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Standing at a copy machine at HSBC late one night, reviewing 50 statements of work that needed urgent attention, Kayleigh Kuptz had her lightbulb moment. "Technology should do this," she thought, "this should not be done by me." Four years later, that frustration has become Deployed, a B2B SaaS platform that's saving enterprise clients millions while transforming how corporations engage with service providers forever.
You can listen to our conversation with Kayleigh in the latest episode of the Angel Insights podcast:
Kayleigh Kuptz never set out to be a founder. Originally from Germany, she studied international business in the Netherlands before following what she calls "a fairly generic path" into consulting with Accenture Strategy. But rather than climbing the traditional corporate ladder, she found herself drawn to problems that needed solving.
"I followed exciting opportunities and I followed problems to be solved," Kuptz explains. Her unconventional career path took her from Accenture to "joining the dark side" at her former client HSBC, where she spent years as Chief of Staff for Financial Crime Risk. Later, she moved to Castle Trust, supporting the IT components of a banking license application.
The common thread? "I was handed a problem to be solved. And that's what energizes me."
But it was one particular problem that kept following her everywhere: the painfully inefficient process of how corporations engage service providers through statements of work.
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As a consultant at Accenture, Kuptz had to write statements of work every six to eight weeks; those critical documents that define what service providers will do, how much it will cost, how long it will take, and under what terms everything will be delivered.
"All of that is agreed over many, many, many emails and meetings and then written down in an often outdated Word document template that's then never looked at," she recalls. "Deliveries are rarely linked to those legally binding documents, which causes all sorts of problems."
When she switched to the buyer side at HSBC, the frustration only intensified. Trying to staff teams quickly and engage multiple service providers meant navigating the same slow, fragmented process, but now from the corporate perspective.
The scale of the inefficiency became clear through her research: a large UK bank spends approximately £1 billion annually on services. Breaking that down reveals tens of thousands of these documents being created, each one consuming valuable time from mid-to-senior-level professionals whose daily rates run into hundreds of pounds.
The breakthrough moment came during one of those late nights at HSBC. Kuptz and her now co-founder, Jamie, were alone on their floor, reviewing yet another stack of statements of work to identify inflated pricing and scope issues.
"I was at the copy machine copying 50 statements of work that we had to review that night," she remembers. "I just remember standing there thinking, technology should do this. This should not be done by me."
That conversation at the copy machine sparked something that would eventually become Deployed. But like many great entrepreneurial journeys, the path wasn't linear.
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Even while working at Castle Trust, Kuptz and Jamie continued their weekend brainstorming sessions, eventually bringing in a third co-founder, Emma, who ran research through an Innovate UK grant while the founders remained in their day jobs.
The research validated what they'd experienced firsthand: the problem was universal. "I've been doing this for six years and I have yet to meet someone who says, 'I love writing statements of work. It's so easy,'" Kuptz notes.
The tipping point came when their excitement for the evening work exceeded their enthusiasm for their day jobs. "I think it's only fair to your employer to then leave," she reflects. "And that's what we did."
Deployed's B2B SaaS platform tackles what Kuptz calls "enterprise inputs". These are any documents like scopes of work, commercials, requirements, project briefs, and hiring justifications that business users create to engage corporate functions like procurement, legal, and HR.
The solution transforms a traditionally chaotic process into a structured, collaborative workflow. Instead of wrestling with 30-page contracts and endless free-text boxes, business users navigate a conversational flow that generates contracts automatically.
The results are dramatic: Deployed delivers approximately 75% time savings. One client saw document creation time drop from 15 days to just four days, while less complex products can now be completed in hours instead of days.
But the real impact extends beyond time savings. The platform's AI components suggest appropriate pricing mechanisms and outcome-based deliverables, resulting in 11-16% cost savings per contract. For that £1 billion-spending bank, this translates to £110-160 million in annual savings.
Deployed faces the classic challenge of category creation. They're not just selling a product, but challenging deeply ingrained habits. Corporate functions like legal and procurement are often set in their ways, viewing innovation as scary even when it benefits them.
"Some of them see DocuSign as innovation," Kuptz observes, "and then you have to go in and say, DocuSign is over 20 years old. It's not innovation anymore, per se."
The key has been demonstrating that AI augments rather than replaces human capabilities. "We augment the commodity part of their work, not the strategic part where they can use their brain and their capabilities," she explains. "We augment the boring stuff."
This positioning has helped Deployed compress their sales cycles from a year down to three months, a 75% reduction that mirrors their product's efficiency gains.
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Deployed's funding journey began with an unexpected win. In 2020, with just a prototype and no clients, they entered a female founders competition hosted by Microsoft Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and featuring Melinda Gates. Winning the global SaaS category brought a $2 million convertible loan that kickstarted everything.
That unusual pre-seed funding allowed them to spend two years building their platform to enterprise security and data protection standards before onboarding their first clients. By 2022, when they raised their seed round, they had revenue, corporate clients, and proven results.
The round included Angel Academy, whose operator-heavy network resonated with Deployed's approach. The partnership proved particularly valuable as Angel Academy launched their EIS fund, providing sophisticated investors with access to high-growth companies like Deployed that are solving real enterprise problems at scale.
With 50% UK and 50% US investment, plus a significant proportion of users already in North America, international expansion feels natural for Deployed. But Kuptz has noticed cultural differences that influence their approach.
"UK buyers are very process-focused, and US buyers feel more impact-focused," she observes. "US clients seem to move a lot faster. They get excited. And our ethos of involving clients in the journey matches their cultural perspective."
This customer-centric approach has sometimes led to over-customization challenges. "We did go down a too high customization rope in the beginning," Kuptz admits. "We had to learn to say no and define our own prioritization mechanism."
Looking ahead, Kuptz is most excited about leveraging the data Deployed collects to create predictive insights. "Which projects are successful and how have they been defined? Which projects fail and how have they been defined?" she asks.
The goal is developing an AI and machine learning framework that can identify patterns contributing to project success or failure, feeding these insights back to users in real-time.
Her broader vision positions Deployed as "what DocuSign is for e-signatures" but for any enterprise document creation. It's an ambitious North Star that could reshape how corporations handle their most critical business inputs.
Balancing entrepreneurship with twin toddlers requires what Kuptz calls "ruthlessly prioritising pockets of time." Her advice to other potential founders is refreshingly honest: focus on the problem, not the title.
"I never sat down and said, 'the next thing I want to do is be a founder,'" she explains. "I intimately knew this problem and it frustrated me. I'm not obsessed with being a founder. I'm obsessed with the problem I want to solve."
That problem-first approach has kept Deployed grounded in real customer needs rather than theoretical solutions. It's advice that resonates particularly well with the operator-heavy investor community that Angel Academe has cultivated through their EIS fund.
Deployed represents more than just another B2B SaaS success story. They're addressing a fundamental inefficiency that costs enterprises billions while frustrating the professionals who navigate these processes daily.
By transforming 30-page contracts into conversational flows and turning scattered email threads into collaborative workflows, they're not just saving time and money—they're making work more strategic and human-centered.
The copy machine moment that started it all has evolved into a platform that could reshape how the world's largest corporations operate. For Kuptz, that's validation that sometimes the best entrepreneurial opportunities are hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone frustrated enough to say: "Technology should do this."
Deployed's platform is available for enterprise clients. Learn more about their approach to transforming enterprise document creation at linkedin.com/company/deployed-co
