What This Means for Our Future

Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and documents our startup journey. It does not constitute financial advice or a formal invitation to invest.

Now that GPCDS Labs has Advanced Assurance, it means that HMRC has pre-approved us for the benefits of SEIS, which is designed to significantly lower the risk for angel investors. For individuals looking to back our mission of dataviz for all points, an investment in Pier now comes with:

• 50% Income Tax Relief: Investors can offset half of their investment amount against their UK income tax bill.
• Capital Gains Tax (CGT) Exemptions: Any profits made on the shares after three years are entirely tax-free.
• Loss Relief: If things don’t go to plan, the remaining risk is heavily mitigated by further tax relief.

Combined with our membership in the SETsquared incubator in the Silicon Gorge, this puts us in an excellent position to continue our rapid iteration and development of our purpose-driven business.

Let’s Talk

Now that the regulatory approval is officially sort ed, we’re turning our focus toward funding our roadmap and building our Pier proof of concept into a closed beta of our human-first data communication workspace.

If you are an angel investor passionate about the future of data communication, accessibility, and human-centric software, we’d love to chat. Our founder can be contacted at charlotte.hadley@visibledata.io.

Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and documents our startup journey. It does not constitute financial advice or a formal invitation to invest.

Our New Strategic Objects

B Corp provide a standard boilerplate that we found to be insufficient, so we have tailored our legal objects as follows:

• Digital Inclusion & Challenging Ableism: We have legally committed to actively promoting accessibility in all data outputs and directly challenging ableist standards in data tools. We will push our clients to include all humans in their visualizations by prioritizing accessible software solutions.

• Advancing Data Ethics: We are bound to promote the humanization of data communication and empower our community of learners and clients.

• Preservation of Human Livelihoods & Agency: We have committed to a default, exclusive use of human creators for creative content and data insights to preserve authentic human meaning and prioritize human artistic expression.

• Design Integrity: We have legally rejected the use of deceptive patterns (as defined by the Deceptive Patterns project) and addictive patterns in our product design and marketing.

Hard Coding Our AI Governance

As an R&D-intensive software company, we believe AI should amplify human capability, not replace it. To ensure our technology aligns with our ethics, our Articles now enforce strict operational constraints:

1. No AI Avatars: The company is strictly prohibited from using AI avatar services for audio or visual content.

2. Minimum Generative AI Facing Clients: Any exceptional use of generative AI for client- or community-facing creative work must be isolated, explicitly declared, and limited to an absolute minimum.

3. Internal Efficiency Only: We explicitly permit the use of AI for internal operational efficiency, technical code development, or administrative support—but only provided it does not displace human artistic expression.

Radically Transparent Accountability

To ensure we stick to these rules, our directors are now legally mandated to prepare and circulate an annual Impact Report. This will provide a balanced, comprehensive analysis of our impact on society and the environment, and it will explicitly include:

• A “Human-Agency Ratio” summary.

• An “Accessibility Audit” of our software recommendations.

• A formal declaration of our adherence to ethical design standards.

By embedding these values directly into our legal structure at Companies House, we are ensuring that as Pier grows, our core mission remains uncompromised. We’re excited to take this major step toward B Corp Pending status and to continue building a workspace that puts humans first.

The Journey So Far

It’s extremely early days for us. We pitched our startup to SETsquared in February and were accepted into the incubator. We’ve now officially incorporated and starting to bring our vision into focus.

What’s Next: Our Immediate Roadmap

Now we’re Companies House official, we are focusing on four clear goals for the near future:

1. Define our values, mission, and purpose to ensure we build ethically from day one. Our goal is to acquire B Corp Pending status before August 2026.

2. Mature our product plan to turn our vision into scalable software.

3. Build a concrete business model with aligned top-down and bottom-up metrics.

4. Submit our application for SEIS Advanced Assurance before the end of Q2 2026.

Why SEIS Advanced Assurance is our critical next step

We’re a software company. Specifically, we are Pier: a human-first data communication workspace.

It’s an R&D intensive and ambitious endeavour. The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) is an incredible catalyst for growing these kind of ventures as it offers early-stage investors a de-risked strategy through income tax relief on their investment. We do not have SEIS advanced assurance. Our goal is to submit the application before the end of Q2 2026, noting that the application does not guarantee approval. Should our application be approved we will provide updates on the company blog.

Our brand so far

We are a proud Bristol-based startup within the DeskLodge (in fact Charlotte was awarded Desklodger of the month in 2025) and have worked with Brand51 on the design for Pier’s logo

The rest of our branding including our colour palette was designed by our founder Charlotte Hadley.

What This Means for Our Future

Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and documents our startup journey. It does not constitute financial advice or a formal invitation to invest.

SETsquared are huge. They’ve supported 450 companies in raising investments totaling over £4.4billion. We couldn’t be more pleased to be part of their history.

Our founder Charlotte Hadley has a history of building teams and services across industry and academia, and she’s run her own data visualisation consultancy service. But, this is her first startup. SETsquared bring expertise, advisors and support across the startup early start journey that we’ll use to plan, build and launch to market.

Next step: incorporate and make this real.