GrowthInvest
GrowthInvest is a technology platform making alternative investments simple. Our vision is to make it easy for investors and advisers to benefit from tax efficiency and potential returns by backing the businesses of the future.
We’re here to simplify the investing process, leaving you free to focus on your clients.
Our team
Our team come from a range of commercial backgrounds, with experience in financial services, entrepreneurship and technology. Personalised client service is extremely important to us, and our dedicated client services team is always on hand to answer any questions you might have.
We are always on the lookout for talented people who could bring their energy and skills to the GrowthInvest team. For more information and current vacancies, head over to our Careers page.
The advisory board
Daniel Rodwell (Chief Executive)
Daniel was a founding investor in GrowthInvest and has been Chairman of the Investment Committee since 2012. Prior to this, Daniel worked in finance for nearly 20 years, managing institutional and private funds focusing on equities and derivatives. Daniel managed the UK division of Van der Moolen Equities AG and more recently founded the equity derivatives boutique Ten Derivatives LLP.
Daniel has been an Angel Investor for over 10 years, mentors high growth businesses and sits on numerous panels across the UK assessing such businesses. He is passionate about increasing efficiency in the alternative investment sector, having witnessed first-hand the automation of OTC and Open Outcry traded products in the late 1990s.
Daniel enjoys spending time with his young family and when time permits, reminding himself of his love for running, football and snowboarding.
David Lovell (Chief Operating Officer)
David is an experienced strategic director who has worked in the UK financial services industry for over 20 years, in a variety of distribution and consultancy roles.
After graduating from Edinburgh University, David held a number of roles within the financial services media space, including at FT.com, and played a key role in the development, growth and subsequent sale of Matrix Solutions, a leading Business Intelligence company specialising in the UK financial services marketplace.
As well being part of several successful disruptive product launches, David has also provided consultancy and advice on distribution and fundraising strategies to a wide range of clients looking to approach the UK’s financial intermediaries and high net worth investors.
David enjoys spending time with his family, as well as running, cycling and going to watch live football, rugby and cricket whenever time allows.
Ben French (Client Relations Manager)
After studying his Masters in Marketing Management from Bournemouth University, Ben joined GrowthInvest in a client relations role. Ben previously ran his own events management initiatives at university and later worked in B2C sales for Credico. With a passion for entrepreneurship, Ben is committed to developing client relationships to drive GrowthInvest to the forefront of the tax-efficient market.
Ben is a keen American football fan. In his spare time, he is always looking to get out on the water whether it's paddle boarding or surfing.
Laura-Ann Martens (Operations Analyst)
Laura-Ann Martens joined the GrowthInvest team in 2019 as an Analyst after relocating to London from Auckland, New Zealand. Whilst finishing her Bachelor of Business she interned at the Bank of New Zealand working as a Senior Associate in the Business Banking team. After her undergraduate she was awarded an international scholarship to intern at Zolfo Cooper in New York City as a restructuring analyst, going on to work in investment banking at Evercore, NYC.
Laura-Ann enjoys travelling and eating her way around the world, trading stocks and talking about the growing influence of ESG in today's markets. She is a New Zealand champion in Ice Figure Skating & Tap Dance and has competed nationally in Athletics. In her free time you will find Laura-Ann on her snowboard in the Alps, cycling around London or somewhere near the beach.
Luke Reeves
Luke is a partner and one of the founders of LGBR, leading the partner group that bought itself out from Matrix Group. He has worked closely with the three other LGBR founding partners for over eight years both at LGBR and previously at the asset management division of Matrix Group.
Luke has over 20 years’ experience in the asset management industry. Prior to founding LGBR in October 2012, Luke was Head of Retail and Institutional Business Development for the asset management division of Matrix Group from 2000. Matrix Group raised over £10bn across a range of asset classes, including alternative funds, property, UCITS funds, renewable energy, EIS, VCTs and structured products.
