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 joined Featurespace in 2012. Formerly the Managing Director of augmented reality company Aurasma, she has an extensive career in media and technology, including MD of Yahoo! Europe and Capital Radio. Under King’s leadership, Featurespace has become the world’s leading provider of Enterprise Financial Crime prevention software, risk scoring events and preventing fraud and financial crime in more than 180 countries. The company has also raised more than £100 million in funding, supporting its ongoing expansion and ability to protect more than 30 major global financial institutions, including HSBC, TSYS, Worldpay, NatWest Group, Danske Bank, BBVA and Barclays PLC. Since 2018, she’s been honored by PaymentsSource as one of its Most Influential Women in Payments and has previously been named “Top 40 Powerful Women in Tech” by Silicon Republic.

David Excell

Dave is Featurespace’s Founder, responsible for driving Featurespace’s innovation strategy, and working with our global client base to provide the industry with the very best machine learning technology. After studying at the Australian National University and the University of Cambridge, Featurespace began as a concept and has become the leading enterprise financial crime platform for financial institutions and technology providers. Dave is also a Board member of The Knoble, bringing together networks of financial crime specialists to prevent criminals from using the world’s financial systems to profit from the suffering of others.

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.

Len Laufer

Len Laufer is a Leader in Data Science and Technology across the Financial Services Industry.

Mr. Laufer brings a rare combination of experience as both a successful entrepreneur and Fortune 100 leader across industries. In 1997, he founded Argus Information and Advisory Services and grew the company over the next 15 years into a leading provider of information and analytical solutions to the payments industry. After selling the business in 2012, Mr. Laufer went on to lead JPMorgan Chase’s machine learning and data science efforts as Head of Intelligent Solutions. Most recently, he served as CEO of Cerberus Technology Solutions, the operating subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management, which focused on the use of technology, data, and artificial intelligence in investment activities and at the firm’s portfolio companies. Mr. Laufer also served as Co-Chairman of the Board for Alberstons Companies, one of the largest food and drug retailers in North America, until 2021.

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.

Professor Bill Fitzgerald (1948-2014)

Bill was Professor of Applied Statistics and Signal Processing and Head of Research in the Signal Processing Laboratory, in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University.

The Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory is active in the areas of image and 3D data processing, computer vision and computer graphics, audio and music processing, statistical methodology – especially Bayesian methods and life sciences data including genomics, tracking, and machine learning. Bill’s research focused on Bayesian inference applied to signal and data modeling and he was particularly interested in the applications of Sequential Monte Carlo particle filtering methods to signal processing and communication problems. Professor Bill was recognised for contributions in applications of Bayesian theory in signal processing, and he won the EURASIP 2014 Technical Achievements Award. Prior to joining the University of Cambridge, Bill worked in Neutron Scattering at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble and as a Professor of Physics at the ETH in Zurich.