Meet the Team.

Rob Elkin is the co-founder of Rational Partners and a technology leader whose career spans CTO and senior engineering roles across consumer technology, edtech, and mobile — from leading technology and product for the world's largest social language learning network at Busuu to running cross-functional engineering, product, and UX teams of 80 across the UK business at Just Eat.

At Busuu he served as CTO, transitioning the team from outsourced to permanent, rewriting the legacy technology stack, managing the tech due diligence for the acquisition of Verbling, and delivering 5x revenue growth through A/B tested product improvements. He championed diversity, shifting gender balance in the team from 5% to 45%. At Just Eat he led the UK technology organisation, pioneered A/B testing and user research as product disciplines, delivered native checkout across iOS and Android in conjunction with the UK launch of Apple Pay, and moved release cycles from monthly to daily.

Beyond his operating roles, Rob founded and runs AltConf, the largest independent Apple developer conference in the world, grown to a six-figure budget with over 100 speakers across San Jose and nine worldwide locations. In 2020 he served as COO of Helpful Engineering, a 16,000-person open-source COVID-19 volunteer organisation where he built project management, data science, and engineering teams and led interfaces with the US Air Force, White House, and US Department of Defense.

At Rational Partners, Rob and co-founder Roja Buck work with private equity and venture capital investors to assess, fix, and transform portfolio companies' technology — deploying senior technologists as fractional CTOs, running technical audits ahead of investment, and building the tooling to scale that work.

Roja Buck is the co-founder of Rational Partners and an award-winning technology leader, recognised in CIO Magazine's Top 100 UK CIOs. His career spans CTO and senior leadership roles across fintech, edtech, healthtech, and e-commerce — from scaling Just Eat's international platform and leading distributed engineering teams of 120 across Bristol and Kyiv, to running the technology function at Riverford Organic Farmers through its transition to employee ownership.

His work has consistently centred on going into complex organisations, understanding what's broken, and making it work — whether inheriting a struggling platform as interim CTO, helping a business prepare for a transaction, or advising investors on an acquisition. He brings deep technical literacy, commercial acumen, and a track record of building high-performing teams.

At Rational Partners, Roja and co-founder Rob Elkin have built the 5P framework, bringing structured rigour to technology due diligence and fractional leadership across more than a hundred engagements with firms including H.I.G. Capital, Smedvig, Partech, Maven, and Mercia. Roja has personally served as fractional CTO across multiple client engagements while building the firm's AI-native Insights platform, which uses large language models across every stage of the assessment process.

An early grounding in AI and robotics research at the University of Bristol gives him a foundation that has become directly relevant again — he is a hands-on practitioner with large language models, not just an evangelist. He is as comfortable in a boardroom explaining technology risk to a GP as he is in the codebase working out why something doesn't scale.

Richie Barter is the Commercial Director at Rational Partners, bringing a rare combination of founder experience, structured finance expertise, and hands-on software engineering. He spent four years as CEO of Replan, a B2B SaaS platform for food and beverage manufacturers backed by Hoxton Ventures, whose IP was acquired in November 2024. Before that, he bootstrapped Coolgarif Tech, building products including ListSmart for eBay and AltViz process automation — with customers spanning eBay, the UK Government, Greenergy, and Hovis.

Richie's career began in investment banking at HSBC, where he worked as a CDO Structurer and Associate Director in Credit Treasury, and before that as a Rating Analyst at S&P. That background in structured credit and risk assessment gives him an unusually sharp lens on commercial due diligence and portfolio company economics — he understands both the spreadsheet and the codebase.

He holds an MSc in Software Engineering from Oxford (Distinction) and an MSc in Accounting and Finance from LSE. It's a profile that sits squarely at the intersection of technology and commercial strategy, making him particularly effective at evaluating whether a company's tech can actually deliver on what the business plan promises.

Rob Bowley is a product and technology leader with over 25 years of experience and more than 15 years in senior leadership roles spanning start-ups, scale-ups, and FTSE 250 enterprises. His career has been defined by a consistent ability to build high-performing engineering organisations, deliver products that scale, and drive transformation in complex environments. A long-standing advocate for Agile, XP, and Lean practices, he combines hands-on technical expertise with commercial acumen and a pragmatic approach to organisational design.

