What we did: Discovery, UX design, full-stack development, MVP launch
Women founders in the UK receive just 2% of investment funding. Black women founders? 0.02%. And only 14% of angel investors are women. If those numbers don't make you angry, read them again.
Sarah King and Claire Dunn - the founders behind Obu - weren't just angry. They'd lived it. After nearly running out of runway on their own funding round (closing with just 48 hours to spare during the pandemic, celebrating with a mini bottle of champagne and a 30-minute walk), they saw the gap in the market that nobody was filling. Not a gap, really. A chasm. And they decided to build a bridge across it.
Their pitch to us? "We want to build a fintech platform, a bit like Bumble, that matches women founders with women and ally angel investors." We sat up. We listened. And then we got to work.
This is the bit that matters if you're a founder reading this, because it's the bit most case studies skip over. Sarah and Claire had a powerful vision, real domain expertise (both came from corporate financial services careers), and a market that was screaming for something better. What they didn't have was a technical co-founder, or a detailed blueprint for how the platform should work.
And that's fine. That's actually normal. Most of the best ideas we work with start as a clear problem and a rough sense of the solution. The job of discovery is to turn that into something a development team can actually build - without losing the soul of the thing in the process.
So we started where we always start: understanding the business deeply enough to make good technical decisions on its behalf. That meant getting under the skin of Obu's brand vision, their value proposition, and their mission - not as a box-ticking exercise, but because everyone on the project team needed to be pulling in the same direction. When you're building something first-to-market in a regulated space, alignment isn't a nice-to-have. It's oxygen.
Obu's platform serves two very different audiences: founders looking for investment, and angel investors looking for opportunities. Each has their own registration flow, their own set of needs, and their own relationship with risk and trust. But they all end up on the same platform, going through the same raise lifecycle. Getting that right meant mapping the entire end-to-end experience before writing a single line of code.
We took Obu's process flow maps - which were separated into angel and entrepreneur journeys - and pulled them into one unified userflow diagram. Not because we love diagrams (though, let's be honest, we do), but because it gave the whole team clarity on what was happening on-platform versus off-platform, where third-party integrations came in, and what communications the user would receive and when.
That single diagram let us write the epics and user stories that would define the MVP scope. What's in, what's out, what goes in the backlog for later. For a founder, this is one of the most important moments in the process - because it's where you confront the gap between what you want to build and what you need to build right now.
The hardest conversation in any MVP is the one about what you're not building yet. But it's also the most valuable.
Here's something you won't find in most agency case studies: building a fintech platform that handles real investment - shareholder agreements, articles of association, Companies House filings, ID verification, due diligence - is properly hard. It's not a landing page with a Stripe integration. There are rules. There are regulators. There are things that can go very wrong if you get them wrong.
For us, this meant learning fast about a sector we hadn't worked in before. For Obu, it meant learning about software testing, epics, user stories, design systems and prototypes. Both sides were on a steep curve. And we won't pretend it was all smooth sailing - there were difficult conversations. About scope. About timelines. About what was realistic and what was wishful thinking.
But here's the thing: we didn't shy away from those conversations. Neither did Sarah and Claire. As Claire put it:
"I love the culture at Rise - their values are really clear and feel closely aligned to ours. They are genuinely excited about what we're building and why, and they're great fun to work with, even when there are gnarly conversations to be had like bottoming out scope. We've had to throw several curveballs their way - which didn't freak them out."
That bit about curveballs? That brings us to one of our favourite parts of this story.
Third-party integrations are one of those things that can quietly derail a project. You're relying on someone else's product, someone else's roadmap, someone else's bugs. And when it became clear that the community messaging tool Obu had selected was still in beta - and its messaging functionality simply wouldn't work for what the platform needed - we had a choice. Panic, or fix it.
We went with option B. Within 48 hours, we'd put together a proof of concept for an alternative messaging service, got it in front of Sarah and Claire for sign-off, and had it implemented. Problem identified, solution delivered, nobody lost any sleep. Well, maybe a little sleep.
This is what working with a product studio actually looks like, by the way. It's not just about writing code to a spec. It's about being the kind of partner who can absorb a curveball without the whole plan unravelling.
The Obu angel investment platform went live on 21 June 2023, hitting its Q2 launch target. First to market. Inclusively designed. Fully operational in a regulated financial services environment. That's not a bad sentence for a startup that didn't have a technical team eighteen months earlier.
But the launch was just the start. Within months, Obu had facilitated its first funding rounds - over £290,000 raised across two female-founded businesses (Moody Month, a femtech wellness app, and ProperPlan, an AI-powered project planning tool). Real money. Real founders. Real change.
And the industry noticed. The Obu x Rise partnership won two BIMA Awards - including recognition in the Trailblazers category - with judges commenting on how important Obu's mission is to levelling the playing field for women founders and angel investors. The project also won BIMA Client of the Year, which is a recognition of how well the two teams worked together, not just the end product.
If you're reading this as someone with an idea - maybe in fintech, maybe in something else entirely - there are a few things worth pulling out:
Whether it's a fintech platform, a marketplace, a SaaS product, or something that doesn't have a category yet - we'd love to hear about it. Book a free 30-minute discovery call with one of our founders. No obligation, no hard sell, and you'll walk away with at least a couple of things you hadn't thought of. We promise.
30 minutes. One conversation. No obligation.
