Team
Leadership Team
Dr Davin Yap, CEO and Board Director
Davin cofounded Transversal with Dr David MacKay, and has subsequently led the business through its early development stages. He is responsible for technology and future product development.
Davin holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Cambridge University and a M.A.Sc.
Jeff Caplan, COO and Board Director
Jeff is responsible for direct sales as well as all aspects of client satisfaction. This means ensuring that we delight all of our clients all of the time.
Previously Entrepreneur in Residence and VP Operations at ThinkVentures, an $80m Internet-focused early stage VC and early stage investor in Transversal, Jeff first joined Transversal in 2001. Jeff has managed and grown technology companies over a career that spans twenty years. He has built up and sold two successful businesses, one to The Gardiner Group plc, a £100m T/O LSE listed company for which he later served as a main Board Director. At the time Jeff was believed to be the youngest Director of a fully listed LSE company, at the age of 29. Jeff held full P & L responsibility for the core business division and oversaw, and subsequently ran, the merger of two Group businesses. Prior to that, as Managing Director of MVD Ltd, a UK-based security distribution company, Jeff implemented a rapid growth plan increasing turnover by 300% and net profit by 1000%, in the space of 3 years.
Jeff holds a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Computer Science from the University of Lancaster, England.
Marc Quantrill, Partner Sales Director
Marc is responsible for all aspects of Transversal’s global partnerships and alliances.
Previously Marc held various senior management level positions within BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace), the global systems, defence and aerospace company where he was a sponsored graduate engineer. He held the position of Head of Computer Aided Engineering and was involved in the outsourcing and relationship management of key engineering IT functions to CSC during the early 1990s - which at the time was the largest outsourcing contract in the world. Since then Marc has held various senior management and director roles in knowledge management software technology companies. He was Managing Director of European Knowledge Solutions, an early pioneer in the delivery of advanced knowledge management solutions, before joining Autonomy Corporation where he enjoyed a successful 9-year tenure in sales. During his time with Autonomy he saw two successful IPOs (NASDAQ and FTSE) and was awarded Autonomy’s global sales award on three occasions.
Marc holds a B.Eng. (Hons.) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Hertfordshire.
Paul Ryland, VP Engineering
Paul is responsible for service delivery and directing research into Transversal's natural language processing technologies. Paul has authored several patents both pending and approved. He has also championed and implemented ISO27001 throughout Transversal's operations, enabling Transversal to be ISO27001 accredited in 2009. Paul oversees service delivery from Transversal's three UK data-centres. Paul is a director and the company secretary of Transversal. Paul was the original lead developer of Metafaq and Transversal's sophisticated Memory Engine technology.
Paul holds an MA and MMath from Girton College, University of Cambridge.
Heather Richards, VP Professional Services
Heather is one of Transversal’s executive directors, and is also responsible for its Professional Services team of consultants, Web developers and customer support executives. Heather joined Transversal in 2001, and has been instrumental in the company’s growth from a Cambridge technology start-up into the successful business it is today.
Prior to joining Transversal, Heather worked for 8 years in the United States as a manager at Public Interest Communications. Here she oversaw fundraising campaigns for high-value clients such as Amnesty International and World Wildlife Fund, and was also part of the management team that successfully led the company through some major IT transformation projects.
Heather holds BAs in English and Philosophy from Westminster College (USA), and an M.Phil. in European Literature from the University of Cambridge.
Richard Little, Chair of the Board
Richard was founder and chief executive of Braid, a middleware vendor, from 1982 to 1999, when it was sold to Mercator. He remained a board director until 2001. Currently, he sits on the board of three other B2B technology and service suppliers in the finance sector.
Peter White, Non-Executive Director
Peter White is the founder of YTKO, the European economic and enterprise development company.
Peter is a leading practitioner of proof of concept, using innovative processes to develop and accelerate market engagement and revenues for early-stage technology. He is also active in implementing enterprise programmes for rural areas, creating and delivering innovative networking, collaboration and start-up projects, and in working with disadvantaged communities to promote self-employment to reduce worklessness.
His early career was in financial services, for Aviva, before later managing English-language marketing for Olivetti across Europe, at the start of the Personal Computer era. Appointed CEO of Creative Direct, a consumer marketing consultancy, he developed and launched the first home pregnancy test, Predictor, and many other health and personal care innovations.
His innovation and enterprise expertise is wide ranging: he was Director of the Yorkshire Enterprise Fellowships, the largest pre-incubation project in Europe, covering biotechnology, healthcare and chemicals. He is a director of Outset CIC, a not-for-profit focused on economic inclusion, and a trustee of the Norfolk Network. He remains closely involved in ICT, where he is a non-executive director of two technology companies; and in optics, supporting a high performance optical processor, for which he holds three patents.
Independent Advisers
Professor David MacKay, Cofounder
David is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Cambridge University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. His interests include construction and implementation of hierarchical Bayesian models that discover patterns in data, development of probabilistic methods for neural networks, and the design and decoding of error correcting codes.
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