At Moneysupermarket Group, a FTSE 250 company with a £1.25 billion market cap, Rob served as Technology Director with responsibility for approximately 180 engineering staff across Manchester, Belfast, and London. He designed and led a major organisational transformation that broke down silos between business areas, significantly increased talent density and diversity of hires, and relaunched the engineering career framework — driving a measurable increase in internal progression and reducing attrition. At Co-op Digital, he played a leading role in building the digital function within a traditional enterprise, growing a permanent engineering capability from zero to over 60 staff while delivering dozens of online products and services and managing an £8 million-plus budget across 110 engineers.

Earlier in his career, Rob was VP Engineering at Masabi, where he oversaw the most significant development phase in the company's history, building the JustRide platform launched with New York's MTA and Los Angeles Metrolink, and playing an integral role in securing a $12 million fundraising round. At 7digital, he progressed from Principal Developer to VP Technology, transforming a small team into over 50 engineers, implementing microservices architecture and continuous delivery practices that enabled 40 to 60 releases per week, and contributing to a successful $10 million investment round and subsequent IPO.

As a fractional CTO at Rational Partners, Rob works with founders, scale-ups, and investors — modernising platforms, turning around underperforming technology teams, and conducting technical due diligence for investment firms. He is an active member of the technology community, serving as a mentor on accelerator programmes and a board advisor for Manchester Tech Festival.

Toby Abel is a CTO Partner at Rational Partners, a repeat founder and technical leader with a track record of building companies from first commit to acquisition. He was the founding CTO of Beamery, the talent operating system that went on to become a unicorn. He also founded Befittd, a sizing and fit prediction platform for luxury fashion e-commerce (acquired), and co-founded Krzana, a structured data news platform (also acquired).

Toby's earlier ventures include Route2, a sustainability data platform, and his current projects include the Open Council Network, an AI-enabled civic technology platform built on large language models, and a part-time CTO role at AYU, a community data platform for alternative investment. His technical focus sits at the frontier of AI-first system design — LLM-enabled content systems, orchestration patterns, and evaluation layers.

With a BA in Computer Science from Oxford and experience spanning the full lifecycle from founding to exit, Toby brings a builder's perspective to Rational Partners' due diligence and fractional CTO work. He knows what good architecture looks like because he's built it under pressure, with real users and real investors watching.

Victor Tuson Palau is a technology and product leader with over 20 years of experience spanning fintech, cryptocurrency, cloud infrastructure, and telecommunications. His career includes CTO and CPTO roles at some of Europe's most prominent technology-driven financial services firms — Bitpanda, Ebury, and Wayflyer — as well as senior engineering leadership at Canonical/Ubuntu and Nokia.

At Bitpanda, Europe's leading digital asset platform serving over 5 million users, Victor restructured a 300-person integrated Product and Technology organisation to streamline both B2C retail and B2B offerings. During nearly five years as CTO at Ebury, he scaled engineering from 40 to over 300 people, elevated platform availability from 98% to 99.95% by institutionalising SRE practices, and led the technical evaluation and integration of the BEXS Banco acquisition in Brazil. He also supported Ebury's landmark £350 million investment from Banco Santander. Earlier, as VP of Commercial Engineering at Canonical, he orchestrated global product launches with partners including Dell, HP, and Lenovo across Ubuntu's cloud, desktop, and IoT ecosystem.

As a fractional CTO at Rational Partners, Victor works with investors and scaling businesses to assess operational readiness, uncover hidden technical risks, and lead technology turnarounds. His combination of hands-on engineering leadership, investment-grade due diligence experience, and deep fintech domain knowledge — spanning PSD2, KYC, and AML frameworks — makes him particularly effective for organisations navigating complex regulatory environments, architectural modernisation, or strategic M&A.

Peter Wallis is a CIO 100 award-winning CTO who has spent his career building and rebuilding technology platforms in highly regulated, high-volume environments. Most recently as CTO at LendInvest PLC — the UK's leading alternative property finance platform with £7.9 billion lent — he led product, design, engineering, and data teams to deliver a proprietary cloud-based broker portal that drove a 113% increase in buy-to-let originations and a 60% reduction in cost per origination. Under his leadership, BTL retention surged from 12% to 38% in four months on a £560 million backbook, and LendInvest was named Best Digital First Mortgage Lender 2025.

