Just this week, Chancellor John Healey sounded the alarm, warning the UK risks becoming an “incubator nation” that produces promising start-ups only to lose them to rival markets.
It follows research from Virgin Media 02, which revealed that of more than 2,000 businesses surveyed, 68% of start-ups now view the US as the leading region to grow their businesses, with the UK trailing behind both the EU and Singapore.
But two 21-year-old tech founders are bucking that trend, betting on Manchester over Silicon Valley to build their AI business.
Childhood friends George Jefferson and Art Freebrey recently returned to Manchester after spending three months on the renowned Y Combinator accelerator in San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in tech along the way.
Their AI-powered marketing start-up, Revnu, has already already raised $3m in a funding round led by NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance to accelerate its growth.
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Revnu’s platform is designed to help businesses find customers and build their sales pipelines, using AI agents across channels including LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram to run campaigns, test advertising, generate leads and book meetings.
So I hopped on a call with co-founder George Jefferson to find out why the duo picked Manchester to scale Revnu, which he describes as a marketer’s “dream tool”.
“Our whole thesis is that we think big businesses will be run by small teams – and we are trying to create the tool that makes that happen,” he tells me.
As sunlight streams into his office in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, it quickly becomes clear that Jefferson isn’t short on ambition. He describes himself as the “ideas guy”, pointing across the room to Freebrey, who I can’t quite see behind him, busy working away on the nuts and bolts of development.
And while Silicon Valley might seem to most like the obvious place to build a fast-growing AI business, the pair weren’t entirely convinced.
He describes the experience as “great”, with everyone based within a few hundred metres of each other, but was surprised that so many people preferred to meet virtually instead.
“I think everyone’s a little bit antisocial there. It really shocked us, so being there has little advantage.”
But the bigger pull back to Manchester was the opportunity to tap into the North’s engineering talent, while building a business that could still sell to customers across the Atlantic.
READ MORE: Where Greater Manchester’s tech growth is happening — and what’s driving it
“Talent in America is also really expensive, especially when you come from the UK,” he says, highlighting how an average engineer in San Francisco can earn a minimum of $200,000 a year.
Having studied at the University of Manchester, Jefferson was already familiar with the region’s talent pool, pointing to universities from Edinburgh to Liverpool and Sheffield for producing “incredible engineers”.
But he believes the challenge is that too many are drawn away by opportunities elsewhere.
“There is great talent in Manchester, the North has always produced great talent, and it’s always been taken out either to London or to the States.
“I think we’re just realising that, and it’s great for us because we get to pay people a great wage in Manchester, and I think there’s a great quality of life here.”
They’ve since realised Manchester offers the best of both worlds, whether it be access to talent, lower operating costs and the ability to sell internationally without relocating.
“We found there’s this incredible opportunity for us where we can be in Manchester and we still can sell to the United States.
“As an early-stage start-up, you benefit from the cheaper costs. You can still sell to the US. It’s a pretty great scenario, and it feels like a bit of an untapped market.”
And they’re wasting little time putting those ambitions into practice, with the duo working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, splitting their time between developing the platform and speaking to customers.
Part of the recent investment will go towards growing Revnu’s Manchester-based team, with those hiring plans already underway after the business recently secured a founding associate who will relocate from London in November.
“He graduated from the University of Manchester around two years ago, and ended up going down to London, as most graduates do. But we’ve brought him back up, which I’m really excited for,” he says.
And while AI is already changing the skills businesses are now looking for, he believes attitude and ambition matter more than ever.
“AI has definitely changed hiring. A can-do attitude and high agency are the number one things we look for.
“If someone is genuinely ambitious, curious, high agency and can do things themselves, they will go really far in today’s age, and that’s exactly who we’re looking for in our engineers.”
From building Minecraft servers to a $3m-backed AI start-up
What’s perhaps even more interesting is how Jefferson and Freebrey got here. Despite being just 21, Revnu is far from their first venture.
The duo first met in a year nine geography class and quickly became friends, before getting their first taste of entrepreneurship at just 13 when they set up a Minecraft server together and made a few thousand pounds after promoting it.
Next came reselling limited-edition football trainers, with Freebrey eventually putting his coding skills to use to build a bot that could snap up new releases in seconds. They eventually moved into buying and selling rare vintage clothing, turning over around £100,000 by the age of 17.
“We had some big wins. We also had some big losses. So it’s not all sunshine and rainbows!” he admits.
But reflecting on one particularly cold evening in December 2023, he began questioning what they were doing.
“I very vividly remember at this time we built all sorts of tooling to help our own internal operations. I was the ideas guy and Art was the developer. And all of a sudden, it was December 2023, my fingers were bleeding from being in the warehouse as it was so cold.
“I was just chopping up these cardboard boxes. I said to Art, ‘what are we doing? Why don’t we just have like a cushy job, selling the software we’ve made ourselves?’”
It turned out to be a pretty good idea. They had already developed accounting software for their Vinted business, so they started selling it to other sellers, promoting it through TikTok videos and skits.
“The following month, we made more money selling software than we did the actual clothes. So very quickly, we packed up the whole physical stock business,” he says.
By then, they had both had started university, with Jefferson in Manchester and Freebrey in Swansea, but they continued building software together despite the distance, spending hours on calls as they knew they had a “good thing going”.
But juggling university full-tome and growing their business ventures started to become increasingly difficult, so they increasingly turned to AI to automate everything from coding to customer support and eventually marketing.
