.png)
Nick Jones has pivoted Zumo twice, sunsetted a consumer app with over 100,000 users, and is now positioning the company as crypto infrastructure for the institutions that were too cautious to touch the space two years ago. Here's what he learned along the way.
There's a version of the Zumo story that sounds like a cautionary tale. A crypto company builds a consumer app at the peak of the market. The market collapses. Two major UK financial institutions pull back from pilots that were close to going live. The company restructures, sheds headcount, and quietly winds down its flagship product.
But that's not really the story. The real story is about a founder who understood, from the start, that the timing was wrong. Who kept pivoting until the timing was right. And who built the kind of regulatory standing that now looks, as the UK finally clarifies its framework for crypto authorisation, like the most important asset in the business.
Nick Jones co-founded Zumo with Paul Roach after careers running across London's early internet and media scene, through data, mobile, and machine learning. Nick had already had exits, spent time as an investor focused on what was then called machine learning, and was looking to get back in as a founder. Paul had deep product experience and had spent serious time in blockchain. Their thesis, when they started building, was a non-custodial wallet infrastructure that businesses could white-label and build on. A fundamental business-to-business setup.
It was a strong thesis. Unfortunately, it was about seven years early.
Knowing when to pivot
The early B2B wallet product found a technically strong but commercially premature market. Rather than wait it out, Nick and Paul moved quickly. They saw where the actual adoption was happening, in retail crypto between 2019 and 2022, and built a consumer app on top of the infrastructure they'd already created. The app was user-friendly, covered trading and crypto access, and attracted over 100,000 users during the period of peak retail crypto interest.
Zumo was also one of the first companies through the FCA's registration gateway, the fourth through the door. In an industry that had operated in a regulatory grey zone, getting registered and supervised by the FCA was a significant commitment for a small company. It also turned out to be the right one.
Then 2022 happened. The collapse of several high-profile crypto platforms spooked the market and pushed UK financial institutions back from the blockchain pilots they'd been quietly running. Two large institutions that Zumo had been working with through that year pulled back. One had been close to a real rollout.
Nick is candid about what that moment required:
"We understand that the crypto markets are cyclical. You know, they go through phases where they go up really fast, and then they go through phases where they go down, and then they go through phases where they don't do very much for a while."
The market falling away further confirmed the underlying read: the institutions were interested, the technology was ready but the regulation wasn't there yet, and without regulatory clarity, the risk calculus for a traditional financial services business wasn't going to work. So Zumo went back to its investors, made the case for a second pivot, successfully wound down the consumer app, returned all customer funds, and transitioned fully into B2B infrastructure. Crypto as a service, for companies that want to offer digital asset products without building the whole stack themselves.
The regulatory inflection point
The reason that second pivot makes sense right now comes down to timing, which is the thing Nick has been thinking about throughout Zumo's entire journey.
In October 2026, cryptocurrency activity in the UK will become fully authorised under the Financial Services and Markets Act, putting crypto firms on the same regulatory footing as investment management companies. The FCA registration regime that Zumo went through from 2021 onward was the precursor to this. Full authorisation raises the bar significantly, but it also removes the single biggest hurdle:
"The closer we get to being fully authorised, the lower the risk level becomes for a traditional company."
You can already see the signs. Whether it is Lloyds running tokenised deposit tests or US banks launching crypto services following regulatory clarity stateside, the pattern is consistent: once the regulatory path is clear, institutional adoption accelerates quickly. Zumo is positioning themselves to be the infrastructure layer for that adoption in the UK, in the same way a payments-as-a-service provider handles the heavy lifting on payments. The original B2B thesis, just reached via a longer route than anyone anticipated.
The co-founder relationship
Paul Roach brought the product depth to Zumo. Nick brought the commercial instinct, the fundraising experience, and the strategy. A very deliberate split that translates into everyday function.
Nick is clear that the co-founder relationship works when the two people are genuinely different from each other, not just different on paper. He's direct about what that balance looks like in practice: Paul is an exceptionally strong product person, which isn't Nick's leading domain. Nick's strengths sit in ideas, strategy, commercial conversations, and raising capital. That division is borne by their skill set and expertise, very deliberate.
