In this interview, Zandra Moore shares practical advice for early‑stage founders. She highlights two lesser‑known no‑code platforms—Ninox, a flexible database builder, and TAAP, an app‑builder that helped the UK vaccine rollout launch quickly. Moore then recounts the creation of Panintelligence, describing how she, the CTO (Ken) and finance director (Mike Cripps) bought the product’s IP, spun it out from a fintech, and she moved from sales‑and‑marketing director to CEO. The company raised a $6 million Series A in 2019, expanded from a UK base to a Boston office, and now serves SaaS vendors worldwide. Moore explains that Panintelligence’s platform was originally engineered for banking‑grade security (PCI compliance, multi‑tenant data isolation) and that this security‑first architecture makes it a natural fit for SaaS companies needing embedded business intelligence. The product offers self‑service dashboards, scheduled reporting, real‑time alerts, and a self‑service machine‑learning layer that lets users build predictive models without developer involvement. Moore outlines why BI/analytics matters for SaaS founders at different growth stages—early‑stage firms can use predictive features for market differentiation, while more mature firms leverage the tool for customer retention, expansion revenue, and competitive advantage. She notes the greatest ROI is seen in Series A‑B companies that have enough customers to benefit from retention and expansion tactics, and emphasizes a usage‑based pricing model that aligns costs with delivered value.
Chapters
In terms of no-code lab, any favorite tools you recommend or you love to kind of, you know, recommend to startups to kind of kickstart and kick off their business right away?
Oh, do you know, there's so many. And in fact, actually, if they go on our No-Code Lab website, um, No-Code Lab, uh, there's a number of different technologies in there they can take a look at. Um, I always feel bad trying to recommend any because I always don't want to, um, pull any out. But maybe, uh, one that people don't know about is Ninox. I think that's a really cool tool. Um, uh, you know, everyone's heard of Webflow and all of these tools, but I think Ninox is worth checking out. And we've also got a, um, an app builder called TAAP, which is T-A-A-P. That's another company that we're doing some really cool stuff with. The vaccine rollout program here in the UK has used the TAAP platform to get that to market within weeks. There's some really cool use cases in some of those no-code lab projects that we're lucky enough to be part of. But yeah, reach out if you want to find out more.
Cool. We'll add those to the show notes. Check out ninox.com. Talking about Pan Intelligence, you started off as the sales and marketing director, right? And then, you know, tell us a little bit more. What was that process? You know, you built the idea, I believe you purchased the IP, and then you launched and eventually moved your way into the CEO position. How did that work out?
Yeah, so there was 3 of us that were sort of beavering away trying to turn this Panintelligence product into an independent sort of go-to-market tool for business intelligence and analytics. At the time, we were part of a fintech where we were sort of alongside technology for big lending systems and end-to-end transactional systems for banking. But we knew we had something that could be applied to lots of different sectors. And in this case, we were looking at the technology market and software vendor market, 'cause it's an area that I particularly knew well and could see a gap in. And, you know, we had the opportunity to buy the IP, the 3 of us, Ken, who's the CTO, Mike Cripps was the finance director. The 3 of us were really building this business out. Mike had that kind of MD, FD leadership role. I was leading on sales and marketing. And we just, a combination of strengths that came together to really, we all played to each other's strengths to get it off the ground. Mike, a little older than myself and Ken, he'd made his money on the exit of PanCredit, which was the business we were part of. So, you know, he really helped us to get off the ground and stepped back from the business in 2019. And it was, you know, prior to that, we'd always seen that transition of me moving into the CEO role as he sort of stepped back from the business. and stood down in 2019. So, yeah, so there was always a kind of plan, and that's how it worked out. So, you know, I can't say I feel very different today than I did when we first spun out the business. You know, I'm still doing a lot of the same things I used to do then, just probably doing more of this, actually, which is talking about the story of the business and being probably upfront. But mostly my day doesn't change so much.
Love it. Love it. And then where are you guys, just for our audience to kind of know where you are, where are you guys in terms of size today? And have you guys raised any external capital? Are you guys fully bootstrapped?
Yeah, so we raised Series A in 2019. We raised just short of $6 million as part of our kind of growth and scale-up capital to help us to expand internationally. So we are— we were predominantly serving a kind of European and UK market, and now very much, you know, all over the world, a lot in the US actually now, a lot of SaaS vendors in the US that we work with. So yeah, we're UK-based predominantly. We have an office in Boston, Massachusetts. But yeah, we raised that, like I say, in 2019 as our first kind of first round of investment to accelerate our growth. And, you know, that's been a really good experience for us. We're certainly benefiting from bringing some additional kind of advice into the business and, you know, a chairman who's been fantastic in helping us kind of grow up a little bit and focus our— business model in the right areas and our go-to-market strategy.
Makes sense. Then can you share for our audience to understand, how does the platform work specifically for SaaS companies, and what problems were you looking to solve in the market for SaaS founders?
