Seedrs, the leading equity crowdfunding platform, announced today that it has promoted Jeff Kelisky as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) effective today.
Kelisky, who joined the company as Chief Operating Officer (COO) in January 2017, succeeds co-founder Jeff Lynn as CEO.
Seedrs also announced that Lynn has been named Executive Chairman. In that role, he will chair the company’s Board and will continue to serve as a full-time executive in the business, focusing on major strategic, commercial and corporate initiatives.
Kelisky is a highly-experienced technology executive with a track record in building, leading and scaling successful businesses:
●A technologist by background, he started out as a programmer and systems engineer—and later became a salesman—at IBM during its Lou Gerstner-led renaissance.
● Following an MBA at London Business School and several years consulting with A.T. Kearney, he joined Multimap, which was Europe’s leading provider of online mapping services. After a year he was promoted to CEO and led the business for five years before selling it to Microsoft in 2007.
● He joined Microsoft with the sale of Multimap, serving as General Manager of the Bing Local Search and Mapping portfolio worldwide.
●He then joined Picsolve, a Fidelity-backed $75 million image capture business in the entertainment space, as CEO. In that role, he delivered the company's transformation from an analogue to a digital business, and by the time he left in 2016, it was an industry leader in image capture and in retail execution.
Kelisky’s promotion to the CEO role comes at the end of an 18-month process. The process began in early 2016, when Lynn told the Board that as Seedrs moved from its startup phase to being a true scaleup, he felt it would benefit from having a CEO who had already led a successful, high‐growth transformations in technology-driven businesses. Lynn made clear that he remains fully committed to the business and intends to serve it however he can add the most value. The Executive Chairman role will allow him to do precisely that.
As CEO, Kelisky will lead the business as it enters a period of significant growth. His appointment follows a string of recent accomplishments from Seedrs including:
●Funding over 510 deals with more than £230 million invested into campaigns on the platform including a £3.8 million round for Revolut from over 4,300 investors this month.
●Launching the equity crowdfunding sector’s first Secondary Market in May 2017, from which some investors have realised up to 19x returns on their investments.
●Becoming the sole equity crowdfunding platform appointed to the Royal Bank of Scotland Capital Connections Programme in May 2017.
●Being named the most active investor in UK private companies by independent research agency Beauhurst in February 2017.
● Continuing to work closely in partnership with Sir Andy Murray, who has now backed almost 30 early-stage businesses on Seedrs, promoting the success of European SMEs.
●Being shortlisted in 2017 for Digital SME of the Year (DL100), Fintech 250 (Future of Fintech), Fintech 50 (The Fintech 50: Seedrs is The only crowdfunding platform on it), Alternative Finance Provider of the Year (2017 British Small Business Awards), Tech Company of the Year (National Technology Awards)
Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Seedrs, said: ”I feel privileged and delighted to lead our incredibly talented team at Seedrs on our very bold mission. We have a track record of delivering many firsts to market in aligning the interests of smart investors and ambitious businesses in equity crowdfunding - and this is only the beginning. With the products and services in our pipeline today, I look forward to accelerating on that success and continuing Seedrs’ unique dedication to quality, transparency, and service to its fast growing customer base”.
Jeff Lynn, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Seedrs, said: “I am hugely excited about the transition we are announcing today. Jeff Kelisky is going to make an outstanding CEO, and I cannot fathom placing the company’s leadership into a better pair of hands. Meanwhile, I am very much looking forward to serving as Executive Chairman, where I will have the chance to focus on major initiatives where I feel I can add most value to the business, and indeed where I can support and learn from Jeff’s leadership as the company pursue aggressive growth in the months and years to come.”
“Lynn and Kelisky have formed a perfectly harmonious team since Kelisky’s arrival at Seedrs, and a number of recent accomplishments including a rapid increase in investment through the platform and the successful launch of a groundbreaking secondary market validate that” said Steven Rimmer, Senior NED at Seedrs since 2012 and an active board member. “Over the last seven months they have collaborated on shared initiatives and together I have no doubt they will drive Seedrs to become the standard bearer in the industry during this incredibly exciting growth period."