Beurzbyte
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Beurzbyte was a London-based EdTech/FinTech startup founded by Pedram Parhizkari and Niels Soete, named after Brugge's Huis Ter Beurze - thought to be the world's oldest stock exchange. Its 'video-first' mobile app taught novice retail investors the ins and outs of investing through 60-second videos made by finance professionals, promising to 'bridge the gap from Wall Street to Main Street'. The app had two parts: Beurzbyte Learn (financial-literacy video education) and Beurzbyte Discover (a marketplace for discovering investment opportunities, personalised to the user's investment style). It raised £2.2 million in pre-seed funding from angel investors in January 2023, launched the iOS app in March 2023 and Android in June 2023. The company (Beurzbyte Ltd, company no. 13043092) was dissolved on February 25, 2025 via voluntary strike-off.
02 / Beurzbyte FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No founder post-mortem is public, but the outline is clear from the record. Beurzbyte tried to build a consumer subscription-style education business on expensive, studio-produced video content - launched on the back of a single £2.2 million pre-seed with no follow-on round reported - and it never found a monetisation engine. Teaching novice investors 'stocks to fine art and crypto' is a content-hungry, low-willingness-to-pay market: the people most in need of financial literacy are the least likely to pay for it, and the people willing to pay already have brokers and newsletters. Two years after the iOS launch, with the cash from the pre-seed evidently gone and no new investors on record, the founders applied to strike the company off in December 2024 - a voluntary dissolution, the quietest form of startup death. The domain was registered to a single micro-company (its accounts filed as 'micro'), suggesting the team never scaled beyond a small core.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Liquidation
UK Companies House company 13043092 (BEURZBYTE LTD, SIC educational support; formerly TICKERTIME LTD) shows status Dissolved on 25 February 2025 via voluntary strike-off (DS01 3 Dec 2024; Final Gazette 25 Feb 2025).
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Monetise before you educate: financial literacy is a noble mission but a weak business - willingness to pay sits at the wrong end of the market.
- 02
Video-first means cost-first: studio-produced 60-second videos burn cash fast without a revenue engine attached.
- 03
One round is not a plan: £2.2M pre-seed in Jan 2023, dissolved Feb 2025 - no follow-on meant a hard two-year clock.
- 04
Consumer apps need a distribution edge: an app store listing is not distribution.
- 05
A voluntary strike-off is still data: when founders choose to wind down quietly, believe the economics.