From momentum to commercial progress.

Dear Shareholders,

What we said in H2 2025 - what's happened since.

Every commitment from our last update is now in motion. The next two we expect to close: landing the Nestlé Q4 campaign live, and the first Tier-1 issuer deployment.

Introducing Vela Pulse - our B2B insights dashboard.

Pulse is the headline commercial release of this half. It is the brand-facing surface our partners now log into - and it is what makes Vela materially more than a consumer rewards app.

What Pulse does: turns receipt and transaction data into the campaign signals brands actually want - verified, item-level purchase volume across every retailer, which rewards drove behaviour, and how each campaign converted into real basket activity.

Why it is unique: brands today either see their own retailer's data (Tesco/Dunnhumby, Sainsbury's/Nectar360) or buy panel surveys. Pulse is the first surface giving brands verified, cross-retailer, SKU-level purchase data - independently of any single retailer.

Why brands love it: it makes their reward spend measurable for the first time. Every pound funded is attributable to verified purchases, basket lift and frequency change. As the Nestlé brand team put it: "this is the first time we can see whether our loyalty spend actually moved the SKU."

Why it matters commercially: Pulse is the surface we charge for. It converts what used to be bespoke reporting into a self-serve enterprise product - collapsing ops cost per programme and unlocking repeatable platform-fee revenue across every brand we onboard.

Reewild is now Vela.

This H1 we completed the full rebrand from Reewild to Vela - new name, identity, tone of voice and ~50 new aspirational lifestyle rewards in market. The 90-second advert concept below is the visual expression of where the brand sits now: better everyday choices, aspirational rewards, and a route toward more thoughtful consumption.

Four partnerships, validating a repeatable model.

These partnerships - at varying stages of commercial and procurement progress - validate a repeatable model that enables brands to reward verified purchases across retailers while generating item-level purchase insights that brands can't typically access.

Agreed for Q4

Nestlé · San Pellegrino / Buxton / Nescafé +

£65k campaign

Test & Learn agreed across three Nestlé brands - including Nescafé, the world's largest coffee brand. Launching Q4.

Initial campaign across San Pellegrino, Buxton and Nescafé. The activation will be distributed through Nestlé's first-party CRM of ~2.5m consumers; their email pushes typically convert ~10k engagers each - driving an expected user spike from September ahead of the Q4 campaign launch.

Success unlocks a pathway to scale across the wider Nestlé portfolio. Strategically: this is the world's largest F&B company validating verified, cross-retailer item-level reward mechanics.

Initial T&L agreed

Carlsberg-Britvic +

£20k initial T&L

Initial Test & Learn agreed. Campaign to be shaped around one of Kronenbourg 1664, Carlsberg, Poretti, Tango, J20 or Robinsons.

First commercial engagement following the Carlsberg–Britvic merger - opening a pathway across one of the UK's largest beverage portfolios spanning beer, premium lager, soft drinks and squashes.

Success on the initial T&L unlocks the rest of the brand house: cross-category insight into how the same consumer moves between beer, mixers and soft drinks is exactly the basket-level signal Pulse is built to surface.

Annual programme · live

Imperial College London +

~£32k / year

Designed to lift basket value and frequency across £9m+ annual catering revenue.

Based on modelling assumptions of ~10% programme participation, the initiative could generate approximately £50k incremental annual sales for Imperial - based on conversions we proved at UCL in 2025.

Strategically important: tied to a wider operator serving 20+ universities across the UK, creating a clear pathway for expansion across additional campuses.

MSA + pilots under discussion

Mastercard +

MSA + pilots

Master Services Agreement under discussion as the legal shell, with specific deployments priced underneath as pilot / order forms.

A broad MSA that lets specific deployments be priced underneath as pilots - aligning both with Mastercard's internal KPI (live product integrations at scale) and Start Path's (deals inked and revenue generated). Three commercial roles being shaped in parallel: A · channel partner (Vela deploys with issuers, co-brands, merchants and food delivery - integration + platform + success fees); B · data partner (campaign measurement, switching analytics, category insight); C · sponsored innovation (Mastercard funds pilots like meal card issuers, Nespresso / Dynamic Yield-style, Imperial / Edenred).

Each role addresses a different budget centre - distribution, data revenue, innovation - reducing single-line dependency. We expect to land a hybrid: an A-style channel commercial with a C-style innovation pilot as the entry wedge.

Inside the rebuilt app.

A walk through the rebuilt consumer app - the surface where every metric in this update is generated. Each screen below is a live page from the new build: home, member tier, reward discovery, engagement streaks, aspirational redemption, itemised receipts, seasonal challenges, impact scoring, the Insiders community and Vela Plus sign-up.

‹ ›

Home - balance, rewards, daily activity · the hub of the app

Reward discovery - curated by category · Starbucks, Costa, Just Eat, Deliveroo

Airbnb reward - £50–£150 experience tier · aspirational redemption

Itemised receipt - line-by-line purchase view · points earned per SKU

Challenge screen - World Cup edition · seasonal engagement boost

Impact score breakdown - carbon, nutrition and category signal on every purchase

Weekly streak - engagement loop · W1 → W3 reward ladder

Vela Insiders - early-access community · joining reward

Vela Plus sign-up - premium tier · £5.99/month or £59/year

Plus Member - earned badge · shareable

Sapling Spirits - live this half.