“It was because we were really lazy and we couldn’t market our businesses all the time, and so we simply built it as an internal tool for our software companies to help them grow.”
That was the beginning of Revnu, and they were already making between £5,000 to £10,000 just in a month.
“Honestly, we thought we were living life. My dream at the time wasn’t for more money. There was no bigger vision. I though it could maybe help me pay my way through university. Maybe I can even buy a house at the end of it or get a deposit or go and travel Thailand and Bali and be an indie nomad.”
The internship that changed everything
Things soon became considerably bigger after they took up an opportunity to do a paid internship with Monzo co-founder Jonas Templestein, which saw the duo move to London for the summer.
They were among just five people selected, with the other interns coming from Oxford, Cambridge and UCL.
“Art and I were kind of the wildcards, Art from Swansea and I was from the University of Manchester and my degree was in planning and surveying. I’m not sure what did it, maybe I charmed my way in on the interview,” he laughs.
One evening, working late in the office with Jonas, the pair shared the story of their business ventures so far and their ambitions for what came next. It was a conversation that opened their eyes to just how valuable what they were building could be.
“What we then realised is if AI can do the coding, AI can do all the marketing, and then you can do some really cool things.
“And marketing is this last piece that changes the world and how AI interacts with businesses. Anyone will be able to start a business and become an entrepreneur.
“It already has, it did for us as students, where we had this idea, and whether it was Vinted accounting software, or we wanted to make a Vinted sniping tool that, no matter how small it is, you can just go and make it, and then with Revnu you can go and sell it.”
But making the leap from running profitable software businesses to joining Y Combinator wasn’t quite as straightforward as you might think.
“I spent a long time umming and ahing. A lot of people obsess over venture capital and fundraising, and that was never the goal for us. We just wanted to do something cool and difficult,” he says.
They debated whether to finish their degrees or go all in on Revnu. In the end, they took the plunge and applied to Y Combinator, although neither of them expected to get in.
“We did not think we’d get in, in a million years. We just said let’s give it a punt.”
By that point, investors had already come knocking and Jefferson even reveals he turned down a $170,000-a-year job at a planning automation company in New York, whose CEO would later become an investor in Revnu. Another individual had offered to match Y Combinator’s investment if the pair were unsuccessful.
“There was this very short period where life just exploded in one moment. We ended up going down the YC route, and it has been incredible.”
A marketer’s ‘dream tool’, or a threat to jobs?
While Revnu’s wider ambition is to help businesses “grow with smaller teams”, Jefferson describes the platform as something closer to a “proactive marketing employee” that identifies opportunities.
“Instead of being a tool to help you go and do this campaign, it will text you in the morning and say: ‘Hey, I’ve seen this advertising campaign you’ve done is doing really well. Want me to go and find people who’ve interacted with it and email them?’ Do you want me to connect with them on LinkedIn?’
“It’s like the world’s best employee working for you 24/7.”
The company is already selling to larger businesses looking to become more ‘AI-native’, whether that’s improving efficiency to “get better results” or rethinking how their marketing teams operate. They have also recently launched a self-serve option aimed at solo entrepreneurs who want to use AI to market their businesses.
“We meet loads of cool people who end up quitting their jobs and they’re using Revnu to market their businesses. It’s a new wave of entrepreneurship.”
But with AI increasingly capable of handling work traditionally carried out by marketing teams, where does that leave the people doing those jobs? While he doesn’t believe the technology will spell the end for marketers, he acknowledges it could shake up the make-up of some teams.
“Everything balances itself out. I think there may be instances where we do reshuffle a department of a customer who we’re selling to.”
Instead, he argues the technology could give individual marketers more freedom, allowing them to focus on creative ideas rather than getting bogged down in admin and backlogs.
“The great thing about Revnu is it also empowers one person to run a marketing team really well. So it’s like the marketer’s dream tool, instead of being trapped and isolated in a big team.”
And despite the “controversy” and debate around AI replacing jobs, he’s quick to point out that Revnu itself is hiring.
“So if anyone is scared, I would love to talk with them because if they’re a great marketer, I think they’d be a perfect fit here.”
Bringing a bit of Silicon Valley back to Manchester
As for what comes next, his vision remains ambitious as he sees a future where much larger businesses can be “run by far smaller teams”, with AI doing much of the heavy lifting.
And while the duo are firmly committed to building Revnu from Manchester, they’ve brought back a healthy dose of what he describes as ‘Americanism’ from their time spent in San Francisco.
“In America, they celebrate failure, right? In America, you cheer people on if they’ve set up three businesses and failed, whereas I think everyone’s a little bit scared to be embarrassed here. No one wants to take a risk because it’s scary. America taught us that nothing’s going to happen if you just sit there and don’t take a risk.”
It’s an attitude he believes the North’s growing tech ecosystem could benefit from.
“We definitely got infected with like a good amount of Americanism while we were out in San Francisco, and I think we’ve brought it back with us. And it’s something we do sometimes miss here. Everyone’s a bit cautious about how they come across. Everyone wants to look cool. We get it, but take some risks. Sometimes you’ve got to be a bit more American.”
And for Jefferson, the decision to build Revnu in Manchester is about much more than keeping costs down, it’s also a bet on the region’s maturing tech sector.
“There are a lot of start-ups in Manchester. Times are changing. You can work anywhere, so I’m sure we’ll be the first of many.”
