Alex Preece’s first shop had candles, bags and a problem: the stock did not turn into enough money. After leaving the British Army, he had tried online retail. He ended up bankrupt. It is an awkward opening for a founder’s biography, which is precisely why it deserves to stay. The later £11 million sale is easier to put in a presentation. The shop explains rather more about the price of another attempt.
Today, Preece is co-founder and CEO of Tillo, a company connecting businesses with digital gift cards, rewards and incentives. He lives in Austin, Texas, having moved from the UK with his family. In September 2026, Tillo announced its acquisition of Italy’s Amilon. The distance between those chapters is considerable. Preece tends to acknowledge the rough ground in between.
A shop, a setback, a second start
He grew up in Weymouth, on England’s Dorset coast. Hospitality was an obvious local line of work; he wanted the military. His grandfather had served. Preece followed that example, entering a world in which plans, responsibility and dependence on other people became practical matters. He later served in Bosnia and Iraq.
His own account of school is unsentimental. He says he left with no GCSEs and joined the Army at sixteen. Training at Harrogate gave him an appetite for trying hard that school had failed to produce. It also gave him a different measure of achievement. A qualification and a parade square reward different things; he found his footing on the latter.
Business supplied another education. His online shop failed after he committed money to stock he could not shift. He has spoken publicly about bankruptcy and a period on benefits. These details make the familiar instruction to persevere sound less like a motivational poster. There were bills attached.
Eventually, he and Gareth Gillatt co-founded Local Daily Deals. MoneySupermarket.com acquired it in 2011; Preece describes the exit as an £11 million deal. The sum belongs to the company transaction, rather than a calculation of his personal fortune. More interestingly, the partnership survived its first success. The two founders would go looking for another problem together.
The two ventures share an interest in helping people get more from what they spend. Daily deals offered a visible bargain. Rewards infrastructure works further behind the scenes. Following Preece across them makes his later choice of industry easier to understand. A consumer may never encounter his company’s name, yet still use something that depends on the connections his team has made.
The spreadsheet nobody wanted
The next opportunity came with remarkably little glamour. Trying to use gift cards in another business exposed a tangle of relationships and processes. Retailers had their own systems. Buying rewards in bulk involved manual work. Delivery could take days. A customer might be promised an instant reward and discover that the machinery behind it preferred a leisurely stroll.
Preece and Gillatt started Reward Cloud, registering the company in March 2016. Their September announcement of investment from Passion Capital described a Brighton team connecting retailers’ gift card processors and making the results easier to manage. The business later became Tillo. Its basic usefulness was already visible: fewer separate connections, less administration and quicker access to digital value.
An HSBC case study records that the company turned a profit within a year. By 2019, it had processed more than £500 million in gift card value. Those are transactions through the platform, rather than revenue retained by Tillo. The distinction matters. A railway carries goods worth much more than the price of the ticket.
A simplified view of the network Preece and Gillatt built.
An idea has to work on both sides
Of course, a connection is only useful when somebody is waiting at the other end. The founders needed brands to attract business buyers, and buyers to persuade brands to participate. Each side wanted evidence supplied by the other. It is a particularly civilised form of deadlock: everyone likes the idea, provided somebody else goes first.
Preece has described winning both sides by making the platform useful and straightforward. The lesson is less theatrical than a grand launch. A network has to earn its early relationships before its size becomes a reason to join. Every additional partner then has something more substantial to examine than the founders’ enthusiasm.
The uses stretch beyond birthday presents. Cashback can become spending value. An employer can reward a colleague. A loyalty programme can give members a choice of retailers. On payments podcasts, Preece argues for seeing gift cards as a way of moving and redeeming value. The card’s familiar name can make the underlying business surprisingly easy to overlook.
There is a local dimension, too. Tillo’s partnership with Miconex brought Town & City Gift Cards into its network, connecting reward buyers with programmes supporting local businesses in the UK and Ireland. A founder pursuing international scale still has to make the result useful somewhere specific: a shop, a town, a purchase somebody actually wants to make.
