London fintech Penfold wants the act of starting a pension to take about as long as ordering a coffee.
The seven-year-old company sells a smartphone-first pension that employees can open in minutes. Employers can wire it into payroll, including the salary sacrifice plumbing that cuts National Insurance bills [Penfold.com, 2026].
It is a small product idea aimed at a very large pool of money: the €9.4 trillion UK pensions industry [EU-Startups, May 2025].
The pitch has been consistent since founders Stuart Robinson, Chris Eastwood and Peter Hykin started the company in 2018 [Crunchbase]. Traditional UK workplace pensions were built for employers with HR departments and for employees who do not move jobs often.
Penfold is built the other way around: a consumer-grade app for the saver. An employer console is bolted on so small businesses, contractors and gig workers can plug in.
The company first attracted wider attention in May 2021. It closed an $8.5 million round to build out what it called a full-stack pension in an app aimed at freelancers [TechCrunch, May 2021].
The bet
Penfold's wedge is the bit of UK payroll most small employers find painful.
Salary sacrifice, where an employee gives up a slice of gross pay in exchange for a larger pension contribution, lowers both employee and employer National Insurance. It is well understood by big-company finance teams and poorly served at the SME end of the market.
Penfold offers free salary sacrifice setup and ongoing support to employers. It positions the feature as a way to offset the recent rise in employer NI [IFA Magazine].
The company also published a salary sacrifice guide aimed specifically at employers trying to absorb the National Insurance hike [IFA Magazine].
That dual-sided design, consumer app on one face and employer onboarding on the other, makes Penfold a B2B2C business rather than a pure direct-to-consumer pension brand.
The platform allows employers to set up and manage a pension. They can implement salary sacrifice from the same dashboard [EU-Startups, May 2025].
Why it could be big
The UK auto-enrolment regime created a captive flow of monthly pension contributions across nearly every employer in the country.
Most of that money still sits with incumbents like Nest, the government-backed scheme, and with insurer-run defaults. Penfold is going after the slice where the saver actually opens the app, sees the balance, and tells their employer to switch.
Investors have kept writing checks across cycles. Disclosed funding totals roughly $22.2 million.
Backers include Bridford Group, Gresham House Ventures, Force Over Mass Capital, Elkstone Capital and the Crowdcube retail base [Crunchbase]. Bridford led the August 2022 Series A of about $9.2 million [UKTech News, Aug 2022].
A further €4.6 million Series A extension landed in May 2025 to keep developing the app for employees and businesses [EU-Startups, May 2025]. A 2024 crowdfunding round added retail capital alongside the institutional money [FinTech Global, Feb 2024].
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Seed 2021 | $8.5M |
| Series A 2022 | $9.2M |
| Series A 2025 | €4.6M |
The team and the traction
Robinson, Eastwood and Hykin remain the listed co-founders on Crunchbase and on their own LinkedIn profiles [LinkedIn, 2026].
The company has run a single product line under the same brand since 2019. The investor syndicate has stayed broadly intact across rounds. The Crowdcube presence gives Penfold a customer-shareholder overlap.
What the bears say
The credible bear case is competitive density. PensionBee is public, well-capitalised and owns the consolidation narrative. Nest is effectively free at the point of use for employers and benefits from being the government default.
Moneybox has a larger consumer brand in adjacent savings products. A Penfold employer choosing salary sacrifice today is choosing it over an incumbent that already has the payroll integration.
The bull answer is that none of those competitors lead with the SME employer onboarding flow plus a saver-friendly app in the same package. The National Insurance increase has given Penfold a timely, quantifiable wedge to sell against [IFA Magazine].
What to watch
The next twelve months will test whether the May 2025 raise translates into a step change in employer accounts rather than a continuation of steady growth.
Watch for a disclosed assets-under-administration figure. Watch also for any move into adjacent employer benefits. Watch the competitive response from Nest.