Prior to this Luke worked for investment houses including M&G and Prudential.
Mark Insley
Mark established Ascot Wealth Management in 2010 following a career in investment banking, mainly, lending, collatoral analysis and trading. Under Mark’s leadership, the firm has grown quickly into a respected advice practice, with it’s main services being Financial Advice, Wealth Management and Estate & Tax Planning.
Mark is a strong believer of using technology in finance, to enable clients to monitor their investments wherever they are. Mark is among the small percentage of young IFAs in the otherwise largely grey industry of financial advisers in the UK. He has helped bring in a change in the way the industry works.
Martin Fox
Martin has been in financial services marketing all his working life. After a range of roles at Legal & General, he became Marketing Director at Prolific, and then General Manager Marketing at Pearl. He then took the opportunity to set up the strategic marketing arm of a London agency, where he launched ABN AMRO into the UK retail market, and launched Just Retirement from scratch. Today he runs Bulletin Marketing, and has a wide portfolio of financial services clients, across product providers, banks, investment houses, EIS managers, wealth managers, family offices and service providers. Bulletin provides research and marketing consultancy and support to enable companies to become more profitable.
He is one of the judges of the Sustainable and Ethical Investment Awards run by Incisive Media, and he also chairs the judging committee of the EIS Association awards and is chair of the EISA Financial Planning Committee.
Ben Gladstone (Head of Operations)
Ben joined GrowthInvest in 2018 as Head of Operations, bringing to the company over 20 years of experience in senior operational roles within financial services. His investment banking career includes roles at Natwest Markets, Morgan Stanely, and Barclays Capital.
Ben has a BA Honours degree in Business Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London.
He is a keen sports enthusiast, enjoying cycling and running, and has completed numerous challenges over the years. He also plays regularly for his local rugby team (albeit the Vets!). He enjoys spending weekends with his children focused on sporting pursuits.
Luke Miles (Operations Manager)
Luke graduated from Bournemouth University with a First Class degree in Finance & Economics. Whilst studying at university, he undertook a placement year at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars working within the Aftersales warranty team, where he analysed large data sets and liaised with a worldwide network of dealers.
Luke is passionate about the financial industry and is currently undertaking his IMC qualification. He is very interested in technology and is a sport fanatic who enjoys skiing, surfing, football and rugby.
Melissa Griffiths (Head of Sales)
With a BA Honours degree in Geography, Melissa spent her former City years within the European Equity markets in Institutional Sales and Sales trading at Teather & Greenwood and Cazenove, developing a strong client base of key institutions. Initially beginning her career in Enterprise Investment Scheme Ltd, Melissa has returned to the tax-efficient space as Head of Sales for GrowthInvest, following a break in her career for motherhood.
Melissa strives for a client-focused approach, in order to drive GrowthInvest to the forefront of the market, providing value to all clients and a whole of market solution for Tax Efficient Investments.
She enjoys spending time with her two daughters and pursuing an active life of running, circuit training and skiing.
Martin Cosgrove (Chief Investment Officer)
Martin Cosgrove recently joined the leadership team at GrowthInvest in the position of Investment Director. Prior to this, Martin's career spanned 20 years in Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs, where, as a Managing Director, he was responsible for overseeing a number of trading and sales businesses within the equities division. Martin also represented Goldman Sachs on the Board of Equilend, which is a global market participant sponsored platform, facilitating Securities Finance Trading, Post-Trade and Clearing Services to the Securities Lending Industry.
Martin has been an active angel investor for 10 years and holds and mentors a large portfolio of growth companies across multiple sectors. He is a firm believer that the alternative investment sector offers investors an effective means of diversifying their portfolio coupled with the attractive returns and tax advantages available. He is passionate about increasing efficiency in the alternative investment sector, having overseen the automation of large parts of the Securities Lending Industry at Equilend.
