Selling the move nobody enjoys
Most people would rather visit the dentist than pack up their life and cross a border. Paul Bennett built a company on that exact dread. PerchPeek, the London startup he co-founded in 2018, takes the part of relocation that breaks people - the visas, the guarantors, the strange new postcode, the apartment you have to rent sight unseen - and hands it to an AI-assisted coach who has done it a thousand times before.
Today PerchPeek operates across more than 150 countries with a team of roughly sixty-seven, backed by something close to $18 million in funding. Its biggest single market is the United States, much of that internal state-to-state migration. Its biggest European market is Germany. The people moving most often come from India and Brazil, heading toward jobs in tech labs and pharmaceutical companies that have learned a flexible move is a retention tool, not a perk.
Bennett's pitch is unfashionably blunt: relocation is miserable, the incumbents treat it like paperwork, and a small app with a friendly human on the other end can fix most of the misery. He has been proven right enough times to keep raising money on it.
I think over the next 10 years we'll see a lot more people migrating.Paul Bennett, on the decade ahead
A bottle of hand sanitiser and a regional advertising award
At seventeen, Bennett stood outside supermarkets selling hand sanitiser. The product was unremarkable. The pitch was not - it won him a regional award for "compelling advertising," which is a polite way of saying he could talk a stranger into a purchase before they reached the trolleys. The instinct to sell the story rather than the bottle never left.
He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford between 2011 and 2014, playing first-team hockey for the university Blues. Then he spent three years at Amazon. The role that mattered was launching Treasure Trucks in the UK - roving promotional vehicles that turned everyday retail into an event. His biggest one was a Star Wars-themed spectacle in Trafalgar Square that drew more than ten thousand people. He learned to make logistics feel like a party.
Relocating to London after university gave him the problem he would eventually sell. Moving was awful. Nobody had fixed it. He found two people who agreed.
"Tinder for renting," then almost nothing, then everything
PerchPeek began in 2018 as a UK property marketplace. Bennett and his co-founders - Oliver Markham and Dr Aasis (Ace) Vinayak, who brought machine learning to the table - called it "Tinder for renting." Swipe through flats, match with a home. It was a tidy idea for a tidy world.
Then March 2020 arrived and the world stopped moving. Literally.
Just after, March lockdowns hit, and we thought we'd probably made the biggest mistake ever - people couldn't even leave their homes, let alone move country.Paul Bennett, on the early pandemic
The mistake became the opening. Remote work untethered millions of people from their offices, and suddenly the question wasn't "which flat" but "which country." PerchPeek pivoted into end-to-end relocation: housing, admin, immigration, the hand-holding. In 2020 it helped a thousand people move and raised about £2 million led by growth fund Episode 1. The "Tinder for renting" line quietly retired. The company kept growing.
Ship it before it's perfect
Bennett's operating philosophy fits on a sticky note: perfection is the enemy of progress. He credits "not being a perfectionist" as the reason projects actually get out the door. He writes longhand, thinks visually, and pressure-tests ideas by explaining them to his mother, whom he cheerfully describes as a fierce critic. If the idea survives mum, it might survive the market.
When London's venture capitalists passed on early PerchPeek, he didn't sulk. He messaged more than a thousand angel investors on LinkedIn, one at a time, until enough said yes. The same stamina shows up off the clock: he starts most days with a run and, in 2019, won the 100km Jurassic Coast Challenge - an ultramarathon along England's south coast. He reads Carol Dweck's Mindset and runs his day on tools like Momentum Dash and Fireflies.AI.
The quotable founder
"Perfection is the enemy of progress."
His favourite line"Don't be afraid to do things differently."
Advice to his younger self"We thought we'd probably made the biggest mistake ever."
On March 2020"Over the next 10 years we'll see a lot more people migrating."
On the future of mobilityThe map of a modern move
PerchPeek's footprint reads like a departures board. The patterns underneath it tell you where the world's talent is actually going.
Five things that explain him
His first business was hand sanitiser sold outside supermarkets - and the advertising won a regional award.
He won the 100km Jurassic Coast Challenge ultramarathon in 2019. He runs most mornings.
He coached hockey and tennis to young people in Buenos Aires through United Through Sport.
At Amazon he ran a Star Wars Treasure Truck event for over 10,000 people in Trafalgar Square.
He still tests big ideas by explaining them to his mother, his self-described fiercest critic.