Serve First lands £5m follow-on funding to scale AI customer experience offering
Serve First has almost doubled its Annual Recurring Revenue since last funding round in June 2025
Milton Keynes, Thursday 9th April 2026 – Serve First, the AI-driven customer experience and performance management platform, has secured £5 million in new funding from Pembroke VCT and the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II, through fund manager Mercia Ventures.
Subscribe to TRBBoth firms first invested in June 2025 as part of a £4.5 million funding round.
Since this initial investment, Serve First has almost doubled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to over £2m and attracted new customers including Brentford FC, The Sushi Co, Topps Tiles, The Body Shop and Spud Bros. It has also expanded into Europe by securing a contract with a chain of over 2,500 pharmacies in 7 countries.
Launched in 2023, Serve First’s AI-powered platform collects and analyses customer feedback from in-store surveys, online reviews and mystery shopping. Its software then translates these insights into actions for frontline teams, helping businesses to act on customer insight more quickly, supporting improvements in service performance and customer loyalty.
The business continues to work with enterprise customers across sectors including retail, hospitality, health and wellness, franchise and facilities management. It has also launched a new offering to support UK venue and events operators that are required to comply with the new ‘Martyn’s Law’ legislation.
The latest funding will be used to strengthen Serve First’s sales and marketing function, including the imminent appointment of a Chief Revenue Officer, and will also support continued product development, including further investment in AI capabilities.
Serve First was established by founder and CEO Erol Ayvaz, who has more than 20 years’ experience in technology and customer experience, including roles at Asana and Market Force Information. The company, which is based in Milton Keynes, now employs 25 staff.
Fred Ursell, Head of Investments at Pembroke Investment Managers, said:
“The best investments reveal themselves quickly. Erol is a rare founder – someone who has both operated multi-site businesses at the coalface and scaled software companies, which means he understood this problem from the inside before Serve First ever wrote a line of code.
That founder-market fit is showing in the numbers: since backing him in June 2025, Serve First has grown revenue at breakneck speed, deepened relationships with its existing enterprise clients, and secured a significant European rollout with a major client. When a portfolio company executes this well this early, increasing our support is an obvious decision. We’re excited to back the team through the next phase.”
Erol Ayvaz, Founder and CEO of Serve First, said:
“The company’s growth over the last year is a clear indication of the market appetite for Serve First’s offering, and this latest funding injection speaks to both the future potential of the business and the strong delivery over the last year by our exceptional team.
“It’s an exciting time to be operating in this space, and there remains considerable untapped potential for Serve First’s offering. We expect market demand to accelerate rapidly with the rise of agentic AI, which is making customer experience far more critical to business performance than ever before.”
Howard Mitchell, Investment Director at Mercia Ventures, said: “The Serve First team have built a great product that is loved by their expanding list of customers. With market demand strengthening, this is an opportune time for them to accelerate growth. We are excited to support them on their journey.”
The £400m Midlands Engine Investment Fund II covers the entire Midlands region and provides equity investment up to £5m and debt finance from £25k to £2m to help a range of small and medium sized businesses to start up, scale up or stay ahead.
The purpose of the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II is to drive sustainable economic growth by supporting innovation and creating local opportunity for new and growing businesses across the Midlands. The Midlands Engine Investment Fund II will increase the supply and diversity of early-stage finance for smaller businesses in the Midlands, providing funds to firms that might otherwise not receive investment and help to break down barriers in access to finance.
About Serve First
Serve First is an AI-driven CX and performance intelligence platform for multi-site organisations. It brings together customer feedback, mystery shopping, operational audits and real-time action management in one connected system. By turning insight into clear, accountable actions at location level, Serve First helps businesses improve service performance, reduce operational risk and build stronger customer loyalty. Serve First operates across sectors including retail, hospitality, health & wellness, franchise and facilities management, and key clients include Alphega Pharmacy, Aramark and Elior Group.
Please visit www.servefirst.co.uk for further information.
