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I love to hear from good founders I’ve encountered before when they launch something new.

Sarat Pediredla is a well-known face in the digital product consultancy world thanks to his previous company Hedgehog Lab.

With his new product, his target customer is the kind of business he used to run. Read on to learn all about Thredspan.

– Martin

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Thredspan wants to help professional services companies understand the future

The thing about doing something for long enough is that you eventually learn it inside out. And that means you intuitively know the pain points others in your position feel.

After almost 20 years running digital product consultancy Hedgehog Lab, Sarat Pediredla knows the consultancy market inside out. Now having left the business he built, he’s launched a new startup with the goal of giving others in the space a much easier time.

“In consultancies, you traditionally have professional services automation tools, or PSAs. They've been around for a long time and none of them ever really help you run the business,” Pediredla says.

In fact, he found using PSAs a frustrating experience, with their “glorified spreadsheets” that provide data but not in a particularly useful way.

And so Pediredla is building Thredspan as “an operating system for consultancies” that can help them run their businesses with forward-looking intelligence rather than just data about the past.

In practice, Thredspan is designed to help consultancies make important decisions like when to increase their headcount, and help them keep track of profitability across complex, long-term client engagements.

“The difference between the tools that exist and where we're going is a lot of tools are historical, so they allow you to do analysis on what happened last month, last year, and last quarter. But there are very few tools that use AI to give you intelligence about what is going to come in the future, and that's an important element of Thredspan. That's why we call it ‘professional service intelligence’,” Pediredla says.

“You get data and insights that you can effectively use to run your business in the future, rather than just look backwards and see how your business performed in the past.”

Key to creating these insights is capturing the right data in the right way from across the business, rather than relying on third-party tools such as CRMs that aren’t necessarily built for the task at hand.

The story so far

Pediredla has worked in the digital consultancy space for 25 years and co-founded Hedgehog Lab in 2007. Over the years, the company grew to serve clients such as Aviva, Santander, and Deliveroo from its base in Newcastle.

After organising a succession plan, he stood down as CEO at the end of 2025 to address a new challenge.

“I had this problem that I was constantly facing, running my business on a day-to-day basis. With where AI is right now and where technology is, it just felt like the right intersection and the right time to solve this problem.

“This problem has existed for a long time. To solve this problem in the way I wanted to do pre-AI would have been quite cost-prohibitive, because you'd have to train your own machine learning models. You'd have to do a lot of complex engineering, even two years ago.”

He began talking about the idea for Thredspan with potential customers. Feedback was positive to the point, he says, where some people were ready to sign up based off the concept alone.

As is often the case these days, Pediredla is starting out as a solo founder. With an initial version of the product now complete, a beta launch is planned for the first cohort of users in July.

“The product is mostly built [thanks to] my traditional background in software engineering. Because it's a core platform that businesses will use day to day, there's a little bit of testing and some fine tuning we want to do. The goal is to get to 10 business customers by the end of the year.”

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