29%
of casual shifts in UK hospitality are filled inside 48 hours of the shift
OPERATOR SURVEY, N=212
Stagehand
Series A · September 2026
Shift work that fills in an hour and pays the same day.
Stagehand runs the casual workforce for 240 venues, from 900-seat theatres to festival bars. No agency in the middle, no waiting a month to be paid.
Confidential
£1.42m ARR · 11,400 active workers · London
Arrow keys, or click, to advance
02The problem
Venues staff their busiest nights out of a group chat.
A 600-cover Saturday needs 40 casual staff. The duty manager posts the shifts in WhatsApp on Wednesday, chases on Thursday, and takes whoever answers. When nobody answers, an agency fills the gap at 2.2 times the hourly cost, and the venue never meets the worker twice.
11%
no-show rate on shifts booked by message, against 3 percent on booked rotas
SAMPLE OF 14 VENUE GROUPS
31 days
median wait between working a casual shift and being paid for it
WORKER PANEL, N=1,860
“I have four hundred numbers in my phone and no idea which of them will turn up. Friday is a guess.”
DUTY MANAGER, 900-SEAT VENUE, MANCHESTER
03The solution
One pool of known workers, booked like a rota and paid like a card machine.
The venue posts the shift once. Workers who have already worked there, and cleared the checks, see it first. The shift fills, the hours are approved on the night, and the money moves the same evening.
Fills
Ranked, not broadcast
Shifts go first to workers the venue has rated, who are free, near, and compliant. Median fill time is 47 minutes.
Sticks
The same faces
68 percent of shifts are worked by someone who has worked that venue before. Training cost falls with every repeat.
Pays
Same day, not next month
Approved hours are paid within four hours, funded by us and settled by the venue on its normal terms.
04The product
Four screens, and nothing a duty manager has to be trained on.
-
Post the shift
Role, hours, rate and dress code, from a template the venue saved last time. Twenty seconds on a phone behind the bar.
-
It ranks and offers
Workers are ordered by rating at that venue, distance, availability and compliance. Offers go out in waves, not all at once.
-
Clock in on site
A four-digit venue code, no hardware. The manager approves hours at the end of service with one tap per person.
-
Pay clears the same evening
We fund the worker, invoice the venue on 21-day terms, and file the right numbers for payroll and right-to-work.
Saturday 14 Sep4 of 5 filled
17:007 HRS
Bar back
Held · Rosa L. · rated 4.9
£96Filled
17:306 HRS
Glass collector
Held · Danny O. · 12th shift here
£78Filled
18:005 HRS
Cloakroom
Offered to 9 · 2 viewing
£65
18:006 HRS
Bar, upstairs
Held · Marta K. · rated 5.0
£84Filled
Posted 11:42 · first held 9 minutes later
05Traction
Twenty-four months, 240 venues, and revenue that compounds off repeat shifts.
£1.42m+9% m/m
Annual recurring revenue
240
Venues live
128%
Net revenue retention
94%
Shifts filled, all venues
ARR at quarter end, contracted subscriptions plus trailing take rate. 184,000 shifts worked in the last twelve months; 68 percent by a returning worker.
06Market
We are taking the part of the agency bill that buys nothing.
TAM
£4.9bn
UK spend on temporary hospitality, events and venue staff, agency and direct, 2026.
SAM
£1.18bn
Venues that already staff casually themselves: 31,000 sites booking more than 20 shifts a week.
Target
£86m
Our reachable share by 2030 at 7 percent of SAM, on today's pricing and today's fill rate.
Sources: trade association staffing spend, 2025; venue licence counts, England, Wales and Scotland; our own funnel, 2,900 qualified sites.
07Business model
A seat fee that covers the cost of serving, and a take rate that grows with the venue.
Revenue per venue, per year
- Platform subscriptionTiered on sites and shift volume£3,480
- Take rate on shift value1.9 percent, paid by the venue£2,140
- Same-day pay fee£1.20 per advance, paid by the worker, optional£280
- Average contract value£5,900
Unit economics, trailing twelve months
- Gross margin71%
- Cost to acquire a venue£1,850
- Payback9 months
- Gross churn, venues6% a year
- Contribution per venue, year two£4,190
Advances are funded from a £2m facility, not the balance sheet. Loss rate to date 0.21 percent, against a 1.5 percent covenant.
08Competition
Rota software books the shift. Agencies fill it. Nobody does both, and nobody pays tonight.
| Stagehand | Agency, e.g. Chapter Staffing | Rota software, e.g. Rotaly | In-house group chat | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fills the shift | Yes, 94% | Yes, at 2.2x cost | No, it only schedules | Sometimes |
| Worker paid same day | Yes, 4 hours | No, 2 to 6 weeks | Not applicable | No |
| Venue keeps the relationship | Yes | No, agency owns it | Yes | Yes |
| Right to work and checks | Held and re-checked | Held by agency | Fields to fill in | Manager’s problem |
| Cost per filled shift | £4.10 | £26 to £38 | £1.80, unfilled | Free, and unreliable |
Chapter Staffing and Rotaly stand for their categories; neither is a real company. Cost per filled shift is our figure for a 6-hour bar shift at £13.20 an hour.
09Team
Three founders who have each been on the wrong side of a Friday rota.
Nadia Okafor
Co-founder & chief executive
Ran operations for a fourteen-site bar group, where she booked roughly 60,000 casual shifts by hand. Started Stagehand to stop doing that.
Tom Brackley
Co-founder & chief technology officer
Built payments infrastructure at a challenger bank, then led the team that shipped its instant payout rail. Owns the funding and risk stack here.
Ruth Ellams
Co-founder & chief commercial officer
Sold workforce software into venue groups for nine years. Closed 180 of our first 240 venues, most of them without a demo.
Nineteen people, fourteen of them in London. Advisers: a former chief operating officer of a national pub group, a payments lawyer who wrote our worker agreement, and two duty managers we pay for an hour a week to tell us what is broken.
10The ask
Raising£4.5m
Series A, £3m committed by an existing investor and a fund we have worked with since seed. Closing November 2026.
What it buys, by the end of 2028
- 45%EngineeringCompliance automation, ranking, the payout rail in-house
- 30%Sales and venue successFrom 240 to 1,100 venues, three regional teams
- 15%Payments and riskFacility expansion, underwriting, fraud
- 10%Operations and reserveEighteen months of runway held back
Takes us to £6.4m ARR, 1,100 venues, and contribution break-even in Q4 2028 on the plan in the data room.
11Close
Come and watch a Saturday fill itself.
The fastest way to judge this is to stand in a venue at five o'clock on a Saturday and watch forty shifts fill on a phone. We will take you to one in London, Leeds or Bristol, any weekend you like.
- Next step
- A venue visit, then the data roomCohort data, the funding facility, and every contract
- Timing
- Closing November 2026£3m of the £4.5m is committed
- Contact
- Nadia Okafornadia@stagehand.example · 020 7946 0417
- Prepared for
- Series A partnersSeptember 2026 · confidential
Fictional example deck. Stagehand, its people, its venues and every figure above are invented; any resemblance to a real company is coincidental.