Aled Treharne (Chief Technical Officer)
Aled is an experienced technology leader and joins us as our Chief Technology Officer. Aled has over 20 years of experience of working in a number of startups and rapid growth organisations, scaling networks and platforms to deal with millions of subscribers. Most recently Aled was one of the founding members of a specialist technical consultancy, Siphon Networks (now part of the Nuvias Group) supporting service providers in designing and scaling platforms from SME through to global communications operators. He helped lead the organisation to become a disruptive force EMEA-wide, winning several awards and making the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 3 years running. His move from cutting edge telecommunications into financial technology is a natural step - moving from one regulated market to another and brings with him a wealth of experience in critical systems and integration. Aled's speciality is in leadership of technical teams and scaling services and platforms to support rapidly growing companies like GrowthInvest.
Aled spends much of his spare time supporting local charities. He is a trustee of Twisters, a trampolining and rebound therapy charity in South Wales specialising in providing opportunities for disabled children. Aled has also spent the last 11 years working with St John Ambulance Cymru where he is an ambulance medic regularly providing medical support to the emergency services and at events as well as being a trained Tactical Commander. He is also a trainer and assessor for St John. He was recently awarded the honour of membership of the Order of St John for his services to the charity. The little spare time he has left after all that is spent with friends and family, or walking the countryside of South Wales looking for some peace and quiet!
Matt Braddy
As Ex-CMO of Just Eat, having joined Just Eat in 2009 from the Financial Times Braddy’s career history has also seen him work at Toptable and Gameplay. At Just Eat he oversaw rigorous modelling of the proposition and playful campaigns, such as the ‘kidnapping’ of TV chef Anthony Worrall Thompson and fielding an anti-cooking by-election candidate. The brand recently floated on the LSE for over £1.5bn.
Kerry Ritz
Kerry is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Barclays Techstars Programme and a Non-Executive Director (NED) and Advisor to a number of high growth companies. He is also an advisor to First Derivatives and their Kx Technology Fund. He is also an angel investor in companies in Europe, Israel, Canada and the United States. He is also an external evaluator for EIT-Health and a mentor to companies at numerous accelerators including Mayor London International Business Programme, RebelBio, Wayra (Telefonica), Techstars, and Microsoft Ventures.
Previously, he was Managing Director of MassChallenge UK, the world’s most startup friendly accelerator. Prior to that, he was Chief Marketing Officer of FTSE 250 Euromoney Institutional Investor Plc, where he was responsible for marketing, sales, customer service, fulfillment, marketing technology, product management, and customer insight.
He has also been CEO of Palringo and VP Business Development for EVRYTHNG, both innovative early-stage VC-backed companies.
Kerry has a track record of bringing innovative and disruptive businesses to market: he was the President of Vonage UK and was one of the Founding Directors of “3”, the first 3g mobile operator in Europe.
Steve Dobson (Head of Investments)
Steve joined the GrowthInvest team in September 2020, after joining Goldman Sachs straight from Loughborough University. Steve spent 25 years there, joining their lifetime membership of the Quarter Century Club. He started as part of the back-office team, running reconciliations for futures contracts, before joining the Equity Derivatives desk, initially as desk assistant. He then progressed onto full trading and instigated the spinoff of the Securitised Derivatives business, which serviced retail flow via aggregators. The business grew from vanilla products to lightly structured flow derivative products, and from pure equity to multi asset. He moved onto automated listed options market making and single stock market making, before taking on responsibility for the Equity Algo flow and servicing the Goldman Sachs Private Client base for equity execution. He ended career at Goldman Sachs working on the One Delta desk trading ETF, index Swap flow and Closing auction aggregation where he was the supervisor for all on exchange equity execution. During his career at Goldman Sachs, he covered many aspects of the equity markets including working with exchanges on pricing and order book strategies and is now enjoying looking at the starting blocks of the equity cycle with EIS and VCT investments and working with technology to add some disruption to an old school process.
Outside of work he is a big Middlesbrough fan, loves the outdoors and all things nature, and looks after his youngest son's football team.
