Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top Edinburgh based Partner operating in the Venture Capital space. If you think a Partner is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Andrew Castell
Partner of Par Equity
Andrew is a Chartered Accountant and has a MA in Jurisprudence from Oxford University. His career prior to Par Equity took in corporate finance and restructuring as well as serving at PLC board level. Within Par Equity, Andrew is responsible for a range of disciplines including regulatory matters, finance, fund structuring and investment and exit execution.
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About Par Equity: Par Equity is a leading, early-stage venture capital firm, investing in innovative, high growth technology companies.
Robert Higginson
Partner of Par Equity
Robert spent the early part of his career as a software engineer for a start-up based in the U.S before moving into broader technology, product management and strategy roles within the financial services sector. Latterly he has operated as an investor on his own account before assuming his main role as Par Equity’s Gatekeeper where he is responsible for assessing inbound investment opportunities.
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About Par Equity: Par Equity is a leading, early-stage venture capital firm, investing in innovative, high growth technology companies.
Paul Atkinson
Partner of Par Equity
Paul is an entrepreneur and serial angel investor having started three businesses prior to Par Equity. He has a substantial track record of building value for companies in the technology and services sector and taking them to a successful exit. He has a BSc in Physics from Manchester University. Paul’s responsibilities within Par Equity include business development and helping portfolio companies access the right people in Par Equity’s network to support them in delivering growth. He also oversees Par Equity’s forestry activities.
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About Par Equity: Par Equity is a leading, early-stage venture capital firm, investing in innovative, high growth technology companies.
Paul Munn
Partner of Par Equity
Paul is a Chartered Management Accountant and has experience of corporate management, turnarounds, business development and active share owner engagement. He has a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Glasgow. Within Par Equity, Paul works closely with portfolio companies on a wide range of operational and growth challenges as well as being responsible for Par Equity’s property funds.
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About Par Equity: Par Equity is a leading, early-stage venture capital firm, investing in innovative, high growth technology companies.
David Milroy
Partner of Maven Capital Partners
Based in our Edinburgh office, David is responsible for new Private Equity investments in Scotland and also supports a number of companies in the Maven portfolio. He started his career as a scientist with GlaxoSmithKline and then as a clinical pharmacist at Guy’s/St Thomas’ hospitals, London. After completing his PhD, he moved to international consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie (and then parent Deutsche Bank) where he supported the healthcare banking team, advising clients on their corporate and licensing strategies and performing due diligence projects on companies, products and technologies. Most recently at ITI Life Sciences, a unique state-supported innovation fund, David was responsible for identifying funding opportunities and crafting these into significant collaborative R&D programmes. David joined Aberdeen Asset Management in September 2007, as Fund Manager for the White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund, an early stage seed fund investing in new technology emerging from the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. David has a First Class Honours degree in Pharmacy, a PhD (Molecular Biology/Gene Delivery) from the University of Bath and a MBA with distinction from Edinburgh University.
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About Maven Capital Partners: Maven Capital Partners is a private equity firm that provides a range of funding options to SMEs and investment opportunities.
Sandy McKinnon
Partner of Pentech Ventures
Sandy has been a Pentech partner since 2001. His areas of interest include security technology, the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and new infrastructure technologies such as blockchain and microservices. He has led investments in edge-caching company Velocix (sold to Alcatel-Lucent), predictive analytics company SeeWhy (sold to SAP), machine-learning computer-vision company Omniperception (sold to Digital Barriers), audio effects company Sonaptic (sold to Wolfson) and real-time big data analytics company Acunu (sold to Apple). Sandy has also been deeply involved in commercialising technology from Universities for most of his life and still helps Old College Capital at Edinburgh University. He has recently been involved with setting up and making operational techstartNI, helping the team there deliver a micro-seed fund for Northern Ireland. Sandy had a Research Fellowship at Cambridge University, working in Nanotechnology with many of the pioneers in the field. He has a Ph.D. and B.Sc.(first) in Physics from the University of Dundee.
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About Pentech Ventures: Pentech Ventures is a venture capital fund focused on finding category defining software companies.
Craig Anderson
Partner of Pentech Ventures
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About Nutmeg, Pentech Ventures, PrimaryBid, TravelNest, Vauban: Pentech Ventures is a venture capital fund focused on finding category defining software companies.
Marc Moens
Partner of Pentech Ventures
Marc has been a Pentech partner since 2008. His areas of interest include companies that make use of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, companies that build solutions focused on marketing optimisation, and companies that grow through network effects. He has led investments in targeted advertising company Struq (acquired by Quantcast), data and machine learning company Semetric (acquired by Apple), customer experience optimization specialist Maxymiser (acquired by Oracle), music streaming service We7 (acquired by Tesco) and daily fantasy sports company FanDuel. Marc has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where he ran a research group working in natural language processing. He left the University to co-found Rhetorical Systems, a text-to-speech company, and became its CEO. In 2001, Pentech became one of Rhetorical’s investors. Rhetorical soon became a market leader in high-quality text-to-speech, with sales across Europe and the US. In December 2004 Rhetorical was sold to a US-based speech company.
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About Pentech Ventures: Pentech Ventures is a venture capital fund focused on finding category defining software companies.
Peter Finan
Partner of Epidarex Capital
Pete Finan is the former head of the Novartis Institute of BioMedical Research (NIBR) site in the UK where he oversaw the activities of 350 scientists and clinicians working in the respiratory disease area. Prior to this he was an Executive Director in the Developmental and Molecular Pathways department at NIBR in Cambridge, Massachusetts leading programs in oncology, inflammation and regenerative medicine and Head of Biology at Karus Therapeutics. Pete is also a Partner at Epidarex Capital and has led / co-led the financing of six new companies in the Epidarex portfolio. He has a BSc and PhD from the University of Leeds.
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About AdoRx Therapeutics, Enterprise Therapeutics, Epidarex Capital: Epidarex invests in early-stage, high growth life science and health technology companies in under-ventured markets within the UK and them.
Andrew Shannon
Co-Founding Partner, Head of Compliance, and Investment Committee Member of Circularity Capital
Andrew joined Foresight’s private equity team from UBS, where Andrew was part of the utilities advisory team. Prior to UBS, Andrew worked for Societe Generale both in London and New York in the M&A and Leverage finance teams. Within the portfolio Andrew serves on the boards of engineering business Aquasium, support services business ICA and software business Vector Command. Andrew holds a MA in Economics from Cambridge University and a BSc in Technology & Business Studies from the Robert Gordon University.
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About Circularity Capital: Circularity Capital is a specialist private equity firm investing in European growth SMEs operating in the circular economy.
