Within ten days of the first lockdown in March 2020, fintech veteran Oli Cavanagh had an idea. He was ordering take-out pints, meals and coffees around his home in Blackrock in south Dublin but realised he could no longer tip the staff or delivery drivers serving him.

A serial entrepreneur who has founded or worked in nine different fintech start-ups, Cavanagh could feel his brain begin to buzz as he tried to think of a solution to tipping when no one was using cash.

He rang up Charles Dowd, a payments expert who had previously worked in Facebook in Menlo Park and co-founded Plynk, a money messaging start-up that failed in 2018. At the time, Dowd was acting chief product officer in Clevercards, the Irish digital payment company.

Within 24-hours Dowd started working on trying to find a better way to tip that didn’t require carrying around a payments machine or having to go to the bother of downloading an app. It was still a side project, but as weeks turned to months, Cavanagh could see a business was emerging.

As the summer came Cavanagh was getting minor building works and painting done in his home. He was used to making small donations to charity using spare change but again noticed this wasn’t happening. Cavanagh felt there had to be a tech solution to all these issues.

By September 2020, Cavanagh and Dowd had progressed their idea enough to launch a new business called Strikepay, or Strike for short. They were now working flat out developing an instant contactless way of tipping or making payments that could be done by tapping a Strike card or QR code with any mobile phone.

By not having an app to download or requiring any personal data to be exchanged they felt they’d created something that was badly needed as the world accelerated towards being cashless. As Christmas approached Strike had built up a small team, but it still had no customers.

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Sitting in a coffee shop in Dun Laoghaire, Cavanagh is telling me the background to his story. He remembers the excitement of trying to calculate the size of the market Strike is targeting. “I calculated there must be 60 million people reliant on tips in English speaking markets we’re targeting like the United States, Britain and Ireland,” he said.

Strike’s first customer was Brody Sweeney’s, Camile Thai. “We started with them in Phibsborough as that’s their busiest Camile Thai,” he recalled.

Sweeney was interested in the technology as he told Cavanagh it would fix a “huge pain point” for him as his 200 delivery drivers were losing out as customers were unable to tip easily. “We overnight doubled the tips going to his drivers,” Cavanagh said.

In March 2021, Strike launched with Camile Thai. It had by then filed patents for some of its technology, so it felt confident enough to start building up a customer base.

The average tip paid using Strike is €7 on payments that range between €30 and €5,000. It has been used to give tips or make payments to everyone from barbers to builders.

At the same time Strike is working with various charities in 2,500 locations including Spar and Circle K. Its technology has allowed charities like the Marie Keating Foundation so they can continue to raise funds via mobile phone payments rather than collecting change.

He said another big contract was with UNICEF as it used Strike to make it easier for people to donate vaccines to poorer countries. In total Strike is being used in 4,500 locations in the six months since it began to roll out.

Raising funds, scaling up

Initially, Cavanagh was leading its sales team. However, he said the business had closed a seed round of €600,000 from angel investors and raised over €1 million of a €6.5 million series A round which had allowed it to build up its team to 15 people.

Cavanagh said Strike expected to close its series A in the next six months. However, the money raised so far had allowed his business to hire more people and make its first acquisition. Cavanagh said its investors were private but including leading tech entrepreneurs with investments in areas like e-charging networks, taxi platforms, and data analytics.

He said Strike had raised some money itself through its founders’ network and worked with advisors on raising money too. 

The head of business development at Strike is now Gail Kaneswaran, a model who previously worked with online retail start-up Bezzu as well as Frockadvisor.

In June, Strike acquired Gratsi, a cashless tipping start-up based in Belfast. The co-founder of this company Jack Spargo is now its vice president of engineering. “Buying Gratsi added to our engineering ability,” Cavanagh said, “And it also brought us into Britain with our first customers there.”

He said he was aware of other start-ups targeting the same space they are but predicted it could be “a second-mover that gets the cheese” type market. “You don’t have to be the first mover,” he said. “Since we started a couple of clones have come out, but Strike is definitely the biggest in Ireland at what it does by a long shot,” he said. “I think in time there will be consolidation in this space as the world doesn’t need 50 different tipping systems.”

