There is a stretch of 2016 in which the founder of what would become a nine-figure revenue business could not get his own family to download it. One profile says Barney Hussey-Yeo struggled to get even his partner or his mother to sign up. Cleo was a chatbot, and it lived, in its first form, in his bedroom.
He came to it by a plain route. He took a computer science degree at Manchester Metropolitan, a masters in machine learning at Bristol, and went to work as a data scientist at Wonga, the payday lender, for about 13 months. A podcast blurb describes state-school beginnings in Sheffield, though I could not find a fuller account of his childhood.
The price was a business that looked more like American fintech than a British chatbot.
What he took from Wonga is not documented in the sources I read, so I will not guess at it. What is documented is the product he built next: a Facebook Messenger assistant that read your bank data and nagged you, with a joke, about spending. He joined Entrepreneur First and, by March 2016, had already launched.
The wound was ordinary and the stakes were small. The first users were hard to find. The first money, a GBP2m round led by LocalGlobe in 2017, came with backers such as Taavet Hinrikus and Ian Hogarth.
What nobody expected came from across the Atlantic. When Cleo launched in the US, daily signups jumped from around 1,000 in the UK to around 10,000 within a week, by Hussey-Yeo's account, because American bank APIs, especially Plaid, made connecting an account easy. By the December 2020 Series B, led by EQT Ventures with $44m, Cleo had 4 million registered users, 96% of them in the US, and over $10m in annual recurring revenue. A free tier sat beside a $5.99 premium plan and a salary advance of up to $100.
The price was a business that looked more like American fintech than a British chatbot. Reported 2024 revenue rose from $65.9m to $135.7m with a small pre-tax loss, and in 2025 the company launched a voice-and-memory version of its coach. In February 2026 a press release claimed $185m in annual recurring revenue; Hussey-Yeo has also cited $280m. The figures differ by source and are the company's own.
The lesson is in the chatbot's first users. If a product only works when strangers like it, you will not learn much from your mother. Hussey-Yeo kept going until strangers did.