His track record extends across fintech, sports betting, and national-scale consumer platforms. As CTO of Sporting Group, he led 180 engineers across internal and offshore teams, launching an odds platform that generated £1 million in additional revenue and £9 million in betting volume during the 2018 World Cup while cutting OPEX by 48%. At ETX Capital he rebuilt the core trading platform, winning Best Spread Betting Platform. As Chief Architect at Camelot, he was responsible for the technology behind the National Lottery's £6.9 billion revenue operation and migrated its 11-million-strong player base.

Peter is equally comfortable scaling teams up and safely scaling them down — growing LendInvest's technology team from 55 to 93, then right-sizing to 38 while delivering a 15.3% reduction in tech OPEX against an £8 million budget. He has led cyber security incident response under pressure and brings deep enterprise delivery experience from earlier roles at Capgemini and Accenture, including Argos's £141 million supply chain programme. He holds a Master's in Engineering Science from Oriel College, Oxford.

Mike Nuttall is a technology leader with over 20 years of experience building platforms, scaling engineering organisations, and leading high-growth businesses through critical inflection points. His career spans senior leadership roles at Disney, MOO, FanDuel, MyTutor, and Pottermore, with a consistent track record across EdTech, FinTech, eCommerce, gaming, and entertainment media. He has facilitated over £50 million in funding rounds, contributed to four successful exits, and holds a first-class BSc in IT from the University of Salford alongside a postgraduate diploma with distinction from Sheffield Hallam.

At MOO, Mike scaled the engineering team from 15 to over 90 and led a major platform transformation during a period of sixfold business growth. At MyTutor, he inherited a team of 10, grew it to 60-plus engineers, rearchitected the platform from a monolith, delivered the US market launch on time and budget, and owned a technology budget exceeding £6 million. He served as principal architect for WizardingWorld.com, building a cross-franchise platform in collaboration with Warner Bros and Niantic that served over 35 million users. At Medicanimal, he stabilised the platform, integrated four acquisitions, and was instrumental in raising a £50 million-plus Series B. Between operating roles, he served as CTO-in-Residence at UCL, modernising the computer science curriculum and establishing partnerships with AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

As a fractional CTO at Rational Partners, Mike brings deep expertise in stabilisation, turnaround, and scaling operations, acquisition integration, and scaling teams through hypergrowth. He is known for quickly diagnosing what needs fixing, establishing agile practices that deliver results, and building engineering cultures that retain talent — at Disney, the team he built remained 90 percent intact five years after his departure.

Ifor Williams is a technology leader and technical founder with over 25 years of experience in fintech, regulated environments, and enterprise systems. As co-founder and CTO of Accountis, he built an e-invoicing and corporate payments platform from inception to 30% of the UK's direct debit and credit volume within two years, culminating in a $10 million acquisition by Fundtech (now Finastra). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered IT Professional, and has contributed to European standardisation efforts as a member of CEN, co-authoring the European Standard on eInvoicing.

At Ebury, a London fintech unicorn processing over £10 billion annually, Ifor served as Architect and Principal Engineer, professionalising engineering practices for a remote-first team that grew from 50 to 200 engineers during a period of 40%-plus annual business growth. He designed high-performance distributed systems using CQRS and event-driven architectures that improved query performance by 10,000x, chaired the Technical Design Committee governing architectural decisions via an RFC process, and mentored solution architects across distributed systems design, domain-driven design, and regulatory compliance.

Earlier in his career, Ifor led development of FDA-regulated medical diagnostics software controlling robotic laboratory systems, where his work quadrupled sales. He was an early adopter of Extreme Programming, and a recognised voice in financial services technology, serving as a main panelist at SIBOS and speaking regularly at EBADay and the E-Invoicing Summit.

Ifor now provides fractional CTO and AI strategy services through Rational Partners, drawing on hands-on experience with production LLM systems, multi-agent orchestration, and cloud architecture alongside deep fintech domain knowledge spanning FCA-regulated payments, SWIFT and ISO 20022 standards, and European banking frameworks.

