Perkbox Grew to $36M ARR and Exited for $170M After Three Pivots: Saurav Chopra's Story

August 31, 2026

TL;DR: Perkbox is a UK employee benefits and rewards platform, sold to small and mid-sized businesses that couldn't previously afford one. It began in London around 2011 as HuddleBuy — a "Groupon for SMBs" — founded by Saurav Chopra and Chieu Cao, on a seed round of roughly £350,000 (about $500K) from angel investors. Three pivots later it reached over $30 million in top-line revenue and was acquired by Great Hill Partners, in a deal completed in February 2024, for $170 million according to Chopra. The whole company raised less venture capital than it eventually generated in annual revenue. Chopra told the story on The Product Market Fit Show.

What does Perkbox do?

Perkbox is an employee benefits, rewards and recognition platform. Employees get meaningful discounts — cinema, restaurants, retail, wellness — through closed group deals unavailable to the public, and employers get a retention tool.

The differentiator was who it served. Enterprise benefits platforms existed. Nothing served companies with 10 to 50 employees.

"We were targeting this micro SMB segment that no one had touched… if you're like 10 to 50, no one was touching you." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

The reason nobody touched it was arithmetic: outbound sales doesn't pay for itself on a $1,000–$5,000 contract. Perkbox solved that with a channel almost nobody was using for B2B.

Key stat: at peak, Perkbox was generating roughly 5,000 inbound leads a month — enough that the sales team never built an outbound function at all.

"There was no need because the calendars were stacked." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

Following the acquisition, Great Hill combined Perkbox with Vivup to form the Perkbox Vivup Group, which Chopra says now serves around 4 million people in the UK.

Who founded Perkbox?

Perkbox was co-founded by Saurav Chopra and Chieu Cao, originally under the name HuddleBuy. Chopra described a three-person founding team on the show, with backgrounds at Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft — himself on business development, one co-founder who had led Apple's online team, and a third who was a Yahoo and Microsoft digital marketer.

Those logos are the reason the company existed at all.

"The big logos and some startup experience helped to get the around going very quickly from some very, very good angel investors." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

The original thesis was straightforward: Groupon was everywhere, collective buying worked, and small businesses had none of the purchasing power large companies took for granted. The founders had lived both sides.

"Everything is three times more expensive. I don't get my hotel rates, I don't get anything that I used to get as a big corporate." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

There was one problem. In 2011, nobody would fund it.

"SMB was kind of a dirty word, right… no one did SMB SaaS businesses back then." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

How much has Perkbox raised — and what did it sell for?

Seed — roughly £350,000 (about $500K) from European angel investors, 2011. They tried to top it up with VC and failed.
Publicly reported total funding across all rounds sits at roughly $32.8M–$38.5M — verified as of August 2026 — with the later rounds coming only after the business had already reached scale. The 2019 round of £13.5M was reported by TechCrunch.
Acquisition — completed 20 February 2024 by Great Hill Partners, a full-cash transaction. Chopra states the price was $170 million; the figure was not disclosed in the official announcement.

Key stat: Perkbox raised less money in total than it eventually made in a single year of revenue — the metric Chopra himself flags as the achievement.

"Probably one of the most important things is about being capital efficient and really, really taking care of your cash because that gives you optionality. The fact that we were able to pivot and all those things is because we were so capital efficient." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

For more on this, see capital efficiency metrics.

Three pivots: from printers to leads to memberships to Perkbox

Pivot 0 — the original HuddleBuy, killed in seven months. They started with what businesses bought most often: printer cartridges, keyboards, hardware. It didn't survive contact with the margin math.

"Amazon is going to kill us any day because you make 200 printers, you sell and one comes back, there's no margin." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

Chopra is unusually blunt about why they persisted as long as they did.

"I guess we were just trying to prove some vanity metrics… just to show to our — obviously this is the first time that we had actually as founders, we had started a business as a management team." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

Pivot 1 — products to services, and Facebook. Companies like Zipcar and Pitney Bowes started asking HuddleBuy to promote their services. The unit economics were unrecognisable.

"On one Zipcar business, if I sent one customer, we made more margin than selling a hundred printers, and there was no inventory, no hassle." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

With three or four months of cash left, Google Ads was unaffordable — which forced the discovery that carried the company for a decade. They ran B2B offers on Facebook in 2012, when essentially nobody did.

"The SMBs, micro SMBs behave like consumers. So they were on Facebook and our cost per click was, oh my God, it was so, so low." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

Facebook later featured them as one of its first UK B2B case studies. The lead generation business reached about £1.5M in revenue at 70%+ gross margin, throwing off roughly £750K in profit.

