Shareholder Update
May 2026
Internal Sabotage.
Rebuilt & Recovered by AI.
Ready for Scale.
June 2021
On 3rd June 2021 the founder emailed shareholders, team and engineering contractors to confirm miPic had received a £2 million investment opportunity from Dubai and Abu Dhabi VCs to anchor a new crowdfunding campaign via Seedrs in the UK. This would be miPic's second crowdfunding campaign — the pre-launch received:
Traction before our crowdfund was publicly announced or launched.
The founder was anticipating the sabotage after removing a former lead developer for negligence — affirmed by other team members of slowly blocking feature releases. In preparation, the founder logged all communications with the bad-acting contractors involved who had previously deleted PayPal keys, SSL certificates to cause IT dysfunction and blocked revenue-generating product launches in the buildup to the June 2021 downtime.
Origin
Carl was the artist himself from 2006 to 2009, with his own Liverpool market stall selling canvas prints. He wanted to transform how photographers and artists monetise their own images via social commerce — turning 100 likes into £100 as a desirable physical product.
Social network effects of your fan base — that's the seed miPic grew from. Every product on the platform connects an artist's followers directly to a printed object they can hold in their hands.
2014 — Beta Soft Launch
A £12k bank loan to build The Internet's Print Button — we had no marketing budget, no distribution playbook, one idea: give everyone a platform to earn from their creativity.
A Liverpool solo founder with younger retail sales experience. No prior startup experience. No business MBA. No venture-capital network. Carl launched miPic from a Clapham flat-share in 2014. Four months after launch miPic won Virgin Startups' Pitch to Rich from 300 UK entrants, pitching to Sir Richard Branson live on TV in a Shark Tank–style live audience.
That platform validation enabled miPic to fundraise on Crowdcube — raising £170k from fifty investors, launching the campaign from a £0 anchor standing start.
[ mi (my) - pic ] ; noun
The team hijacked the existing Spanish word mipic, gaining users in 40 countries by month 2 — entirely organic using the Twitter and Instagram hashtag. Today miPic has paying global customers in 80 countries and users in 190 locations worldwide, before paid marketing spend.
Featured In
Early Marketing Test
A 4-week paid acquisition test followed by 2 weeks of pure organic ripple. Network effects of the social-commerce model show up immediately once paid spend stops — shares, reach, and signups continue compounding without budget.
Instant Users
4-Week Paid Test · 2-Week Organic Ripple
The compounding pattern in weeks 5–6 — signups continuing without paid budget — is the fan-base network effect at work. Every artist that joins brings their audience with them. Repeatable at any scale of ad spend.
June 2021
Before the 2021 downtime, the miPic platform had not experienced any offline activity since the company was launched — for 7 years.
2022 — 2025
No insight into what had been done to the codebase. We were firefighting, with all costs attributed to DevOps. Every fix surfaced new failures in the App. The engineering team was reduced from 5 to 2. New hires were being intercepted. The Founder didn't yet know the platform was being actively held back from inside.
miPic lost the £2m Dubai investment and was unable to launch the Seedrs campaign with 210 investor pledges committed. Yet this was the best thing to happen to the company.
We had a bad apple
trying to disrupt a great bunch.
The Founder remained in Dubai to lead disaster recovery and expose the engineers involved. Personal loans of £30,000 to continue operations into 2022. Zero revenue for 4 months. Replacement engineers were brought in via the same agency to repair the sabotage and restore the platform.
Two years of frozen platform development. Zero new features launched. All budget assigned to DevOps security and survival. The platform limped on its last stable deploy from 2021. Not stagnation. Survival.
The Founder raised £320,000 between Q4 2023 and 2025, reducing fixed costs by 50%. miPic hired contractors for 36 months working remotely from LATAM, UK and USA. No contracted salary since 2021 for the founding team.
Every attempted hire was intercepted. The CEO's employment folder was compromised, confirmed by both Apple and Google. The CEO's calendar was converted to a publicly accessible link by a bad actor — exposing every investor meeting, consultant call and hiring interview to outside eyes.
Agentic Engineering
1 founder · 7 AI agents · 3.5 weeks · Cost $1,000
February 2026
During an AI-assisted audit and rebuild, the founder uncovered comprehensive forensic evidence of IP sabotage by the bad-acting contractors involved — traced to named individuals, verifiable through git forensics and server access logs, causing systematic platform degradation across multiple code repositories before the system failure and downtime.
Collections pages were deliberately launched with 15-second loading times to cause user drop-off. Google Analytics scripts were manipulated. The print order pipeline was deliberately broken for automated workstreams. Customer baskets were wiped by an engineer and PayPal keys deleted. Bugs were designed to look like technical debt — blamed on "old code that needs rebuilding from scratch" by former bad-acting engineers, to make the founding team appear incompetent.
June 3rd sabotage — server SSL certificates were removed and backups were turned off, causing internal server failure during a DDOS attack. The platform was destroyed. Zero revenue. Zero customer access for 15 weeks. 2 engineers disappeared the week of the sabotage and blocked company phone calls with no handover documentation, siloing knowledge.
Active paying customers could not complete purchases. The Checkout button was disabled for logged-in users with no way to diagnose. The automated print pipeline was deliberately broken — images could not reach lab teams. The hands-free automated system built across 7 years was silently degraded until it stopped functioning entirely.
Healthy Growth
2015 — 2017
Crowdfunding & pre-seed years. 2015 saw 2,336 builds shipped — the platform's most productive year on record.
Slowing
2018 — 2020
Pre-seed slowing → angel round → engineering issues begin. Activity halved each year as access to the codebase tightened.