Strike, he said, was considering growth both organically and by acquisition.

Already, growth has been significant. “Our numbers are still very early. We had 427 per cent growth between Q2 and Q3. That is fantastic growth, but it will be 10X once we go into the UK fully. We have a team ready to go there. We have a US entity set up and working with our first trial customers.”

Strike, he said, makes its money by charging a fee, which can be included or added to the amount paid. This can range depending on circumstances or the amount of money from 6 per cent to 1.5 per cent of the sum paid.

Another advantage to using Strike was it made it easier for users to keep track of how much money they were getting.

“We do not give tax advice. There is almost certainly a tax liability and users should seek advice,” Cavanagh said. “But this is also really handy for employers as we take that tax liability (from tips) away from them and pass it on to the person receiving the money to deal with.”

An entrepreneurial journey

Oli Cavanagh has been involved in nine fintech companies to date. He co-founded Pliba in 2005 with a school friend. It was the world’s first mobile booking app for anything from taxis to restaurant tables. Cavanagh’s idea was ahead of its time, some two years before the first iPhone, so the business ultimately failed.

The problems Pliba was trying to solve were later solved by multi-billion dollar businesses like Uber, Deliveroo, and Hotels.com. Another idea Cavanagh had was called Instacoach. The idea was for users to get coaching online from experts like David Leadbetter, a renowned golf coach based in Florida.

“Dermot Desmond used that at one point,” Cavanagh recalled. “David would look at a video of your swing and then come back with drawings and audio over it with his comments. Dermot got golf coaching from David in Florida while he was in Dublin.” Did Desmond end up investing? “Sadly no,” he laughed. 

He had better luck however as the co-founder of other businesses. CI Solutions, an encryption technology company, was sold to the Electronic Transaction Corporation, while Alldatasystems, a SaaS company, was sold to Autofinder Group.

Cavanagh learned a lot working in start-ups, including how to spot exciting new companies. Between 2004 and 2014 he spent his time helping founders create sales engines around their ideas.

He was sales director with Changingworlds when it was sold for €60 million to Amdocs and then went to work with BriteBill as vice president of sales. It too was bought by Amdocs for €80 million.

Cavanagh then co-founded peer-to-peer finance company, Flender, in 2014, and he worked for the business until 2019. As we chat while our photographer Bryan Meade does his work, Cavanagh recalls getting the idea to ask Ireland rugby captain Jamie Heaslip (now with Stripe) to be its head of brand after he retired.

“Jamie was brilliant,” he recalled. “We’d been advertising but not getting that many calls afterwards. Once we had Jamie on board things really took off.”

Having seen start-ups sell for big money, is that the plan with Strike? “It is several years out from being anywhere near there,” he laughs. “We have something that is very timely. We are the best at it. We are first or thereabouts. We are market leaders in Ireland and expanding quickly and raising money. We will probably do more acquisitions. We are replacing a lot of traditional payment terminals already. We hope to replace a good few 1000 more before the big guys notice we are replacing them.”

Is this the start-up you’re most excited about to date? “Infinitely. This is my ninth tech company, but none of them have close. We are revenue-generating right out of the traps…within three months of our first year. I know what it is like to fail but I’ve got some successes under my belt too. It took way longer (to get to revenue) even with companies that eventually had nice big exits like Brightbill and Changingworlds. No company I’ve worked with has had this level of growth at this early stage, and we’re only starting.”

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The Currency is pleased to be the digital media partner with The IMAGE Virtual Business Summit. The IMAGE Business Summit, in partnership with PwC, returns for its second year on Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st October 2021. It will bring together the opinions, insights and learnings of key Irish and international business leaders from the worlds of business, tech, communications, finance and politics; including Anya Hindmarch, Dame Inga Beale, Leo Varadkar, Oli Cavanagh and many more. To book your tickets and see a full list of speakers and sessions you can check them out here.