Yeah. We were a happy accident really. The thing with the finance world is they have a lot of data and an awful lot of volume of data that is moving quite fast transactionally, and they don't like you to move that around. When we built the software originally for banks, they were like, hey, don't move our data please. a lot of users and we only want them to see what we want them to see. So make sure that, you know, we've got a lot of kind of security that can enable us locking back what people can and can't do and can and can't see. But also, you know, make sure we're not caching any data anywhere on any device. It's got to be compliant with all of these kind of data security in the UK PCI compliance. So it was built from the ground up for those sorts of requirements. But actually, if you think about software vendors, it's exactly the same. You know, they've done the hard job of collecting all of this data and putting it into their infrastructure. They've usually got a lot of it. And they have lots of users that need to make sure only see the data you want them to see, and often a multi-tenanted environment. So the strengths of our product really fit very, very well into that software market. And actually, what we saw, because we were a software builder building it for ourselves, right? We'd done the job of going, we couldn't find anything that met our requirements, so we built it for ourselves. But that was the same. And actually, we recognized that what we'd done for ourselves was the same problem other people had. And actually, because of the way we'd architected the product around the way in which the deployment infrastructure security, the embedding, the white labeling, it's not just about what you can do at the front end, it's as much about how it integrates within a technology stack, that was really different. And that's where we started. And obviously, over the last 5 years, we've focused entirely on that embedded space in the cloud. You know, we deal with a lot of the things that really matter to a SaaS vendor. So, it's about enabling their roadmap to be accelerated on data analytics, not just data visualizations and dashboards, but reported, scheduled, alerted, data-driven, you know, alerts, notifications, and reports, whether that's PDF or a CSV or just even a web services call setting something off like a trigger or notification. So, you know, a scheduler that's driving insights out to people. self-service dashboard. But more importantly, people are trying to work out how they deal with kind of prediction and machine learning, and often SaaS vendors don't have that capability. And in the world we were in, in finance, you know, scorecarding and predicting people that are most likely to pay back a loan, which is the world that we were in, you know, that's been around for a long time. So we've been doing sort of machine learning engines for 15 years. All we've done is made that a self-service layer that software vendors can configure very easily as many predictive models as they like. As new data comes in, score that and then trigger and drive nudge alerts or just present a list of decisions that people can make, frankly. We've made it super simple to do 3 things: hindsight reporting, real-time live data visualizations, and prediction that anybody, any user can do for themselves. They don't have to rely on their dev team doing it. Their end users can do it for themselves. Yeah, I think it's been an interesting space to be in, but I don't think if we'd have had that early customer base of fintech, we would be where we are now. I think it really helped us to be different, and it certainly stood us very well. Yeah.
We talk about accelerating the expansion revenues and also improving retention. And also standing out from your competition. You know, why would you say, you know, like using business intelligence reporting analytics is, you know, important for SaaS founders? At what stage should they consider using it? And how can they truly leverage the potential themselves? Like, you know, can you give kind of tactics? If I'm a SaaS founder looking at this, how can I really start using this and driving my company?
Yeah, we sort of deal with a number of different stages of sort of SaaS growth. So very early stage where there's sort of new entrants or maybe challenger SaaS technologies, we can be used as a way to differentiate from the incumbent SaaS players. So having things like prediction or machine learning as a differentiator can really help them to stand apart. So sometimes it's less about helping existing customers drive value, but actually about differentiating their propositions. So we often find with those earlier stage companies, it's about, about their proposition. It's about their go-to-market kind of differentiation. You know, are we an extra credit? crown jewel for them, right? If they're a little bit more mature and they've got a lot of customers, it often is about those key customers that they may be at risk of losing. So it becomes a retention strategy to enable them to get better access to their data quickly, easily for themselves without being frustrated that it's kind of locked away within that SaaS platform. So it can be as much to do with retention and, and also at that stage, because you can license it to be able to give customers a different experience, you can start to create expansion revenue Opportunities by unlocking self-service capabilities or advanced analytic capabilities that you can then create upside revenues from and expansion revenues. So it depends on what the compelling reasons are for the SaaS vendor. Sometimes it's retention, sometimes it's expansion, sometimes it's both, and sometimes it's all three, right? Competitive differentiation on top of that. There can be all sorts of drivers, and it's not you know it's it's it's it's easy for us to help people whatever stage they're at. You know the technology has been designed that it's a usage-based model. So if you're small. You're paying for the value you drive from it. It doesn't, you know, we've got a framework of pricing that really enables SaaS vendors to align to their unit metrics, and we just sit and fit with those, which helps us sort of scale with them in a way that they can completely forecast model out and feel is directly attributed to the value, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah. So you have all kinds of, you know, SaaS founders that use this, you know, early stage, mid-market enterprise, or do you have a kind of focus that you see that gets kind of the highest ROI from using it?
Yeah, so I would say that, you know, SaaS vendors that are in that kind of Series A to B phase probably drive the greatest value because they're able to create some competitive differentiation as part of that next stage of growth, but also they've got enough customers that they can use it for both expansion and retention. You know, that point where you're, you know, you've probably had enough customers with you, you may start to— there's a focus on retention, but at the same time, you know, there's also a real, need to drive expansion, that can be quite a really useful point, especially when people are moving between phases of fundraising. You know, as a— by enabling this technology, we can, you know, have an impact on retention and expansion rate and show value for that. So I would say that's a good phase for us. But then, yeah, we have people at all stages. But yeah, I would say that kind of Series A to B. To see, maybe, probably no. Very different here in the UK, you know, Series A is very different to a Series A in the US and in other territories.