Chris Brooke is a CTO Partner at Rational Partners and a technical leader who has spent two decades building and scaling engineering teams across consumer and enterprise technology. His career runs from the engine rooms of Aviva and RBS Global Banking and Markets through to founding CTO roles at high-growth startups — including Hopster, the BAFTA-nominated children's streaming platform where he grew the team from 2 to 30 and launched across 120 countries to over 1.5 million downloads.

As VP Engineering at Spirable, he led a 35-person team building smart video advertising technology through to the company's acquisition by Genius Sports. He has built and managed distributed engineering organisations across London, Kyiv, and Toronto, and brings hands-on experience of the full lifecycle from early-stage product build through to successful exit.

Chris has deep roots in technical due diligence. As Senior Partner at Seedcloud, he advised PE and VC investors on over 50 evaluations spanning fintech, insurance, and cybersecurity — frequently transitioning from pre-deal assessment into post-investment advisory. As a fractional and interim CTO, he has transformed engineering organisations at proSapient, InsurX, Visibly, and BCIS, establishing technology strategies, right-sizing teams, and unblocking delivery.

James Bunch is a CTO Partner at Rational Partners and a technology leader whose career spans enterprise-scale architecture at Citi through to running a PE-backed SaaS company's successful exit to Vista Equity Partners. He holds a first-class degree in Computation from UMIST and brings deep technical credibility across distributed systems, platform modernisation, and GenAI adoption.

Most recently as CTO at TRG Screen, James led a 100-person global technology organisation across nine development teams and twelve products. He rebooted a stalled platform transformation, rapidly implemented generative AI — conversational interfaces for end users, automated coding tools for developers — and integrated multiple acquisitions into a unified technology function, serving as CTO through the company's successful exit.

Before TRG Screen, James was VP Engineering at Qarik, a data science startup founded by ex-Google engineers, and spent several years as a Senior Technical Architect at Citi at SVP level, designing architecture for global trade and communications surveillance platforms handling petabyte-scale analytics across roughly 100 engineers. His earlier career includes delivering government information systems and managing technical teams in defence — experience that grounds his ability to operate in complex, regulated environments where the stakes are high and the room for error is small.

Andrea Candian is a CTO Partner at Rational Partners and a Chartered Engineer with an MBA whose career spans 26 years of building, fixing, and scaling technology organisations — from startups to multinationals, across 17 years in senior leadership. At Raketech, he led a major infrastructure consolidation programme as Group CTO, driving the platform to four nines availability through disciplined architecture and operational improvement.

His track record is defined by speed and decisiveness. At NEC, he took a face recognition platform from whiteboard to global deployment in three months. At Virtual Class, he scaled the engineering team from 10 to 30 and shipped a complex product in record time. He has led teams through Agile and DevOps transformations, driven adoption of microservices and cloud-native architectures, and built leadership teams that deliver in local, distributed, remote-first, and mixed-sourcing environments.

At Rational Partners, Andrea brings this operating experience to bear on technology assessments, due diligence, and organisational transformation — diagnosing what is broken, building a plan to fix it, and staying to make sure it works. His combination of strategic clarity and hands-on technical depth makes him particularly effective in the kind of complex, high-pressure situations where investors need confidence that the technology will hold up.

Tom Dignan is a CTO Partner at Rational Partners and a technology leader with a PhD in Physics from Harvard, 23 patents, and a career that runs from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Yahoo to leading engineering organisations through funding rounds, acquisitions, and scale. He combines genuine research depth in machine learning with the operating experience to turn it into products that work.

As CTO at Syft, the UK's largest marketplace for zero-hour workers, Tom led the company from Series A through to acquisition by Indeed.com, scaling the engineering team from 5 to over 20 and rearchitecting from monolith to service-oriented architecture. At Apolitical, the world's largest social learning platform for governments, he rebuilt the product and backend infrastructure, introduced AI-powered courses, and scaled the team from 6 to 20. At ReputationDefender, he managed US and UK teams to record company-wide profitability.

Tom's earlier career includes VP Engineering at Reputation.com, where he built a research team applying machine learning to entity extraction, sentiment analysis, and text clustering — work that produced 23 patents — and VP Engineering at Hands-On Mobile, where he managed an international organisation approaching 100 engineers shipping titles including Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile and NFL Mobile Live. He brings the rare combination of scientific rigour and battle-tested operating experience that PE and VC investors need when assessing whether a company's technology and AI claims are real.

