My dear friend K recently had an employment tribunal claim made against against herself and her small business for over £10k in damages. The claim of discrimination and injury to feeling turned out to be groundless and vexatious but still caused massive stress and many months of insecurity.

While helping investigate the situation, and trying to make my friends life a little easier, I was struck by how inaccessible the public employment tribunal decisions are in the UK – very basic keyword search and lengthy, legally worded PDF documents.

In response I have developed Ratio, a chat and email advisor for SMEs and employees to help understand their rights and responsibilities as decided by employment tribunal judges. Describe your employment question or situation over and receive a detailed summary of how similar cases have been decided in the past decade.

Interesting challenges and opportunities abound.

One part is understanding the GDPR implications of processing public data at the intersection of legitimate and commercial interest.

A second important part is compute. The processing power to allow reasonable iteration cycles is expensive when at all available through for example AWS. The outcome of a UKRI grant application to use the Dawn or Isambard super computer for processing will make a huge difference to the viability of this project.

And finally, the business side: what segment of the market is ripe, what’s the revenue model etc? Axniks Ltd is now part of the NatWest Accelerator network and the mentorship and coaching made available in invaluable in this quest.

Still, very exciting and loads of fun. I will be back soon with info on how to test drive an early version of Ratio.