"You don't want, you know, two of me in the business. I have too many ideas, you know, all the time, going down too many sidetracks."
The common failure mode he describes is founders choosing someone they get on with, someone similar, because it's easier in the short term. Cultural fit is too easy a shorthand. What actually matters is whether you each understand your own strengths and weaknesses clearly, whether those skills genuinely complement each other, and whether you've been honest about who does what before you're in the middle of something hard. That clarity doesn't automatically come from friendship. It comes from a frank conversation about what you're each actually good at.
What experience as an investor changes
Nick had invested in companies before founding Zumo. He's seen the relationship from both sides, and it shapes how he thinks about investor communication in a way that first-time founders often discover too late.
The basic principle is simple: don't only contact investors when you need money. If they're putting in their own capital, they're taking real personal risk on you, and they deserve to know how things are going, good and bad. Surprises are what erode trust, not bad news delivered honestly.
There's also something more structural that experience gives you: the ability to look at your own company and ask whether it's investable right now, and to act on the answer even when that's uncomfortable.
"You need to think, am I investable personally? And have we made the right decisions?"
After mid-2023, when it became clear that the retail crypto market wasn't recovering quickly, Zumo made significant structural changes. Headcount, team composition, the balance of the business, Nick describes being able to make those calls, clearly and relatively quickly, as one of the things that investment experience gave him. He'd seen what happens when founders hold on too long, and he knew the cost of it.
The Techscaler UAE trade mission
Through Techscaler, Zumo joined a trade mission to the UAE, a market that had been on Nick's radar for some time. The UAE, both in Dubai through the VARA framework and in Abu Dhabi through the ADGM, had moved earlier on crypto regulation than almost anywhere else, building a genuinely business-friendly environment that attracted firms across the spectrum of digital assets.
Nick had done the groundwork beforehand, understood the market, had existing conversations in motion, and went in with a clear objective. Something we recommend to all cohort members on an international route. Know more about it here.
"You need to know before you go, what do I expect to come back with from that trip?"
The trip generated strong interest with a company Zumo had been in conversation with for some time. The progress made during those few days in person would almost certainly have taken considerably longer without the face-to-face time the mission created. Nick notes this isn't unique to the UAE, but the face-to-face culture is stronger there, and understanding that before you arrive matters. Logistics matter too: Dubai is large, traffic is significant, and a badly planned day of meetings can waste the whole thing. The principle he comes back to is preparation. Work the trip as hard as you possibly can before you get on the plane, then work it harder when you're there.
The value extended beyond the meetings themselves. Being part of a group of Scotland's founders from entirely different sectors, and comparing notes on the same underlying challenge of internationalisation, turned out to matter as much as the individual conversations. Zumo has received support from Scottish Development International over the years, and the Techscaler element felt like a natural extension of that, with the strong add-on of a peer community.
On Techscaler Support
Nick's recommendation to founders considering Techscaler is grounded in what he sees as the specific gap it fills in Scotland's tech ecosystem.
Scotland's technology community is relatively young. Founders recycling capital and experience back into new companies, the generational depth that makes Silicon Valley function the way it does, isn't there yet. Building the peer infrastructure now matters. Techscaler, and CodeBase more broadly, fills key sections of that gap in a way that's distinct from commercial accelerators: there's no equity component, the agenda isn't someone else's, and the mentors are people who have recently built or are building real companies.
What Nick values about Techscaler's mentorship specifically is the quality of the access. The mentors are people who have recently built or are actively building real companies in Scotland. That's a different kind of conversation than advice from someone further removed from the operational reality of scaling, and at a stage where you're trying to move quickly, the distinction matters.
"One of the nice things about getting access to the mentors on Techscaler is they're people who've actually recently done or are doing successful businesses."
His caveat applies to any programme: you get out what you put in, and understanding what you want from it before you start is what determines whether it's useful. One of two accelerator programmes Zumo went through was, by Nick's account, almost entirely without value. He puts that down to misaligned expectations, not the programme itself. The lesson is the same one that runs through everything else in this story: be clear about what you're going in for.
Get involved
Techscaler supports startups across Scotland through education, community and international market access programmes designed to help founders build and scale ambitious businesses.
Click here to find out more about Techscaler and upcoming programmes.
.png)