Romain Eude is a technology leader with over 25 years of experience spanning AI, machine learning, e-commerce, and media technology. He has served as CTO five times, founded two companies, and led one through a successful acquisition. He co-founded Utelly, an AI-powered content aggregation and recommendation platform that was adopted by major broadcasters before being acquired by Synamedia, where he spent 18 months as Director of Content Discovery integrating the platform into their Media Cloud Services portfolio. He also co-founded Fit Collective through Entrepreneur First, raising $1 million to build an ML-powered optimisation platform for the fashion industry.

His operating experience spans the full lifecycle of venture-backed technology companies. As CTO at my-wardrobe.com, he built a distributed engineering team and internationalised the platform to nine currencies. At TouchLocal he led technology for a UK business directory serving five million unique visitors per month. Earlier in his career, he spent three years as a software architect at the European Medicines Agency, designing a pan-European system handling data from 25 countries in 21 languages — a foundation in the kind of large-scale, multi-stakeholder complexity that most technologists never encounter.

Romain holds an MS in Engineering from ICAM and is an active angel investor through Ventures Together, a community of 150 European tech entrepreneurs who co-invest. His experience on both sides of an acquisition — as founder and as investor — informs his work as a fractional CTO helping founders prepare for fundraising, due diligence, and scaling.

Douglas Hanley is a Chief Technology Officer and enterprise architecture leader with 30 years of experience spanning software development, solution architecture, technology strategy, and IT transformation. He built his early career as a systems developer before moving into solution and enterprise architecture through roles at leading systems integrators including Capgemini and Logica CMG — a progression from hands-on engineering to strategic architecture that gives him a distinctive ability to assess technology organisations at every level.

As Interim Group CTO at IRIS Software Group, Douglas directed a 400-strong engineering department across a portfolio of 70 products and restructured an £80 million cloud migration programme. As CTO and Board member at Smoothwall, a private equity-backed cybersecurity company, he rebuilt the engineering team to 60 staff, renewed the product strategy through cloud migration, and led the integration of three acquisitions, contributing to an eightfold exit. At Scottish Water, he served as Portfolio Architect ensuring strategic coherence across a £100 million IT transformation programme.

Over the past decade, Douglas has developed deep specialisation in private equity technology advisory, combining fractional and interim CTO services with buy-side and sell-side technology due diligence. Notable recent work includes a comprehensive IT cost reduction programme for Wella in partnership with KKR, optimising over €100 million in annual IT spend across 80 sites in 30 countries. He has also led large-scale technology procurement, from £5 million application management contracts to £50 million global IT outsourcing programmes.

Eoin Woods is a software architecture leader with over 30 years of industrial experience, awarded the 2018 Linda M. Northrup Software Architecture Award by Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute in recognition of using software architecture to significantly improve practices and outcomes in organisations. A UK Chartered Engineer, Chartered IT Professional, and Fellow of the British Computer Society, he holds a PhD in Software Engineering and a first-class degree in Computer Science and Economics from Brunel.

As CTO and subsequently Chief Engineer at Endava, Eoin led technical excellence across an organisation that grew from 1,500 to 10,000 engineers during his nine-year tenure. He managed an international team of approximately 25 senior technical staff, ran a multi-million pound innovation budget, and served as architect for strategically important clients in capital markets and fintech. Before Endava, he served as Executive Director and Head of Architecture at UBS, providing technical leadership for approximately 600 engineers across Securities Operations technology. He held a similar role at BGI, which became BlackRock, giving him deep experience in the technology underpinning capital markets and asset management at global scale.

Eoin has co-authored three books on software engineering, published over 20 peer-reviewed papers, and speaks regularly at leading conferences including Devoxx, GOTO, and QCon. He is an Academic Visitor at Imperial College London. At Rational Partners, he brings rare depth — the ability to assess not just whether technology works today, but whether an architecture can sustain the growth an investment thesis demands.

Emma Pollock is a technology leader with over 20 years of experience in engineering leadership across financial services, fintech, and telecommunications. She most recently served as Chief Technology Officer at FinTrU, Northern Ireland's largest homegrown fintech, where she led a technology organisation of approximately 150 people spanning product engineering, internal technology, information security, and product management. During her tenure, she played a central role in scaling the company from 700 to 1,500 people across offices in Belfast, New York, Porto, Dublin, and London.