Sinead Mullan (Events/Marketing Manager)
Before joining the GrowthInvest team in October 2020, Sinead has built up a wide range of multi-faceted experience that spans Business Development, Sponsorship & Events, and management of C-Suite executives. As part of her Business Development roles Sinead has led lead generation programmes, marketing across social media platforms and general account management efforts. Her Sponsorship & Events background includes consultancy work auditing prestigious venues such as Wembley, The Millennium/Principality Stadium, Lord's Cricket Ground and a whole host of Premier League Football Stadiums. Sinead has also worked with Cambridge University on hosting of major events, weddings and conferences and has strong experience in the Biotech, Pharma and Life Sciences sector organising high end conferences in London and beyond.
Sinead's strength in management and operations is also put to good use via her volunteer work with Wendens Ambo Preschool where most recently she chaired the Preschool Committee and was instrumental in leading the pre-school's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In what little spare time she has, Sinead enjoys horse riding, football, tennis, socialising and generally keeping fit by trying to keep up with her 8 year old on their regular 10k runs!.
Chris Gosling (Operations Executive)
After graduating from university in Summer 2020 with a degree in Economics, Chris joined GrowthInvest in September on an initial two-week work experience. After a successful two weeks, He is now with GrowthInvest on a permanent basis and thoroughly enjoying his time here!
Chris is also a keen footballer who captains his local team Hertford Town, and is a big Liverpool Fan.
Jamie Scott-Brown (Operations Executive)
Jamie is currently studying a Business Management course at Plymouth University. He has joined as an Operations Executive to expand his knowledge and explore the Financial Services industry on his placement year. Previous experience includes handling confidential data within the senior level executive search industry during his gap year prior to University.
Max Coyle (Operations Executive)
Max graduated from Newcastle University with an Upper second class (2:1) degree in BA(Hons) Politics and Economics. He is passionate about the financial industry and will be returning to Newcastle university to undertake an Msc in Accounting, Finance and Strategic Investment. In his spare time, Max enjoys watching and playing football, as well as playing cricket at weekends.
James Griffin (Software Developer)
James is an experienced Software Developer/Engineer, recently joining the GrowthInvest team as a Software Developer. Starting his career in finance helping to optimise HSBC’s Transaction Monitoring solution and AML capability. From there he went on to work in various sectors from healthcare, developing a COVID reporting platform too Defence, working with Leonardo on their Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems.
Reaching his current profession through a circuitous route, after leaving a successful career in the British Army having led various teams in Northern Ireland and Afghanistan. From there training as a Biologist at the University of Bath, and then found his passion for Technology and Software.
With a can-do attitude and a love to learn James enjoys the creativity and problem-solving developing software entails. Having been a STEM ambassador he now mentors FDM consultants on their mentor scheme.
A big fan of the outdoors and loving the water he enjoys various outdoor activities including kayaking, climbing and trekking. He also enjoys Martial Arts having dipped in and out of them over the years, fitness and reading about history and science.
George Denning (Software Developer)
As a family man, George spends most of his personal time enjoying countryside dog walks and spending quality time at home with his three children. When it comes to work, he's eager to establish strategic and creative objectives to improve efficiency and productivity within the workplace and provide simple solutions to complicated problems.
George has been designing and developing websites since 2013. In 2014 he worked with the SEO team at Essential Marketer to create and implement development plans for medium-sized companies investing in digital marketing. As well as building over 100 WordPress themes, leading customer meetings and maintaining business relationships.
George has immense experience working on various portals including developing the back end for an internal project management portal using Laravel as a Rest API.
Whilst working and being a family man, George created a new business - Eat This Ltd and has been building the product backend using Laravel as Rest API and VueJS on front-end.
GrowthInvest is a trading name of EIS Platforms Limited. EIS Platforms Limited (FRN: 694945) is an appointed representative of Sapphire Capital Partners LLP (FRN:565716) which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK.
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