Meet the Team
Travis Baxter
Travis Baxter has thirty years experience of consumer media with specific expertise in content development, consumer change and business strategy. He spent the first 5 years of his career at the BBC and since then his experience includes working at divisional MD level for RTL group and the FTSE 100 company EMAP and working as an operating partner with Advent International. Travis is currently media advisor to the Turkish private equity firm Actera, a non-executive director of South West Screen and of Slicethepie, and is Content and External Affairs Director of Bauer Media in the UK. He also sits on the board of a number of UK radio trade bodies.
Ian Findlay
Ian Findlay joined Ariadne Capital in September 2008, further strengthening the deal team’s capabilities and bringing with him a wealth of international experience in the TMT sector.
A highly experienced business professional, Ian has spent over 20 years working in strategy formulation and M&A initiation and execution. His track record speaks for itself: in his previous position with Emap plc, he was responsible for 47 completed transactions with a total value of £4.5 billion - 32 acquisitions and 15 disposals.
Ian spent 16 years with Emap, during the last six of which he was Director of Corporate Development and latterly a member of the Executive Board. This position saw him execute a major reshaping of the Group, including disposing of some sectors of the business, acquiring strategically advantageous companies and redirecting spend to faster growing, more profitable sectors.
He also worked closely with the Executive Chairman and the CFO on the break-up of Emap, selling consumer activities to Bauer and B2B to Apax/GMG. In difficult markets, the successful execution of this process, which saw value creation for shareholders and a premium of 58% achieved on the remaining sale of plc/B2B, was widely applauded in the financial community.
Prior to joining Emap in 1992, Ian was Business Development Director of RBPG, a division of Reed Elsevier.
Ian is MBA and degree qualified, and has worked in the USA, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Italy and the Middle East.
Click here for the list of transactions Ian completed at Emap 
Paul Flanagan
Focused on digital entertainment, Paul specialises in video gaming and online gambling, carrying out corporate advisory, business development, capital raising and M&A assignments.
With over 12 years involvement in video gaming, online games and 3D technology, Paul is currently building Real Life, a virtual world in which young people test-drive jobs, careers and, by extension, their lives. This builds on previous work including an adver-gaming company and a multi-player video gaming company.
He has worked with many established online gambling companies and smaller start-ups with innovative ideas in mobile, social networking, casual gaming, skill gaming and other areas. Paul is a regular speaker at industry events, including the 2006 and 2007 Gaming Investor Conferences, gaming-focused panels at Ariadne forums, and sat on the 2006 E-Gaming Awards judging panel.
Paul has extensive experience in the high-technology and banking industries in North America and Europe, with dealings in Asia and the Middle East.
He worked for IP Sharp Associates, a value-added networking company in Toronto, building and selling international solutions for the oil, banking and securities industries. Based in London in the late 1980s with Reuters, he developed and ran a European sales and marketing structure for financial services applications, then moved into financial institutions sales for Citibank NA. He went on to work with JP Morgan, closing fixed-income deals with sovereigns in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Paul earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of Western Ontario, Canada and an MBA from INSEAD.
Julie Meyer
Julie Meyer is one of the leading champions for entrepreneurship in Europe. With over 20 years investment and advisory experience helping start-up businesses, she is the well known founder and CEO of Ariadne Capital, founder of Entrepreneur Country, co-founder of First Tuesday, dragon on BBC's Online Dragons Den and weekly columnist in London's City A.M.
Through these intertwining roles of entrepreneur, advisor, investor and industry commentator, Julie has set her mission to build a growth story for the UK and Europe. This passion and entrepreneurial flair has earned her awards as Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow and a place in the Wall Street Journal's Top 30 Most Influential Women in Europe.
American by birth and European in spirit, Julie has added a flourishing media career to her business commitments, recently joining BBC's Online Dragon's Den. In addition to her weekly column for London's City A.M. and regular contributions to Business Week, Computing, FT Digital Business, Spectator Business, Julie is also a regular industry commentator on the BBC and CNBC.
Most recently Julie founded Entrepreneur Country. Managed by Ariadne Capital, Entrepreneur Country is a dedicated community for leading and emerging entrepreneurs, investors, the media and corporate partners who service the start-up industry across the UK and Europe.
From 1998 to 1999, Julie was part of the team at NewMedia Investors, which became early stage investment firm SPARK Ventures in October 1999. During this time she took her first steps in the entrepreneurial arena founding First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs, which many credit for igniting the Internet generation in Europe. It was sold for $50million in cash and shares in July 2000.
As a personal project, Julie is also currently setting up an association for teenage girls to help them find their unique contribution to the world and create a virtuous circle of investment in women.
Diana Nye
Diana Nye is a business development specialist with over 16 years of leadership experience with a special emphasis in enterprise and ASP software, collaboration and convergence. She has worked with a range of companies, from start-ups to some of the largest and most influential corporations in the US, Europe and Asia, delivering sales and marketing, business strategy and transformation, business process improvement, fund raising and team development success.
Most recently she has been working on global go-to-market strategies for Anglo-American joint ventures and was part of the vielife leadership team that drove the acquisition by CIGNA CareAllies.
Diana has lived in the UK for over 16 years and is a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono and West Virginia University.
Diana has joined the Entrepreneur Country team: bringing to live the vision of "building the next generation of growth and wealth in the UK and Europe".
Ian Powell
Ian Powell has worked in the media industry for 19 years, recently selling the plc that he acquired and developed as a BIMBO in 1993.
Ian was Group Finance Director of the Maiden Group plc. Maiden, the largest independent UK outdoor media operator, which was sold for£56 million in May 2006 to Titan Outdoor Inc, a US company majority owned by Welsh Carson.