Prior to FinTrU, Emma held senior leadership positions at Citi in Belfast, serving as Global Head of Communications Surveillance R&D and Head of Global Functions Technology. In this role she was responsible for approximately 200 people across technology and operations, delivering a Big Data and Behavioural Analytics platform for trade and communications surveillance — a critical compliance capability for one of the world's largest financial institutions. Her earlier career includes building ultra-low-latency market data systems at NYSE/Wombat, work in cloud storage infrastructure, and IPTV platform development.

Emma holds an MEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Queen's University Belfast. As a fractional CTO, she brings rare depth in scaling technology organisations through periods of rapid growth, with particular expertise in fintech, capital markets technology, compliance systems, and information security — from technical strategy and roadmapping to hiring, vendor management, and organisational change.

Clifton Cunningham is a Chief Technology Officer with over 25 years of experience leading technology organisations across media, education, and publishing. He has served as CTO at three of the most prominent digital properties in their respective sectors — MailOnline, TES Global, and Infinitas Learning — with a consistent track record of rebuilding platforms, scaling engineering teams, and delivering transformational results under private equity ownership. He holds a Bachelor of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering (First Class Honours) from the University of Queensland.

At Infinitas Learning, Clifton served as CTO and Managing Director of the central product and technology company, leading a team of over 230 people delivering SaaS products for teachers and learners across multiple European markets. He oversaw the consolidation of three separate educational publishers, orchestrated expansion into Portugal and Poland, and contributed to tripling group revenue and EBITDA to over 400 million euros within three years. The business was sold to NPM Capital in 2021.

At TES Global, backed by TPG Capital, he transformed a legacy publishing business into a digital-first platform, achieving over 300% year-on-year growth in mobile news traffic and 200% growth in mobile recruitment applications, while scaling the engineering team to nearly 60 engineers across five continents. At MailOnline, he took the technology team of the world's largest newspaper website from 90 million to 220 million monthly active users, completely rebuilding the platform and pioneering the use of microservices architecture in a large-scale editorial environment.

As a fractional CTO at Rational Partners, Clifton brings deep experience of PE-backed portfolio company operations, having worked directly with TPG Capital, Compass Partners, and NPM Capital across multiple investment cycles. His specialisms span technology strategy, legacy system modernisation, AI and machine learning strategy, enterprise architecture, and post-acquisition integration — with particular depth in publishing, EdTech, and multi-country technology operations.

Joe Darkins is a CTO and commercial technology leader whose career spans Fortune 500 real estate, peer-to-peer finance, mobile payments, capital markets, and Premier League football. He combines deep technical expertise with sharp commercial acumen — he has led global product teams, managed hundreds of millions in revenue, closed deals, and operated at executive and board level across startups, private equity-backed businesses, and enterprises. He holds a Master of Engineering from the University of Reading.

At JLL, a Fortune 500 real estate services firm with $5.9 billion in global revenue, Joe served as Senior Product Director and member of the Residential board, leading businesses generating $470 million in annual revenue with global teams across EMEA and the US. He launched a new global valuation platform to support $400 million in growth projections, delivered a 440% increase in UK website sales over four years to $2.8 million in annual gross fees, and created a new AI-powered data investment platform supporting $4.6 million in client fees.

As Head of Product at RateSetter, he managed £850 million in assets under management and oversaw the creation of a new Innovative Finance ISA that attracted £170 million in deposits in its first year, alongside £100 million in new loans. At Fonix Mobile — which later IPO'd for £90 million — he led technology and product through the doubling of end-user spend to £95 million a year. His earlier career includes programme managing the multi-million-pound international integration of stockbroking into IG, and business analysis roles at Markit working on OTC derivative platforms for Citi, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan.

Most recently as CTO at Burnley Football Club, Joe created the club's first dedicated technology department, building a greenfield team from scratch. He negotiated a 50% reduction in stadium hardware investment costs, identified and rationalised 144 technology contracts, and led procurement consultancy targeting £200,000 to £400,000 in annual savings. At Rational Partners, Joe brings this breadth of operating experience to fractional CTO engagements, technology due diligence, and portfolio company assessments.