"I think that the fact that we didn't have the money made us really go innovate and push harder than anyone else would have." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

Pivot 2 — the membership that half-worked. Uncomfortable running what was effectively an ad agency, they built the "HuddleBuy Gold Card," a Costco-for-business-services subscription at about £200 a year. Two versions launched: direct-to-SMB, and white-labelled for telcos, energy companies and payment providers with commoditised products.

The direct model died when Facebook ad costs rose 6x in roughly three months. The white-label version worked, generating a few million in revenue as a licence business with no acquisition cost.

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Pivot 3 — the customers asked for it. White-label clients kept making the same request.

"It's great you're giving me these benefits. Can I give these benefits to my employees?" — a Perkbox customer, as recounted by Saurav Chopra

That became Perkbox. Same Facebook playbook, but the contract value jumped from ~$200 a year to $2,000–$5,000 per company, because a benefits product sells 20 or 30 seats at once.

The cupcake ad, and what product market fit actually felt like

The single best-performing ad in Perkbox's entire history was, by Chopra's account, an image of cupcakes.

"We still don't know why it works so well though crazy. It's still the highest performing ad ever was cupcakes… 10 years in the business. Nothing's outperformed those ads." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

Chopra was the sceptic. The data won.

"I was the guy who was saying, why was this going to work? Why are we not going more on point? They were like, look at the data." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

There was a structural reason the ads spread. In an SMB, employees are Facebook friends with their manager — so employees tagged their bosses in benefit ads.

"It doesn't happen in enterprise. Your manager, if you're Oracle, your manager is not your Facebook buddy, but in small businesses it does happen." — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

Key stat: Perkbox went from 5 to about 60 commercial staff in 18 months, and from roughly $1–2M to about $14M ARR in two to two and a half years — without raising.

Demo-to-close was only around 10%, well below the 20% he'd expect. The team never got around to optimising it.

"We were just ramping so fast, the ARR was ramping so fast… perhaps you could have slowed down a little bit and looked at, what is the kind of customer we're getting? How long are they going to stay for us?" — Saurav Chopra, Perkbox

That is the honest texture of product market fit: too much demand to fix the obvious inefficiencies.

Key lessons from Saurav Chopra's playbook

1. Capital efficiency buys pivots. Three pivots were only possible because there was cash in the bank. Chopra names this as his single biggest lesson. 2. Constraints force channel discovery. They found Facebook B2B advertising in 2012 because they couldn't afford Google. That accident became the company's moat for a decade. 3. Watch for the request customers keep repeating. Perkbox exists because white-label clients kept asking to extend benefits to their own employees. 4. Beware vanity transactions. Shipping printers proved volume, not a business. Chopra attributes the delay to first-time founders optimising for what investors would find impressive. 5. Single-channel dependence is a real risk. A 6x cost increase in three months killed the direct membership product outright. 6. Keep relationships with competitors. The CEO Chopra brought in to run the exit was the professional CEO of his largest competitor. 7. Prefer the market with no fight. His closing thought, borrowed from Sun Tzu: "the greatest victory is where there's no battle" — and no competition does not mean no market.

FAQ: Perkbox

Q: What is Perkbox? A: Perkbox is a UK employee benefits, perks and recognition platform aimed at small and mid-sized businesses, offering staff discounts on retail, cinema, dining and wellness through closed group deals.

Q: Who founded Perkbox? A: Saurav Chopra and Chieu Cao founded the company, originally as HuddleBuy, in London around 2010–2011. The founding team came from Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft.

Q: Who acquired Perkbox? A: Great Hill Partners, in an all-cash transaction completed on 20 February 2024. Chopra says the price was $170 million. Great Hill subsequently merged Perkbox with Vivup to form the Perkbox Vivup Group.

Q: How much funding did Perkbox raise? A: Publicly reported totals range from roughly $32.8M to $38.5M across five rounds, starting from a £350,000 angel seed in 2011 and including a £13.5M round in 2019.

Q: What was Perkbox called before? A: HuddleBuy. It rebranded to Perkbox in early 2015, after the employee benefits product outgrew the original collective-buying business.

Q: What is Saurav Chopra doing now? A: He founded 5mins.ai, an AI-powered short-form workplace training platform, and served as chairman of Perkbox before the sale.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

Saurav Chopra, Co-Founder of Perkbox — turned a failed Groupon-for-SMBs into a $30M+ revenue employee benefits platform through three pivots and a $170M exit, on less capital than the company made in a year.