The Board

Gordon Hurst

Gordon is a Chartered Accountant and joined Featurespace’s board in November 2014. Prior to that, he joined Capita Plc in 1988 and was appointed to Capita’s Board as Commercial Director in February 1995 and later appointed Finance Director in February 1996.

Through a combination of acquisitions and ground-breaking white collar outsourcing deals–initially in the public sector–the company continued its rapid growth and entered the FTSE 100 in 2001. Through this period Gordon was instrumental in managing acquisitions, large outsourcing deals, and building a team of commercially-focused Finance Directors to enable continued development of the business.  Gordon left Capita in February 2015 at which point Capita had turnover of c£4.5bn, employed c63,000 people, and spanned numerous markets including Financial Services and Banking. Gordon also is Non Executive Chair of the PE funded services businesses, Marston Holdings and Azets Group and is the Chair of the Audit Committee of Darktrace.

Martina King

Martina King se unió a Featurespace en 2012. Anteriormente directora general de la empresa de realidad aumentada Aurasma, Martina tiene una dilatada trayectoria en el sector de la tecnología audiovisual, incluso cargos directivos en Yahoo! Europe y Capital Radio. Bajo el liderazgo de King, Featurespace se ha convertido en el proveedor líder en el mundo de software de prevención de delitos financieros empresariales, de eventos de calificación de riesgo y de prevención del fraude y los delitos financieros en más de 180 países. La empresa también ha recaudado más de 100 millones de libras en financiación para respaldar su ampliación en curso y su capacidad de proteger a más de 30 instituciones financieras globales de gran importancia, como HSBC, TSYS, Worldpay, NatWest Group, Danske Bank y ClearBank. Desde 2018, ha recibido el reconocimiento de PaymentsSource como una de las «Mujeres más influyentes en pagos», y anteriormente fue nombrada una de las «40 mujeres más poderosas del sector tecnológico» por Silicon Republic.

David Excell

Dave es el fundador de Featurespace, responsable del crecimiento y la dirección de la empresa en el continente americano, y además supervisa la estrategia global de producto. Tras estudiar en la Universidad Nacional Australiana y en la Universidad de Cambridge, Featurespace nació como un concepto y se ha convertido en una plataforma empresarial líder en la lucha contra los delitos financieros para instituciones financieras y proveedores tecnológicos.

Dave también forma parte del consejo de la Technology Association of Georgia y The Knoble, lo que supone una forma de unir las redes de especialistas en delitos financieros para evitar que los delincuentes utilicen los sistemas financieros del mundo para sacar rédito del sufrimiento ajeno.

Profesor Bill Fitzgerald (1948-2014)

Bill era profesor de Estadística Aplicada y Procesamiento de Señales y jefe de investigación en el Laboratorio de Procesamiento de Señales del Departamento de Ingeniería de la Universidad de Cambridge.

El Laboratorio de procesamiento y comunicación de señales está activo en los ámbitos de el procesado de imágenes y datos 3D, la visión artificial y la computación gráfica, el procesamiento de audio y música y la metodología estadística, en especial los métodos bayesianos y los datos de las ciencias de la vida —incluida la genómica, el rastreo y el aprendizaje automático. La investigación de Bill se centraba en la inferencia bayesiana aplicada al modelado de señales y datos, y mostraba un especial interés en las aplicaciones de los métodos secuenciales Montecarlo de filtrado de partículas a los problemas de procesamiento y comunicación de señales. Las contribuciones del profesor Bill a las aplicaciones de la teoría bayesiana al procesamiento de señales gozan de amplio reconocimiento, y obtuvo el Technical Achievements Award (premio a los logros técnicos) de EURASIP 2014. Antes de unirse a la Univerdidad de Cambridge, Bill trabajó en el departamento de Dispersión de neutrones del Institut Laue Langevin en Grenoble y ejerció como profesor de Física en ETH, en Zúrich.

