£700k · Other round · Software · Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
From left: Kevin Beales, Rojin Yarahmadi, Nick Beno and Tom O'Neill. Image: Northstar Ventures.
Newcastle upon Tyne-based PolyBox has secured a £700k financing package to expand its automated marketing-reporting platform and add more advanced AI-powered analytics. The package comprises £150k from Northstar Ventures through the North East Innovation Fund, £250k from angel investors and a £300k Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant. Northstar says the latest support takes the company's investment and grant funding since pre-seed to £1.5m.
Turning recurring reports into reusable infrastructure
PolyBox is built for agencies and marketing teams that repeatedly pull campaign data from advertising, analytics, CRM and social platforms, then turn it into client-facing reports. The company says its product supports data from more than 700 sources, pre-aggregates results and offers exports alongside AI summaries and natural-language queries. Its pitch is to replace a recurring manual workflow with a shared reporting layer that non-technical marketers can use.
The commercial leverage sits in agency capacity. A reporting system that can be configured once and reused across clients may let an agency serve more accounts without adding analyst hours at the same rate. PolyBox publishes a testimonial from Impression's head of paid media saying a process that previously took 16 hours a month using Supermetrics and Looker Studio fell to 30 minutes. That is a customer claim rather than an independent benchmark, but it illustrates the time-saving outcome the product is selling.
The package also shows how the company is financing product development. Equity from Northstar and angels was paired with an Innovate UK grant unlocked through the investor partnership. PolyBox says the funding will accelerate its roadmap for automated reporting and AI-generated insights. The distinction matters: the product already aggregates and presents marketing data, while the new work is intended to make analysis and decision support more capable.
A second round extends the same product thesis
Northstar first backed PolyBox in a £500k round announced in May 2024. At the time, the company planned enhanced integrations, team growth and an AI analysis chat tool, building on development work with Newcastle's National Innovation Centre for Data. The new package continues that direction rather than funding a wholly new product category.
The execution test is whether AI assistance improves the speed and usefulness of reporting without obscuring data quality or the judgement agencies apply for individual clients. Marketing data is fragmented across platforms, metrics and attribution models. PolyBox can create durable value if its connectors remain dependable and its automated commentary helps teams move from collecting figures to deciding what to do next. The capital gives the company room to deepen that layer; customer retention and repeatable agency deployment will show whether the time savings translate into a scalable software business.
