Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation

Paolo is the Software Development Manager at Volume.ai A software developer with 10+ years of experience, Paolo started learning computer science in his native Italy. Paolo has a master's degree in computer vision and artificial intelligence. Five years ago Paolo decided he wanted a new adventure and challenge and moved to the UK and he started working for Volume. When he started the company was mainly a digital agency. But when Paolo started it was already changing to a more AI-focused development company. Paolo was part of this transition. They moved from a marketing agency to a software development company. Currently, they already have some products on the market and they mainly focus on machine learning and AI for conversational platforms.

Nimrod is the Business Intelligence Lead at Hermes Investment Management Starting his BI career a decade ago, Nimrod began working in the space as a consultant. He quickly progressed to a lead consultant then team leader. After a few years working in a consultancy, he moved to Hermes where he now works with their in-house BI team. With a BA in Philosophy and Mass Media, Nimrod pivoted into data and has been responsible for overseeing the making of greenfield data warehouses around ESG data.

Hayley is the Business Intelligence Manager at Virgin Atlantic Airlines. Hayley’s path into business intelligence is an unconventional one. She originally studied theology in Las Vegas and initially wanted to be a pastor in the US. Her first job out of university was in a bank. She worked in Finance for a while before getting recruited by a stockbroker and moved into investment management for a decade. During this time she first encountered big data began working closely with datasets and business intelligence. 3-years ago she decided she wanted a change and moved to London. She stayed in data and has worked in everything from fashion to Starbucks and she’s now at Virgin Atlantic.

Mhairi Davidson is the delivery Team Lead at CDL Software After leaving universtiy Mhairi was unsure what she wanted to do. She knew she wanted to earn some money so decided to pursue a career in recruitment. After applying for a few positions she ended up working in the oil and gas market in Aberdeen. After this, she worked in the public sector and then for a sports nutrition company. After a few years in Recruitment, Mhairi decided it wasn’t for her anymore and she decided to move into another industry and went to work with her dad in construction. This industry proved not to be as fast-paced as Mhairi had hoped and Brexit affected the cost of materials so much so that Mhairi wanted something more exciting out of a career. She then moved to a small tech company working in Manchester city center as a salesperson. During her time there she moved into a Head of People position. There was no internal recruitment department so she set that up for them. After doing this the company had a vacant open on their development team for a project manager and she applied for it and Mhairi’s project management career took off from there.

Edson is the Head of Engineering at Lloyd’s Banking Group. Arriving in the UK in 2004 Edson found employment within a fortnight working for a small building sub-contractor in the Bolton area. This role required him to develop their information management systems and upgrading their day to day operations. After a few years, he moved to a company called Amptech which has now been acquired by Trimble. He spent 7 years at Trimble before moving to Findel Education as their Head of Web Development and was promoted to Head of Software Engineering. He has recently moved to Lloyd’s Banking Group.

Mike is the Head of Data & Analytics at the Bodyshop. Mike's interest in data started when he began studying economics at A levels. It was the first time he’d seen a subject that married maths with real-world problems and issues. It was his first taste of using data to make business recommendations. Mike carried on learning economics right through to a Master’s degree. After a brief foray into investment banking, Mike went to work at a company called Game Theory. This company taught Mike the fundamentals of data analytics. After a while at Game Theory Mike moved into the retail sector to work at Debenhams. He did this to get some more hands-on data experience. He then went to the Post Office and got some first-hand experience dealing with bureaucracy and red tape. Then went to The Guardian news and media, then Aimia and now he works as the Head of Data & Analytics at The Bodyshop.

Purnima is the Operations & People Director at Sparta Global When Purnima started her career in technology there was no clear career path set out for her. With a degree and masters in economics, Purnima ended up in technology almost by accident. Her IT career started when she joined a company called Sun Systems. Whilst at this company Purnima got a really good understanding and appreciation of technology. Although she isn’t technical herelf Purnima began to understand a lot of the jargon being used in the business. She realised that if you want to work in an innovative sector you need to work in IT. It was a sector where you could be creative as well as innovative. After working at Sun Systems she spent 16 years working in an IT consultancy before moving to Sparta Global.

Jay is the CTO at Wunderman Thompson Mobile Originally from the east coast, Jay moved to Denver to do more snowboarding. He worked various jobs building websites for companies during and after the dot com bubble burst. When the App boom happened Jay moved into mobile development. He joined a company called Double Encore and they helped build mobile apps for social media platforms. As they were early starters in the app sector they became known for creating high-quality apps. Double Encore merged with another company called Excellent Creations to combine clients and stop competition for developers. They were then acquired by Possible and became Possible Mobile. Since then Jay has been leading the engineering department for the past 10 years. They have recently rebranded and are now called Wunderman Thompson Mobile.

Nigel is the CTO at Intelligent Voice. Before his career in tech, Nigel was an IT lawyer (before IT lawyers were a thing). He’s invested in several small software companies in his time and now specialises in voice recognition and related technologies. Intelligent Voice provides market-leading surveillance and monitoring solutions for telephone calls, e-mail, IM, social media, and any text documents. We also have an incredibly fast speech to text engine, capable of processing speech to text at up to 400x real time using Nvidia GPU technology.

Simon is the Chief Data Officer at Rank Group. Recently shortlisted for Data Leader of the year 2019, Simon has had a long and varied career in Data. In his current role at Rank, he is responsible for driving value and insights from data. He’s previously worked at Regus plc where he, working with the operations team, increased profit margins by 64%. Simon has also spent time at Lloyd bank when he was responsible for driving a billion pounds of revenue per annum. In both of these roles, his successes were underpinned by the use of data. When working for Tesco Simon helped fix the data after the company suffered the largest corporate loss in UK history. At Bupa, he fixed the regulating and reporting issues in the insurance part of the business.