Focus: Text to ask service
Sarah McVittieAge: 27
Company: RE5ULT
Former corporate finance analyst McVittie and co-founder Thomas Roberts believe they’ve found a purpose outside of pub quizzes for their text answering service ’82ASK’. Providing information as detailed as company data and economic forecasts, each answer is verified by a human and then fed into RE5ULT’s constantly expanding ‘human brain’ database. Provisionally launched in August 2004, recent second round fundraising means 82ASK can now market itself to natural early adapters, 18-35 urbanites, in addition to a number of partners. The service costs £1 per text and first year turnover of £500,000 is projected to hit £6m in 2006.
2017 update:
Re5ult rebranded itself as Texpert in 2007 and, in 2008, was sold to the US-based Knowledge Generation Bureau (KGB). McVittie became vice president of new markets at KGB until 2009. In 2010, the entrepreneur co-founded Dressipi with Donna Kelly, a fashion discovery and online styling service helping match clothes to consumers “digital fashion fingerprint”.