Simon Taylor is a strategic technology leader with over 15 years of experience across startups, scale-ups, PE-backed companies, and global enterprises. He specialises in modernising legacy platforms, aligning technology with commercial objectives, and driving AI-enabled operational efficiency. His career spans fintech, edtech, media technology, and govtech, with a consistent track record of transforming engineering organisations and delivering measurable business impact through cloud architecture, DevOps transformation, and cost optimisation.

At Civica, a Blackstone-owned GovTech provider, Simon operated as part of the CPTO senior leadership team, leading GTM, product, and engineering activities for an £18 million investment programme and strengthening delivery discipline across 10 teams through structured governance. At LearnPro Group, a PE-owned VR training platform, he defined a modernisation strategy that materially improved development velocity, shifted engineering from plan-driven to Agile delivery, and introduced self-hosted AI support tooling that reduced first-line ticket workload while remaining GDPR-compliant.

His track record in cloud cost optimisation is particularly strong. At Gravity Sketch, a VC-backed 3D design platform, he introduced AWS cost controls that delivered a double-digit percentage reduction in cloud spend. At Duco, a PE-owned data automation platform, he restructured a monolithic team into two outcome-driven units, introduced value-stream metrics, and improved delivery reliability. At Fitch Solutions he built and scaled the EMEA tech hub and modernised content workflows. At Flying Colours Finance, he was the first tech hire, building engineering and product teams and delivering multiple MVPs within weeks.

As a fractional CTO at Rational Partners, Simon brings immediate strategic value to organisations navigating technology transformation, scaling challenges, or operational efficiency initiatives. His combination of hands-on technical depth — spanning AWS, DevOps, CI/CD, and AI-driven development tooling — with board-level leadership experience enables him to bridge the gap between engineering execution and investor-grade strategy.

Valerie Dryden is a Fractional CTO and VP Engineering with over 18 years of experience transforming engineering organisations across digital health, fintech, insurtech, and lawtech. She specialises in leading globally distributed teams of 10 to 200 people through turnarounds and scaling challenges, combining operational rigour with a coaching-led leadership style. She holds a First Class Honours BSc in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt and is an ILM Level 5 certified coach.

Her track record is defined by measurable outcomes delivered under pressure. As VP Engineering and Acting CTO at Doccla, a $32 million digital health Series B, she reduced time to customer value by 60%, drove AI adoption saving over £200k annually, and raised employee engagement from an eNPS of minus 50 to plus 64. At Thirdfort, a $20 million lawtech Series B, she led a holistic turnaround that reduced cycle time from 24 days to 2 days, saved over £1 million annually, championed 90% team adoption of AI-assisted development tooling, and cut operational costs by 25%.

At Snyk, a $7.4 billion application security company, Valerie improved cycle time by 55% as Director of Engineering, program-managed FedRAMP readiness, and delivered complex multi-cloud deals exceeding $20 million. She increased hiring diversity by 55% and shortened hiring cycles by 62%. At Zego, a £150 million insurtech, she reduced cloud costs by 23% and matured observability with DORA dashboards across engineering. Earlier, as Acting CTO at Care Sourcer, she led technology strategy through rapid expansion and pandemic-era restructuring.

Beyond her operating roles, Valerie founded Outraged Raccoon Coaching, delivering over 500 hours of founder and emerging leader coaching in partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs and Techscaler. At Rational Partners, she brings this combination of hands-on turnaround experience, metrics-driven engineering leadership, and deep coaching expertise to fractional CTO engagements and technical due diligence.

Peter Robinson is the Programme Director at Rational Partners, an IT Director and transformation leader with deep experience across manufacturing, distribution, logistics, retail, and healthcare. He specialises in the complex, high-stakes programmes that most consultants talk about but few have actually delivered — ERP strategy, systems integrator selection, and large-scale technology transformations involving SAP, Sage, and global IT outsourcing.

Peter's track record speaks in numbers. At Dixons Carphone, he developed a same-day delivery solution that generated £2.6 million in additional sales within four months. As Head of IT at Specsavers, he orchestrated an IT transformation impacting 300 staff that contributed to a 33% increase in sales. He has delivered programmes for Primark spanning £50 million budgets, global point-of-sale rollouts across 480 stores, and digital delivery platforms reaching 3.8 million customers.