Dr Robert Sansom

Robert is an active angel investor and mentor to high-technology start-up businesses in the UK and US. He is the Founder of Cambridge Angels, a group of seasoned technology and bio-technology entrepreneurs who invest in and mentor technology start-ups in the Cambridge area. Prior to being an angel investor, he was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of FORE Systems, a leading developer of high-speed data communications systems which was sold to Marconi in 1999. Robert is a non-executive director to enterprises including Arachnys Information Services Ltd, Myrtle Software Ltd, Camfed International, Cambridge Communication Systems Ltd, CRFS Ltd and Netronome Inc. Robert was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2010.

Laurence Garrett

Laurence Garrett is a Partner of Highland Europe, Laurence focuses on growth opportunities in the information technology sector for the European market.

Laurence represents Highland Europe on the boards of LoveCrafts, Starleaf, Modulr and Condeco.  His track record at Highland Europe also includes investments like SocialPoint (acquired by TakeTwo), NewVoiceMedia (acquired by Vonage), and Spot.io (acquired by Netapp).

Gardiner Garrard

Gardiner co-founded TTV Capital in 2000. He has been working in venture capital since the late 90’s and is recognized by Institutional Investor as one of the top fintech investors. TTV’s track record includes numerous billion dollar companies including: bill.com, Greenlight, MX, Cardlytics, & Green Dot. Current areas of interest include security, financial wellness, blockchain enabling technologies, and the use of machine learning and AI in payments and banking.

Gardiner earned a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.B.A. from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. In 2004, he was honored with the Goizueta Business School’s Outstanding Recent Alumni Award. He is also a member of the advisory board at the Emory Eye Center, the Goizueta Business School, and the Shuford Entrepreneurship Program at UNC Chapel Hill. He is a board member of the Boys Girls Club of Metro Atlanta and a past board member of the Georgia Economic Development Board.

Jon Edington

Jon is a Partner at IP Group. Jon focusses on investments in the information technology sector in the UK.

Jon represents IP Group on the boards of Import.io, Garrison Technology, Yoyo Wallet, Re:infer, Resolving and Glass.ai.  He was also an investor at IP Group in Acunu, Semetric, Permasense and PSE, all of which have been acquired.

Prior to joining IP Group, Jon was an investor with Sovereign Capital, a mid-market buyout firm, where he specialised in transactions in the healthcare services market.  Prior to Sovereign, Jon was a Director at 3i Group, where he was responsible for investments such as Nimbus Partners (acquired by Tibco), OST Business Rules (acquired by Microgen), Kavado (acquired by Protegrity) and FMS (acquired by Temenos).

Jon has a BEng from Imperial College London and an MBA from INSEAD.

Gene Lockhart

Gene is Chairman and Managing Partner of MissionOG. He focuses on investment opportunities in financial services and data platforms. As a seasoned investor and accomplished senior executive, Gene leverages his deep experience to build great teams, and in turn, great companies.

Prior to MissionOG, Gene was an operating partner at Oak Investment Partners, leading the development of the Oak FinTech portfolio and building it into a premier growth equity portfolio. He also served as president and CEO of MasterCard International, CEO of Midland Bank PLC, president of the Global Retail Bank of BankAmerica Corporation, and president of Consumer Services at AT&T. Gene served as a board member of NetSpend, Argus International, Community Choice Financial, Metro Bank PLC, Vesta, Progressive Finance, and others.

Gene earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of Virginia and his Master of Business Administration from The Darden School at the University of Virginia.

Lonne Jaffe

Lonne is a Managing Partner of Insight Partners, a leading private equity and venture capital fund that has raised more than $23 billion and invested in more than 300 high-growth technology companies worldwide. Lonne is on the board of several Insight portfolio companies: Featurespace, CentralReach, Tractable, TradingView, Quantum Metric and Wealth-X.

Previously, Lonne was the CEO of Syncsort, a global software company with enterprise-scale products used by 87 of the Fortune 100 companies in more than 85 countries. Prior to his CEO role at Syncsort, Lonne was Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at CA Technologies, responsible for developing and executing the company’s long-term technical and acquisition-related strategic initiatives. Prior to CA, Lonne was a vice president at IBM, where he led the technology growth strategy for a multi-billion dollar software division. He also led several large software acquisitions for IBM, and led IBM’s software solutions business units in education, healthcare, life sciences and public industries, including acquisition and technical strategy, research and development, and the sale.

Lonne has bachelor’s degrees and advanced degrees from Harvard University.