7.4x SEIS exit for Haatch: global work payments solutions Native Teams
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Haatch has just announced its first profitable SEIS exit (April 2025): cross-border work payments platform Native Teams.
The sale has generated proceeds of £1,110,037 from an investment of £149,999 – a 7.4x return for investors in one of the 2021/22 tranches of Haatch SEIS Fund – Wealth Club investors amongst them. Past performance is not a guide to the future – there have also been failures.
Native Teams was launched in July 2021 by serial entrepreneur Jack Thorogood, after he experienced the problems of running a global remote team first-hand.
The platform is now used by 400+ employers, 80,000+ remote workers and freelancers in 85+ countries to manage international work payments, payroll and tax compliance, as well as employee benefits, visa support and employment contracts.
Haatch SEIS Fund invested in Native Teams in March 2022 as part of a €2 million funding round, alongside several European and US venture capital firms.
Native Teams is the second profitable exit announced by Haatch in the space of five weeks. It follows the profitable cash sale of software provider Re-flow in March 2025, which generated returns of up to 6.55x for its EIS Fund.
The manager has so far achieved five profitable EIS or SEIS exits, despite 90% of the portfolio being under four years old.
How does Native Teams combine cross-border hiring and automated payments? Why did Haatch invest and what value does it aim to add to companies like Native Teams? How could you invest in similar companies?
Important: The information on this website is for experienced investors. It is not a personal recommendation to invest. If you’re unsure, please seek advice. These investments are for the long term. They are high risk and can fall as well as rise in value: you could lose all the money you invest. Tax rules can change and benefits depend on circumstances.
What does Native teams do?
Jack Thorogood (CEO) and co-founder Alex Mitrevska (Chief Experience Officer) created payments platform Native Teams out of necessity.
As freelancers working on international projects, they and others they know often struggled with recurring problems. As Jack explains, “Many of us were working remotely without having an in-country employer and we didn’t really know how to make sure everyone would be properly employed in their own country.”
Native Teams aims to make it easier to hire and be hired across international borders. It combines the roles of both payment platform and employer-of-record (EOR).
An EOR provides global employment services – so businesses can hire from foreign countries without having to set up legal entities abroad. Native Teams takes on employment liability and handles HR admin and payroll. Its enterprise customers benefit from having a simple way to pay remote employees: they’re just billed an invoice – no worries about taxes, contributions and local compliance, all of which is taken care of by Native Teams.
Native Teams can issue local employment contracts, see to visas and work permits, and arrange health insurance and private pensions.
At the same time, it processes all the necessary payments automatically and in local currencies – so workers get paid quickly and securely.
By streamlining the multiple services into one platform and automating many of the processes, the company estimates it can help cut the administrative time surrounding the hiring process by 90% and reduce costs down to a third.
What do the clients say?
As we expanded across multiple countries, managing compliance with local regulations and providing local benefits became a challenge. By collaborating with Native Teams, our company positioned itself to concentrate on our mission with renewed focus and efficiency.
Native Teams’ expertise in global employment, compliance, and HR administration gave us the necessary support to hire talent abroad and expand global operations. Their easy onboarding process was crucial for expanding outside Switzerland.
Why did Haatch invest – and what value could Haatch add to portfolio companies?
Haatch is headed by four partners who are all entrepreneurs in their own right. With a history of profitable personal exits, they provide the Haatch portfolio with hands-on support, attend board meetings and advise in areas such as go-to-market strategy. Partners have historically invested in every SEIS fund tranche.
Haatch seeks to back entrepreneurs – like Native Teams’ founder Jack Thorogood – who are building disruptive digital businesses. Haatch targets B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in particular, as this is where the team has significant experience and could be well placed to add value.
Haatch seeks potential investees that are:
- A company offering B2B Software as a Service (SaaS) – in Haatch’s view, the SaaS sector offers the potential to scale across the global marketplace in short timescales, with little or no physical infrastructure required.
- A company solving real and current problems for organisations – potentially capable of making it indispensable to its customers and highly attractive to acquirers.
- Able to demonstrate the potential for long-term, predictable, revenue-generating contracts with larger organisations.
Haatch first met Native Teams founder/CEO Jack in August 2021, but waited until the business had developed a sharper B2B SaaS focus and grown revenue, before investing through its SEIS Fund 2 in March 2022.
The fund has achieved its profitable exit of the portfolio company just after the three-year SEIS minimum holding period. Haatch viewed the exit as an opportunity to return capital efficiently to early backers – and indeed it has returned almost the entirety of SEIS Fund 2.
Returning capital to investors is everything. We’re proud to back founders like Jack and businesses like Native that not only scale globally but also deliver meaningful, tangible returns for investors – and do so within just a few years. This exit reinforces our belief in the power of SEIS to drive both innovation and investor outcomes.
How to invest in similar companies
The Haatch SEIS Fund is currently open for investment – the next deadline is 25 April 2025 targeting deployment in the 2025/26 tax year – not guaranteed, and you can invest online.
Investors should be able to claim up to 50% income tax and capital gains tax reliefs, as well as other SEIS reliefs. Tax rules can change and benefits depend on circumstances.
Haatch has made a total of 103 SEIS investments to date. Following the exit of Native Teams, of the remaining portfolio, 23 companies are held at an uplift averaging 2.6x cost, 71 are held at cost, and seven have failed (April 2025). Past performance is not a guide to the future
Haatch SEIS targets a return of 5x over a planned holding period of 5-10 years – high risk and not guaranteed.
Currently, Haatch aims to invests around £85,000 from the British Business Bank’s Regional Angels Program, alongside investors in each of its SEIS and EIS fund investments.
See Haatch SEIS Fund's performance
Performance per £100 invested in each tax year
Source: Haatch Ventures, as at April 2025. Past performance is not a guide to future performance. The chart shows realised returns (where share proceeds have been returned to investors as cash) and unrealised returns (where cash has not yet been returned and the value of the investments is based on the manager’s own valuation methodology). There is no ready market for unlisted shares. The figures shown are net of all fees and do not include any income tax relief or loss relief.
See Haatch EIS Fund's performance
Performance per £100 invested in each tax year
Source: Haatch Ventures LLP, as at 28 February 2025. Past performance is not a guide to future performance. The chart shows realised returns, if any (where share proceeds have been returned to investors as cash) and unrealised returns (where cash has not yet been returned and the value of the investments is based on the manager’s own valuation methodology) There is no ready market for unlisted shares. The figures shown are net of all fees and do not include any income tax relief or loss relief.
Wealth Club aims to make it easier for experienced investors to find information on – and apply for – investments. You should base your investment decision on the offer documents and ensure you have read and fully understand them before investing. The information on this webpage is a marketing communication. It is not advice or a personal or research recommendation to buy any of the investments mentioned, nor does it include any opinion as to the present or future value or price of these investments. It does not satisfy legal requirements promoting investment research independence and is thus not subject to prohibitions on dealing ahead of its dissemination.
Alex Davies
Chief Executive
Alex was a board director at Hargreaves Lansdown, where he worked for 15 years. He was responsible for building Hargreaves Lansdown into the biggest direct-to-consumer SIPP provider in the UK with more than 150,000 clients and over £12 billion under management. He is a keen investor with a portfolio of shares, funds, student property, EIS and VCT investments.