Funding & an expert team from day one

Nic has 15 years experience in the venture capital industry and prior to founding Forward Partners in June 2013, was a Partner at leading venture capital firm DFJ Esprit.

He has worked and invested in London and Silicon Valley, leading over 25 investments and enjoying a number of successful exits including buy.at (acquired by AOL for $125m) and Zeus Technology (acquired by Riverbed for $140m).

Nic also authors Europe's most popular VC blog: The Equity Kicker.

Matthew used to work on trading floors at Lloyds and BarCap before seeing the light. Following an MBA at SDA Bocconi and before joining us he became an entrepreneur and investor in his own right.

He’s focused on sourcing and executing deals. His other interests and activities include investment strategy, writing and emoji.

Dharmesh helps all our startups build great products. He has a passion for User Research, Lean UX and using data to inform decision making. Dharmesh has a background in artificial intelligence and most recently worked as an early employee at high-growth startup Mind candy. He has founded 2 startups and successfully exited one. 

Seth brings 7 years of design experience from around the world including Washington DC, Cleveland, Ohio and Malta having won awards for his print and packaging designs.

He has a strong passion for all things branding and helped maintain brand standards for world-wide corporations (Nestle, Nokia, John Deere, Kimberly Clark and Sherwin Williams) while also creating new and engaging brands for start-ups, city organisations and charities while his ability to transition his layout and branding skills to the digital world has resulted in clean, intuitive and modern web designs.

Leonidas has over ten years experience in software and product development, specialising in full stack development, scalable infrastructures and lean development practices. He has founded two startups and is an advisor to others.

Leo has a strong engineering background, he works closely with our early stage startups on all their technology oriented needs. He’s an open source advocate and frequent speaker at tech events on infrastructure, scalability, performance and lean development.

Martin is a full stack developer who helps build the right product. He has a passion for development best practices, lean solutions and user-focused products. His background is working with digital media and Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands.

When Martin is not at work he likes long walks on the beach and other cliches.

Alex is a front-end developer with experience building large-scale, maintainable websites. He is an advocate for progressive enhancement, accessibility and good CSS architecture.

Alex has a background in foreign direct investment law, having spent two years advising British SMEs on how to establish a company in the manufacturing centre of south China. He is also passionate about contributing to open source software projects and encouraging diversity in the tech community.

Chris has helped build the leadership teams for some of the world’s most innovative digital companies. Prior to Forward Partners he was a Senior Associate at the digital headhunting firm The Up Group and placed C'level executives at companies such as Skyscanner, JUST EAT, WorldRemit and Circle.

Chris is passionate about disruptive businesses and is now hands-on with helping Forward Partners’ portfolio scale their businesses from a people perspective. In his spare time Chris enjoys playing jazz piano, writing sitcom scripts and drinking IPA.

Nic has spent over 10 years working within national consumer communications agencies on behalf of global retail and e-commerce clients including Amazon.co.uk, Hamleys, ASDA and Pretty Green.

Prior to joining Forward Partners, Nic headed up the PR team at one of the UK's fastest growing e-commerce businesses, notonthehighstreet.com. During his time with the marketplace, Nic was responsible for leading PR strategy for the brand and also worked alongside the SMEs it supports, consulting on communications strategy.

Nic leads communication strategy on behalf of Forward Partners whilst also working with our start ups, helping them to conceptualise and tell their brand and business stories to both press and the target consumer.

Jane worked as an accountant and auditor in various firms before making the move to join Forward Internet Group Limited as their Group Financial Controller in 2000.

In 2014, Jane moved to Forward Partners as their Financial Controller. Jane runs the accounts at Forward Partners and is on-hand to provide support and guidance to our entrepreneurs.

Before joining Forward Partners, Tara worked in Operations across various Start Ups and SME’s. Most recently coming from events based start up Hire Space. She’s also spent the last 5 years as a professional actor, but decided to leave behind the glitz and glamour to focus on her career in Ops.

How I help

Dealing with all things Operations, Tara supports our start ups in getting where they want to go, faster.

Luke joined Forward Partners from REV Venture Partners, a corporate VC, where he was responsible for deal origination, investment due diligence and portfolio reporting. He was previously a consultant with the strategy consultancy Oliver Wyman, where he worked across the retail, aviation, healthcare and FMCG sectors.

Luke originally planned a career in science and he holds a PhD in biochemistry. His focus at Forward Partners is on sourcing and executing new investments.

About me: I previously founded growthsquared.io a data science consultancy on a mission to help e-commerce businesses apply advanced analytics to their data and/or operating model. Before that, I was Head of Analytics at Swoon Editions, an awesome business championing the "zero stock, zero lead time” model in online furniture retail. My PhD was in organisational economics at Imperial College London, focussing on how public and private organisations structure themselves to deliver affordable energy services to the poorest parts of India and East Africa - of course, (not) very related to my future career!

To stay sane during my postgraduate studies, I did a lot of travelling (particularly in South East Asia) and worked part-time at the London Stock Exchange on their ELITE programme, supporting UK scale-ups - great brands such as Skyscanner, graze.com, Vision Direct and MedicAnimal with the trials and tribulations of growing too fast. In my spare time, I really enjoy blogging on the potential for applied AI and data-driven operating models as well as coaching early stage tech entrepreneurs, particularly deep science spinouts of Imperial where I was previously Venture Coach in Residence. Since 2014, I have produced a few case studies on what I imagine are familiar challenges to most startups - all (second hand) war stories that I like to tell at dinner parties! 

While pursuing her MBA at London Business School, Akriti joins us to be an Investment Associate at Forward Partners. Prior to this, she has been a product manager for the user experience team at Microsoft and Alexa at Amazon. Right before business school, she was an entrepreneur, running a fintech company.

She helps with deal sourcing, screening and researching new areas of investment. Her other interests lie in working on new product designs and communicating via gifs.

Jake was the first employee at Property Partner, which he helped grow from 0 - 10,000+ customers. That was following growth roles at startup and large technology companies, taking time in-between those to teach Digital Marketing & Business Fundamentals at General Assembly. Jake is a fellow at the New Entrepreneur Foundation.