Collapse · Zombie Zone
2021 — 2023
June 2021 sabotage. Two full years of zero activity in 2022 and 2023 — independently verifiable in git history.
AI Resurrection
Feb — Mar 2026
1 founder + 7 AI agents. Output equivalent to a team of 5–10 mid-senior engineers — delivered in a fraction of the time and cost.
The code was sabotaged to prevent growth:
flattenImages()
Image processing function disabled in production — breaking PNG file visibility across the platform.
memory_settings
Memory settings were capped to prevent large print files from sending to suppliers. Customer orders could not be fulfilled and had to be done manually.
db_migration
Migration was deliberately frozen at 2020 version to prevent the team from launching any new products. Unable to release.
devops_users
Super admin accounts created by a former engineering contractor who requested the CEO's IP address before remote login was turned on. The founder, product and marketing team could not see these accounts until the platform was offline.
calendar_acl
CEO's calendar was converted to a public URL by someone with previous admin access. Every investor meeting, hire interview and partnership discussion exposed.
recruitment
New engineers recruited to reduce costs were intercepted after contracts began and before joining. The hiring pipeline was compromised.
Artificial Intelligence
In February 2026, Carl integrated 7 AI engineering agents into the miPic development workflow. Working 360 hours across 3 weeks, talking to AI to repair and design new features to deliver what would have taken 4 mid-to-senior engineers 3–4 months.
The founder CEO did not become an engineer. The founder became Chief Agent Conductor — unlocking 4 years of internal IP sabotage to refactor and execute the entire company roadmap at lightning pace in 4 weeks, with dev support from 1 human developer.
Before · Traditional Dev
Engineering Cost · Per Year
Now · Agentic AI Dev
Total AI Cost · 3.5 Weeks
Built iOS from the ground up · 16 years engineering · ex-Deloitte / Monzo / Reddit
"Everything Carl has described and delivered is real. I'd go further and argue he's underselling it."
"I've never seen a non-technical CEO or Founder do what Carl just did."
"That's not a workaround. That's a new operating model."
What We Shipped
Traditional dev cost $200–$700 per day between 2017–2024. The company has reduced its base cost to $500 per month for AI software running 24/7 under the Founder's command.
SaaS Subscription
£6.99/mo recurring. New revenue stream. Built for Creators. Personalised Stores, Exclusive Prints. 80% Commissions and more.
AI Generation
Anyone can be an artist. Text-to-print AI artwork via Gemini. Credit packs £6–£100.
Monetisation
Artists sell digital files instantly. 75% artist / 25% platform. Zero fulfilment cost.
Community
97.5% goes to the artist. Direct fan-to-creator support, no middleman.
New Products
New product categories live. 700,000+ product links across the marketplace.
Infrastructure
3 years of old tech order submission upgraded. Automated pipeline now fully restored.
iOS App
Card or QR code checkout via MoonPay.
Under the Hood
Page load performance improved by 98%. The backend has been completely overhauled. The system is now future-proofed for the next 1–2 years.
The Business Model
The miPic vision was always to bridge physical and digital. In 2026 SaaS service, Crypto & AI image generation replaces the traditional Stock image pillar set. Crypto becomes a new checkout enabler threading through all verticals.
Pillar 01 · Marketplace
Our foundation business. 15–50% commission on every physical print product, now with unlimited product integration potential. Plus zero-fulfilment for digital downloads & artist tips.
Pillar 02 · Recurring
Democratising a $100/month tech stack. First SaaS customers on day one of launch. A new valuation metric for software multiples on top of the print marketplace.
Pillar 03 · Consumable AI
Repeat-purchase revenue. Users buy AI credits to generate AI artwork — no inventory, no manufacturing. Compounds with engagement and feeds back into the print marketplace. Similar AI credit marketplaces doubled $100m to $200m ARR in 2026.
Roadmap
04 · Android App
10 years without an Android app — recent market research surfaced significant share we were missing. We built one in 2 weeks.
05 · New Surface
Bring miPic artwork into the gaming layer — every artist's catalogue becomes a wearable, tradable avatar skin across compatible titles.
06 · Crypto Token
A native creator currency. Earn $MIPIC for uploads, sales, referrals and platform engagement — spend it on Nano Banana credits, PRO subscriptions, and physical product orders.
Founder Mode.
Carl Thomas is a UK Chartered Architect, featured in the Manchester Evening News Rising Star appointments list after selection for the RIBA President's Medals — receiving a first class masters amongst university peers.
Carl previously worked on multi-million pound projects across London, the North-West and China, from single houses to 100-unit residential schemes between 2009–2014.
Using the same disciplines to run a building project — systems thinking, coordinating specialists, budget pressure, stakeholder pace, planning phases to create miPic. v1 shipped in 2014 after 2 years in stealth working evenings and weekends with two freelance engineers Ash & Shabeer.
Cap Table
A shareholder requested to exit the company in 2023 and documentation was provided to the UBO. Communication with legal counsel has continued and a second shareholder has now agreed to exit as part of a settlement. Final documents for execution are now in issue.
Immediate Capital Request
The founder has made a game-changing commitment to the company of 370+ man hours in 3 weeks, to develop and deliver this new platform — without salary for 48 months.
We are now ready for investment to scale through marketing and product development, now that the backend is fast and stable.
Call to Action
Support 2026 runway with immediate capital, to scale the user base beyond 250,000 users into Q4 and go to market for SaaS subscriptions.
mipic.co · Prepared for miPic Investors · 2026 · CONFIDENTIAL