“Compliments are nice, but commitment is what matters.”
Alex Preece, on testing a business idea
Texas is a family decision
The American chapter puts a personal address on that international ambition. After years in Brighton and Hove, Preece moved to Austin with his wife and three children. By his October 2024 interview, he was discussing the work of establishing Tillo’s stateside office. He wanted to take a business that had found an audience in Britain and learn what would travel.
The move also answered a personal question. He has spoken about wanting the experience of living in another country, rather than reaching old age wondering why he had declined the chance. A founder can describe expansion in a sentence. A family has to pack it into suitcases.
He recognises that different markets understand incentives differently. A successful British approach still needs adjustment for American buyers. His conversations about expansion return to learning those differences, rather than assuming the same sales message will work everywhere. Moving makes that learning part of everyday life. The market stops being a destination on the travel schedule.
Thirty minutes, any question
Preece’s public manner includes a willingness to be the person answering. He launched Wild Cards as a podcast exploring unusual careers, business successes and failures. Early guests included Gail Cohen, Michel Gustavsson and James Jittle. In 2023, Sam Thomas reversed the arrangement, interviewing him live at Brighton Dome. The host had to supply his own origin story.
Inside Tillo, a smaller conversation has become a regular appointment. Preece describes running a thirty-minute Friday CEO drop-in, open to anyone. Questions can cover the company’s direction or its weaknesses. The idea came from a colleague who had experienced something similar elsewhere. He tried it. Leadership occasionally benefits from resisting the temptation to put one’s name on the invention.
He also runs sessions for new starters, explaining the company’s purpose and priorities. His test is pleasantly concrete: could someone describe Tillo at a dinner party? It is a useful standard for an infrastructure business. If explaining the company exhausts the evening, the explanation may need work.
More people around the table
By 2025, the business was changing its ownership arrangements as well as its reach. Tenzing partnered with Preece and the continuing management team in a fully secondary transaction. Early investors sold their holdings. The arrangement gave those shareholders liquidity and brought a new investment partner alongside the people running the company.
Later that year, Tom Burnet became Tillo’s first Chair. His role included supporting international expansion and the growth of the platform. For a founder, a larger table brings another kind of work: explaining choices, accepting challenge and sharing decisions with people whose experience reaches beyond the company’s own history.
In its July 2026 announcement, Tillo named Michael Tigwell Managing Director for the UK and EMEA. He had been a Tillo customer during his time at Benefex. Preece wanted an experienced regional leader while he concentrated on the US. Hiring somebody who has bought the service gives the conversation a useful complication: the customer’s perspective is already in the room.
Company-reported network figures. Each connection still has to work for the people using it.
September brought Amilon. Its founders, Andrea Verri and Fabio Regazzoni, continued leading the Italian business and reinvested in the combined group. With offices including Spain and Poland, Amilon extended the European footprint. The combined businesses expected to process more than £3 billion in gift cards during 2026. That was an expectation for the year, rather than a completed result.
Coffee, cake and a longer horizon
Away from the deal announcements, Preece has described an enthusiasm for audiobooks, UFC and the cafes of Brighton and Hove. Coffee and cake make a recurring appearance. In 2022, he was reading Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map, about working across cultural differences. The choice fits a founder whose colleagues and customers increasingly live in different countries.
He also likes horror films, an interest he traces to childhood viewing on VHS. Halloween and Hellraiser are among the titles he has mentioned. There is room in a business biography for tastes that do not have to become leadership lessons. Sometimes a founder simply wants to watch a frightening film.
His ambitions include spending time with his children as well as building Tillo internationally. The early shop, the deals business and the next company have each demanded a different version of his working life. Now there are more people to trust, more markets to understand and a family whose story moved with his. Starting again has brought him a long way from Weymouth. Continuing requires attention to the people who came along.
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More from Preece, and the businesses in his story.