Our first H1 brand campaign in market. Sapling went live mid-half, rewarding verified Sapling purchases across retailers with Pulse providing the brand team real-time visibility on basket lift, frequency change and reward burn-down.

Performance data - verified purchases, basket lift vs control, redeemer retention - is now collecting through Pulse. We will share the first material readout in the H2 2026 update; early signal is in line with the +9.8% transaction frequency uplift demonstrated in our prior validation campaigns.

Constructive competitive tension between the global networks.

Engagement with global payment networks continued to strengthen across H1. Engagement with both Visa and Mastercard is creating constructive competitive tension around distribution and strategic partnership opportunities.

Mastercard issuer pathway

Four live introductions across the UK and Europe. Two specifically anchor the next two milestones - the first issuer pilots that re-rate the conversation with the payment networks.

Monzo

United Kingdom

11M+ UK customers

Digital bank

Edenred

Europe-wide

60M cardholders · €45bn volume

Prepaid meal cards

UP

Romania · Up Group

35M users globally

Employee benefits

Pluxee

Romania (ex-Sodexo)

36M users globally

Prepaid meal cards

Each is a live Mastercard introduction - the network is offering them because issuers and benefit operators are actively looking for differentiated loyalty layers tied to item-level data. Edenred and Pluxee directly engage the €20bn European prepaid meal card market Mastercard prioritised in our last update.

The stickiness signal is strong - by design.

Purchases tracked have grown roughly 10× over the last 12 months - at zero paid acquisition spend, entirely organic. The shape of the growth, and the depth of the cohort behaviour beneath it, is what tells us this product is worth scaling.

Retention remains stable. After the initial drop-off, cohorts stabilise with ~15–20% returning between Day 30–60 - roughly 2× the consumer-app benchmark (industry Day 30 averages typically sit at 5–10%; top-decile consumer apps land around 10–13%). The cohort that tracks once tends to keep tracking.

The main constraint remains top-of-funnel acquisition, not engagement. We have begun running paid acquisition experiments, with encouraging early signals.

Test running · results to follow

Paid acquisition · first £3k test Meta + TikTok

An initial channel-validation test across the two platforms most relevant to our 25–45 lifestyle audience. Numbers below are illustrative of the structure - actual results will be shared in the coming weeks.

Test spend

£3,000

Across Meta + TikTok

Sign-ups acquired

~500

↑ 10× organic H1 weekly average

Blended CAC

£6.00

Comfortably inside payback target

Meta

£1,800 spend · 60% of test

Sign-ups

220

CAC

£8.18

First-purchase rate

60%

D7 retention

25%

Higher CAC, but stronger downstream activation and retention - closer to organic cohort behaviour.

TikTok

£1,200 spend · 40% of test

Sign-ups

280

CAC

£4.29

First-purchase rate

52%

D7 retention

18%

Cheaper acquisition at scale, slightly lower activation - strong creative-led testbed for the rebrand assets.

Takeaway: [to be added once results are in - illustrative structure only. The narrative will cover blended CAC, channel split between Meta and TikTok, downstream activation, and the implications for the £15–25k ramp and the £1m ITV media-for-equity decision.]

Vela is no longer just food and drink.

H1 saw us extend the platform into health & beauty - opening the second of the multi-vertical categories on our roadmap and unlocking an order-of-magnitude expansion in addressable spend, brand budgets and the dataset itself.

The mechanic is identical: a consumer tracks a purchase or links a transaction, the platform parses the SKU, matches it to structured data, and rewards the behaviour. The unlock is who funds it. Health & beauty brings the world's largest, most marketing-intensive consumer brands directly into our addressable buyer pool.

The buyer pool this opens up

The expansion makes Vela directly relevant to the global majors that dominate the category - companies that combined spend tens of billions on marketing, sampling and loyalty each year, and have the same need for SKU-level, cross-retailer signal that our food & drink partners do.

P&G

P&G

~$84bn revenue

L

L'Oréal

~€41bn revenue

U

Unilever

~€60bn revenue

R

Reckitt

~£14bn revenue

E

Estée Lauder

~$16bn revenue

B

Beiersdorf

~€10bn revenue

C

Coty

~$6bn revenue

H

Henkel

~€22bn revenue

First conversations already underway

The expansion is not theoretical. Inside the half we opened our first H&B conversation at scale:

Kao Corporation · introduction facilitated by Mastercard

Mastercard facilitated the introduction to Japanese consumer-goods major Kao Corporation - owner of Molton Brown since 2005 and parent to a wider H&B portfolio including Bioré, Jergens, John Frieda, Curel and Kanebo. The conversation opens via Molton Brown but addresses the full Kao brand house: ~¥1.5tn (~$10–12bn) annual group revenue and the first Asia-Pacific corporate sponsor in our pipeline alongside the existing European and US relationships. A second proof point that the Mastercard relationship is delivering inbound at scale.

