Sheffield AI company raises further £1.5m to roll out social housing platform

Pivigo’s platform, which is used by Peabody, London Borough of Camden, Community Housing and Cobalt, uses machine learning to help maximise rent collection, identify tenants most in need of support and “transform" productivity.

Pivigo CEO Alex Willard said: “We are pleased to be working with Mercia to roll it out to social landlords, especially at the current time when the cost of living crisis is putting their tenants’ finances under greater pressure.

“Managers can only make decisions on the basis of the data insights available, however most organisations lack data insights so make poor decisions. Machine learning radically improves the odds – helping to improve outcomes and profitability. Our product enables organisations to feel the benefits without the need for their own data science team."

The latest funding follows an initial £1.25m investment from Mercia and NPIF in 2021, which helped the Sheffield-based company to develop the platform. Since this time, it has more than doubled the size of its team to over 20 people.

The firm noted that the latest round will enable it to create new jobs, boost its sales and marketing, and roll out its product to more social landlords.

Founded in 2013 by entrepreneur Jason Muller, Pivigo started out as a consultancy delivering bespoke solutions for clients including AstraZeneca, Royal Mail and the Food Standards Agency.

The roll-out is being led by its CEO Alexandra Willard, who was previously CEO of connected car company Tantalum.