He has led systems integrator procurement processes at scale — from £5 million application management contracts to £50 million global IT outsourcing deals. As a Fractional IT Director at Halterworth and across other engagements, Peter brings the rigour and operational grip that private equity investors need when assessing whether a portfolio company's technology function is an asset or a liability.

Lindsey Jayne is a product leader who has shaped some of the UK and Europe's most recognisable digital businesses. As Chief Product Officer at the Financial Times Group, she oversaw premium content brands with a team of 110 product managers, designers, researchers, and analysts — exceeding paying audience targets by 150,000, increasing advertising revenue by 25%, and initiating the FT's AI strategy including its landmark partnership with OpenAI.

Her career is defined by delivering measurable growth in fast-moving, high-stakes environments. As VP Product at Monzo, she tripled the user base from one million to three million, shipped over 50 significant features, and beat revenue targets by 30%. At Yoco, Africa's leading fintech, she set the product vision for market expansion, reaching first break-even within nine months during the pandemic and doubling monthly active users year on year. As Acting Global Head of Design at Farfetch, she led a 90-person creative team across three continents through to IPO, including launches in the Middle East and China.

Lindsey brings a rare combination of strategic breadth and operational depth — equally at home defining AI strategy for a global media brand, driving unit economics at a growth-stage fintech, or preparing a luxury e-commerce platform for public markets. She holds an MBA from London Business School (scholarship) and a BSc in International Relations from the LSE.

Emma van Dijkum is a product leader whose work has been central to two companies reaching unicorn status. As VP Product at Multiverse, she scaled the cross-functional product team from 16 to over 120 and built the product organisation that enabled revenue growth from $10 million to $140 million, while increasing platform engagement by 60% and driving automation from 25% to 71%. At Funding Circle, as Global Director of Product, she scaled the product function from 3 to 8 teams, supporting platform growth from £200 million to £5 billion in lending, and introduced ML-powered credit models that cut lending decisions from weeks to same-day.

Her experience spans fintech, edtech, consumer, and investment platforms. As Head of Product at Octopus Investments, she launched a tax-efficient investment product that raised £77 million. At Naked Wines, she delivered 4x ROI within six months as Global Director of Product. She founded Jobflix and held a senior creative services role at EF Education First, giving her an unusually broad perspective on how product, design, and commercial strategy connect.

Emma now works as a fractional CPO and product coach, helping companies navigate the transitions she has led repeatedly — from scrappy early-stage teams to structured, high-performing product organisations operating at scale. She holds an MChem from Magdalen College, Oxford.

Andy Schrader is a product and technology executive with over 20 years of experience building and scaling enterprise B2B SaaS platforms in regulated industries. His career spans co-founding a venture-backed location intelligence company, leading product organisations at growth-stage startups, and turning around underperforming teams in biotech and tax technology. He holds a BS in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and combines deep technical literacy with a disciplined approach to customer discovery, product operating models, and AI-enabled workflows.

As Cofounder and Chief Product Officer of Reveal Mobile, Andy built and scaled an enterprise SaaS platform from zero to $15 million in annual recurring revenue, serving over 100 enterprise customers. He architected a high-throughput data platform processing more than 10 billion location events per day and led product-driven retention initiatives that reduced customer churn by 50 per cent and increased net revenue retention to 110 per cent.

At Metabolon, a regulated life sciences company, Andy led a turnaround of underperforming product and engineering teams, shipping enterprise capability from prioritisation to production revenue in four months. Most recently, as Head of Product Management for Aiwyn's Tax Division, he built the product function from scratch and led the 0-to-1 development of an enterprise tax engine through direct partnerships with top 100 accounting firms. His earlier career includes senior product roles at aQuantive (acquired by Microsoft), Appia (acquired by Digital Turbine), and Adzerk (now Kevel), giving him deep experience in real-time bidding, ad exchange platforms, and complex product-market dynamics.

As a fractional CPO at Rational Partners, Andy brings executive-level product leadership grounded in the realities of building and scaling in compliance-intensive environments. His ability to clarify complex problem spaces, establish disciplined product operating models, and translate customer insight into outcome-driven roadmaps makes him particularly effective for organisations navigating growth and the integration of AI into their product strategy.