Poolhouse

The challenge

Poolhouse needed to open a London flagship on schedule, and simultaneously lay the foundations of a licensable hospitality platform that could roll out to third-party venues under the BillyQ brand.

At the outset: no technology function, no platform, no design system, no cloud environment, no booking engine, no integration layer, no defined operating model. Off-the-shelf hospitality tooling couldn't support the integrated booking-payments-table-gameplay model the product depends on.

The product isn't a venue with booking software. It's an integrated stack, and the same stack is the basis of the BillyQ licensable product behind it.

What we built

Brand

Rebuilt the identity into a system designed to scale globally. Defined the brand architecture cleanly: the venue brand (Poolhouse) sits separately from the licensable technology brand (BillyQ). Published guidelines and a multi-vendor creative programme to keep the system coherent across teams.

Marketing site

pool.house, designed and shipped end-to-end, including CMS, DNS, analytics, and SEO. The booking journey is wired directly into the platform: no third-party widgets.

ManageMonkey: the operating system

The platform that runs the venue today and will run every BillyQ-licensed venue tomorrow. Replaces the typical hospitality patchwork of booking tool, EPOS, CRM, and reporting.

• Booking and a high-performance availability engine
• Session and table control
• Guest identity and profiles
• Payments: Stripe online, Square in-venue, with webhook reconciliation
• Contracts and governance: BEO generation, e-signatures, document control
• Operational comms and alerts
• Reporting across venues, games, and guests
• Customer-facing booking and manage-booking flows

CueBridge: API and integration layer

A Go backend built as a Clean Architecture monolith. Covers bookings, payments and refunds, floor plans, sessions and gameplay, notifications, and integrations. Structured for future bounded-context extraction as Poolhouse scales.

Venue surfaces and gameplay

A customer booking app in React for search, configuration, payment, guest management, and post-booking flows. In-venue kiosks and scoreboards consuming the same backend. The games engine sits on Unity, coordinated with the ball-tracking system, projector and camera stack, control PCB, and on-table compute. Hardware partners delivered the physical layer; we owned the integration.

Cloud foundation

Production-grade AWS for regulated payments and multi-tenant licensing.

• Infrastructure as code (OpenTofu), multi-account isolation
• Multi-AZ networking and managed data layer
• SSO/OIDC, no long-lived credentials, encryption, auditing, backups
• Structured observability through CloudWatch and Sentry, with deployment safety baked in

Operating model

Built the technology function from zero: hiring, onboarding, delivery cadence, cross-functional governance. Established a security posture suitable for a regulated payments environment.

Outcomes

• Flagship opened on schedule, with integrated booking, payments, and in-venue experience working on day one.
• $34M raised across pre-seed and seed rounds, supported by investor materials and technical due-diligence.
• £650k+ of quantified savings delivered during build, through procurement and platform decisions.
• 90–230× faster booking availability than category incumbents, on the same query shape.
• Platform scope delivered by a team of nine. Comparable programmes are typically staffed five to six times larger.

Build notes

The platform is multi-tenant by design: a BillyQ table installed in a third-party venue still reports into the same session orchestration, monitoring, and billing layer. The availability engine was engineered around the actual query shapes of high-traffic hospitality demand. Infrastructure choices were made to hit the security and reliability bar without inflating launch costs.

Why it matters

Poolhouse is a full-stack hospitality platform, not a stack of integrations. The same system that runs the London flagship is the substrate for a multi-tenant licensing business. The work covers brand, marketing, customer product, operations product, hardware integration, and the cloud foundation underneath, delivered by one team in one engagement.