Prior to Maiden Group Plc, Ian worked at Clearchannel UK, More O’Ferrall Adshel Ltd, and retrospectively a career in telecommunications/bakery and FMCG.
Kit Ruparel
Kit is a board experienced CTO and CIO with a skill-set across software development, IT systems and company operations.
The majority of his career has been spent growing start-ups or turning around SMEs that may otherwise have been regarded as ‘end-of-life’.
Having mostly worked for private-equity or VC backed organisations, Kit’s skills have been regularly used by investors to evaluate companies they may have an interest in, perform due-diligence activities, or assist with growth or turnaround strategies.
With an exceptional ability to rapidly understand a new product or service, the business model around it and whether the technology and operations are helping or hindering the company vision, Kit is as comfortable operating within experienced boards as he is probing lines of source-code with the developers and engineers.
Extremely innovative, Kit rapidly finds solutions to any technical or operational challenge; and as well as having patents to his own name is also excellent at identifying the unique product features or methods in others’ intellectual property and then making the most of them from a business perspective.
Kit’s network and access to skills is very broad, having worked with experts across virtually every technological discipline, using development and BPO organisations across most continents, peering with ‘deep’ contacts (i.e. true technology owners, not evangelists) inside organisations like Microsoft, and negotiating products, services and partnerships from the largest name-brand companies down to the smallest specialist suppliers.
Kit is a Chartered IT Professional and has voluntarily assisted the British Computer Society, the National Computer Centre, the DTI, the Learning and Skills Council and the government e-Skills programme on a range of topics from Professionalism in IT initiatives to defining skills frameworks for CIOs through to IT end-users.
David Scholtz
David joined Ariadne Capital in 2006 to be part of the transaction team. His sector expertise includes digital entertainment, local media, online consumer services, e-commerce and online recruitment. David has championed and advised companies including BView, Enrich Social Productions, Nearworld Investments, Momail, Consenda and Digital Stores.
David’s key focus areas include advising on capital raising, business growth strategy and partnership development as well as corporate advisory within the digital media and online services sectors. He has a strong grasp of new technologies, web development and consumer services.
Prior to Ariadne Capital, he was a Senior Business Analyst at Yahoo! Search Marketing, a division of Yahoo! Europe, for three years where he worked in the European Operations Finance team as a finance business partner to the European YSM Business Development team. Prior to Yahoo! Europe he was at Monster Worldwide (European subsidiary of Monster Worldwide Inc) for four years as European Business Analyst, working across the European Finance and Sales divisions with the European CEO, CFO and Head of Sales.
David has a dual BA Psychology degree from Richmond the American International University in London and the Open University, is a Swedish South African and speaks Swedish, Afrikaans and some French and Dutch.
Karima Serageldin
Karima Serageldin has significant TMT product management expertise having spent ten years leading product innovation and development, product partnerships and profit improvement projects in the internet space at MCI/Verizon and latterly at Pipex Communications.
While at Pipex, Karima was responsible for product management of the fixed and wireless internet access and VPN products sold by Pipex, before joining its M&A and corporate advisory deal team, where she was instrumental in securing seed funding from Intel Capital for a WiMAX joint venture with Pipex (Freedom 4 Group) and executing Pipex’s customer-based acquisition of Cable and Wireless plc arm Bulldog.
Since the sale of Pipex, Karima has been working in venture capital both on the investment and advisory side, notably leading early stage venture investment, and acting as non-executive advisor to the board of a seed stage digital media company.
While at Ariadne Capital, Karima has advised digital media and technology companies such as EGS, gnuTrade, Monitise, Slicethepie, and SpinVox. Karima brings to the Ariadne team combined operational industry experience and end-to-end knowledge, delivering strategic, product and financial solutions for a range of stakeholders; B2B, B2C, consulting and investors across internet/telco and digital media. Sector interests include music, voice innovation, SaaS, IPTV, and mobile applications.
Jonathan Simnett
Jonathan Simnett has 25 years' experience - winning in excess of three dozen awards - for helping private and public sector clients in fast-growth B2B segments to achieve growth, enter new markets, and reposition through the delivery of more effective branding and marketing communications strategies. Most recently, his team at Ariadne Capital portfolio company SpinVox was named as global Communications Department of the Year at the 2009 International Business Awards in New York.
He was formerly vice chairman in the UK of Brodeur Worldwide, a global public relations and marketing communications consultancy. At Brodeur, he was part of the team that founded and built the company to nearly 650 people and $95 million turnover worldwide over a period of 15 years, delivering in excess of 20 per cent year on year revenue growth. He also sat on the board of Brodeur in Europe (a $30 million entity) running, in turn, people and business development and became one of the UK’s first Investors in People.
Jonathan has worked with established companies and firms such as: AT&T, BT, Cable & Wireless, Cisco Systems, e2v technologies, Intel, Nortel Networks, Novell, Informix, IBM, Logicalis, Philips, Openreach, QAD and Sybase. In addition, he has also worked with small fast growth, venture-backed companies such as: @stake, Blast Radius, BlueKite, Bytemobile, Cape Clear, City Reach, DebtResolve, Envisional, Go2Call, Intamac, Intuwave, Interoute, Global Graphics, Roboscience, OnInstant, Palo Alto Software, THINQ and Vecta.
He has also delivered campaigns for other parts of the technology ecosystem: for financiers and advisory firms such as Ariadne Capital and Battery Ventures and their portfolios; and for government organisations such as the European Commission, Locate in Scotland, Salford Regeneration and Thames Valley Enterprise. Jonathan has worked with the management teams of agencies such as ChameleonPR, CognitoMedia, Fleishman-Hillard and Midnight Communications to help them effectively manage change and growth.