and pay workers internationally while building the infrastructure required to operate across more than 184 countries.
We became profitable within our first three years, and profitability gave us something I believe founders sometimes underestimate: choice.
Independence gives you freedom
Building without traditional venture capital can be difficult.
There is no large funding round waiting to absorb every mistake. You have to make decisions carefully, prioritise constantly and understand the economics of your business.
But independence also gives you freedom.
We could decide where to invest based on what we believed would create sustainable value rather than what might support the next fundraising narrative.
That allowed us to think in years rather than quarters.
Over time, that approach produced significant growth. Revenue increased from €5.9m to €25.9m in three years, and in 2026 TFY was ranked 284th in the FT1000: Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies.
In 2025, external estimates placed TFY’s valuation at approximately $502m. Following our latest financial performance, new benchmarking against comparable workforce and HR technology companies has suggested a valuation north of $1bn.
I treat that figure with some caution.
Private company valuations are not an exact science, and I don’t believe founders should build businesses simply to achieve a particular label.
But crossing that benchmark would still represent an important moment.
What makes a successful founder?
The milestone has also made me think about another issue: female entrepreneurship in Britain.
Women remain significantly underrepresented among the founders of the UK’s largest technology companies. Much of the conversation understandably focuses on the gap in venture capital funding available to female founders.
That problem is real and deserves attention.
But I also think we should broaden the conversation.
My journey was not about finding a way to raise increasingly larger rounds of capital. It was about proving that there are other routes available.
If TFY’s latest valuation benchmarking is accurate, we may have become something extremely unusual: a UK female-founded technology company that reached unicorn territory while remaining bootstrapped.
Whether TFY ultimately proves to be the first is less important to me than what the journey represents.
There should not be a single acceptable model of entrepreneurship.
You can raise venture capital. You can bootstrap. You can build through revenue. Different businesses require different approaches.
Founders should be able to choose the model that works for the company they are trying to create.
Creating impact
For me, building a successful company has also never been purely about valuation.
One of the reasons I started TFY was my belief that technology could make access to employment more inclusive.
That philosophy still influences how we build products today.
For example, we provide the core functionality of our AI-powered Applicant Tracking System free to charities, NGOs and nonprofits, helping organisations with limited budgets manage candidates, schedule interviews and communicate with applicants.
As a company grows, it gains the ability to make choices like these.
Commercial success and social impact do not have to sit on opposite sides of the table.
The technology industry is very good at celebrating fundraising announcements.
They are visible, measurable moments. A company raises $50m or $100m and everyone immediately understands that something significant has happened.
Bootstrapped growth is quieter.
There is no announcement every few years. Often, there is simply another customer, another market, another year of revenue growth.
Then one day you look back and realise how far the company has travelled.
When I started TFY in 2015, I could not have predicted that we would eventually operate across 184 countries or that independent benchmarking would one day place the business above the $1bn threshold.
But perhaps that is the most important lesson I have learned.
There is no single formula for building a successful technology company.
Venture capital is one route.
It is not the only one.