Beyond TAM, the strategic value compounds. A consumer basket that includes both food and beauty tells a more complete story about who that consumer is and how they spend - and a more complete story is worth materially more to every buyer on the data ladder, all the way through to the alt-data buyers in the long-term thesis.

Three reinforcing layers of long-term defensibility.

During H1, we transitioned the platform to a fully AI-native development approach, significantly increasing development velocity. The platform captures item-level purchase data, matches it to structured datasets such as carbon and nutrition scoring, and applies incentives that drive defined behaviours.

Together, these components form a data and distribution layer connecting brands, retailers and financial institutions.

Product development velocity - compounding

The single cleanest evidence that the operating model is working: how much faster the team ships now than 12 months ago. Two views.

Two drivers, in sequence. The first step-change - the long-horizon +445% - came from establishing our Hyderabad engineering team: pure delivery capacity going from a small UK cell to a meaningfully larger one. The second - the +64% over the last six months - is compounding on top: AI-native development giving the same team another step up in shipped throughput. The two work in series, distributed capacity with AI agents inside it.

Brand budgets, scaling our user base.

The strategic shape of Vela is now legible. Each customer below is a brand or issuer paying Vela to drive measurable behaviour in their category - and, in the same motion, putting their own marketing dollar to work routing real consumers into the Vela platform. Their budgets become our distribution. Their reward spend becomes verified, item-level purchase data we own forever. Every contract below is therefore two outcomes at once: revenue, and a step-change in our reach and dataset.

Pipeline - by stage

Customer	Stage	Value	Context
Mastercard	Invoiced	£20k	Billed under Mastercard supplier engagement · first commercial revenue line on the new platform fee model

Customer	Stage	Value	Context
Imperial College London	Expected September	£20–30k	Annual programme · pathway to 20+ UK university operator
Mastercard · Imperial collaboration	Expected September	£30k	Mastercard-funded collaboration on the Imperial College programme · September delivery
Nestlé · San Pellegrino	Procurement completing next week	Part of £65k Nestlé T&L	Premium sparkling water · global brand activation
Nestlé · Buxton	Procurement completing next week	Part of £65k Nestlé T&L	UK still water · category-leading brand
Nestlé · Nescafé	Procurement completing next week	Part of £65k Nestlé T&L	The world's largest coffee brand · 2.5m-consumer CRM activation in September
Carlsberg-Britvic	Verbally agreed	£20k initial	Initial T&L to be shaped around Kronenbourg 1664, Carlsberg, Poretti, Tango, J20 or Robinsons · Sep/Oct
Sapling Spirits · re-up	Verbally agreed	~£10k	Follow-on programme · informed by Pulse-measured H1 lift

Customer	Stage	Value	Context
Mastercard · Edenred pilot	Pilot scope agreed	Pilot value in scoping	Mastercard-introduced · anchored on the live Imperial programme · first issuer pilot
Mastercard · Pluxee Romania	Active	Pilot value in scoping	Second issuer pilot · direct entry into the €20bn European prepaid meal-card market
Visa · Vela Plus · Visa Infinite	Pilot scoping	£140k indicative	~20M+ affluent EU cardholders in scope · running in parallel with Mastercard pathway
Immediate Media	Active	£52k	BBC Good Food, Radio Times · 22M users
Compass Group	On hold	£140k	Multi-site enterprise foodservice · on hold on their side
Wonderfield · Dr Will's · MOTH · Bold Bean Co	Proposals out	TBC	Challenger CPG cluster · expected to convert across H2 / early FY27

2026 milestones - what we're tracking this year

What we're actively managing.

Three risks worth flagging openly, in the order they matter.

Time to be heard.

Context worth flagging openly: we have never done any paid marketing or PR. Every metric in this update - the 10× growth in purchases tracked, the ~20% Day 30–60 cohort retention, the partnerships - has been delivered organically, on word-of-mouth and direct outreach. That has been the right discipline through the build years; it will not be the right discipline through the next phase.

Where Freuds will be aiming to land the Vela story

FT

Financial Times

T

The Times

B

Bloomberg

BBC

BBC

F

Forbes

W

Wired

S

Sifted

TC

TechCrunch

Target placements - illustrative of the kind of coverage Freuds will be aiming to land across the next year, not confirmed.

Beyond the 2026 milestones - what we're building toward.

The 2026 calendar above is the near-term execution plan. The medium-term build is broader: expanding the behavioural data model beyond food and drink. Health & beauty is already underway (see above); the categories that follow - wellness, household, pet, kids, fashion - each compound the dataset's value and widen the buyer ladder that closes this update.

Thank you - and where your network can move the needle.

You backed Vela early. The progress in this update - Pulse live with five brand teams, Nestlé procurement completing next week across San Pellegrino, Buxton and Nescafé, Carlsberg-Britvic agreed, Sapling live, the first Mastercard-introduced issuer pilot in motion, the rebrand complete, the health & beauty category opened - is what your capital has built. None of it exists without that early conviction.