George leads fund finance and operations at Forestay, overseeing valuations and managing investor reporting. Before joining Forestay, he spent several years at B-Flexion across venture capital, private equity, and real estate, including as co-head of the fund finance and operations function and as Associate Director within the portfolio finance team.

George is fascinated by the pace of disruption from AI and continued evolution as new tools become available, something he has witnessed firsthand within the CFO stack. Working alongside a team at the forefront of enterprise AI, he has a unique view of just how far and how fast the technology is moving.

George was born and raised in and around London. Football dominated his early years, before giving way to other sports, largely because fitness and ability (the two things football demands most) became harder to come by. These days, he spends his time raising his daughter and cycling when he can, with friends who wait patiently for him at the top, and bottom, of every hill.

Shaun is the founder and CEO of Qudos Associates, a brand consultancy focused on building distinctive, high-impact brand identities for companies at scale.

He brings over three decades spanning brand strategy, corporate communications and growth marketing across sectors – working at the intersection of positioning and commercial performance, where brand is a driver of pipeline, pricing power and talent, not decoration.

Shaun advises leadership teams on brand personality – the tone, story, and visual identity that make a scaling company unmistakable.

• Sharpening positioning and category narrative before scale-up
• Building a brand identity that carries from Series B to exit
• Founder and executive communications – story, voice, presence
• Making brand measurable: awareness, pipeline, and pricing power

Giuseppe is an award-winning professor of negotiation and influencing since 2005 – at INSEAD, London Business School, IMD, Oxford, Cambridge, and HEC Paris among others – and the only person to have taught at all top-10 European business schools. He is ranked the #1 Global Guru for Negotiation worldwide for 2025 and 2026.

He is the founder and managing director of CABL (Conti Advanced Business Learning), the Geneva negotiation and influencing firm, with workshops delivered on four continents to leaders from 145+ countries.

Before leaving the corporate world in 2018, Giuseppe spent 25 years in procurement and commercial leadership at blue-chip multinationals – Procter & Gamble, Novartis, Firmenich, and Merck – combining academic rigour with practitioner scar tissue: a rare bridge between negotiation theory and the deal table.

• Preparing for enterprise deals, renewals, and partnerships
• Reading and shifting the balance of power in a negotiation
• Negotiation training for founders and commercial teams
• The procurement counterparty’s view – how buyers actually decide

Jacques is the founder and CEO of Geneva-based CulturalChange – since 1991 dedicated to building high-performance organisations and the leaders who run them.

He has led 30+ corporations and over 10,000 leaders through cultural change, partnering with top executives on the organisations they want to lead. He began as a production manager at Procter & Gamble, where his leadership method – Deming’s Total Quality principles plus motivational technique – set repeated global production records.

His core belief: workplace culture and leadership effectiveness are inseparable – cultures that bring out the best in people produce outstanding results.

• Designing culture deliberately before scale hard-codes it
• Coaching founders through the leader-of-leaders transition
• Leading organisational change without losing the team
• Building management systems that motivate and empower

Sadaf is a seasoned CFO and transformation leader with three decades of experience across FMCG, luxury, and beauty multinationals, most recently as Operations CFO Americas at Shiseido, the Japanese global beauty group.

At Shiseido she provided finance leadership through a period of regional transformation – leading end-to-end finance operations and global supply-chain finance, from planning and costing to inventory and margin management at scale.

She has directed supply-chain optimisation and large-scale organisational transformation programmes across the Americas region.

• Building a finance function that scales ahead of growth
• Operating discipline: planning, forecasting, and unit economics
• Executing transformation without losing operational momentum
• Supply-chain and cost optimisation as growth levers

Yassine is a SaaS veteran and long-time C-level executive at Nexthink – he joined in 2008 in sales and rose to Chief Strategy Officer, later Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, helping drive the ARR journey from $3M to $300M through to a $3B outcome.

He built Nexthink’s strategic partnership and alliance ecosystem from scratch, and earlier led sales across the Middle East and emerging markets as EVP – instrumental in scaling one of Europe’s defining enterprise software stories, today serving 1,000+ customers and 11M+ employees worldwide.

His prior experience spans Henkel, CSC Peat Marwick and Setcore. Yassine holds an MBA from IMD – where he first encountered Nexthink in a start-up competition.

• Sparring partner to CEOs through the scale-up phase
• GTM design: segmentation, pricing, and land-and-expand
• Building partner and alliance channels that scale revenue
• First-hand playbook for the $3M – $300M ARR journey

Stacey keeps the Forestay team running day-to-day, supporting the team more broadly while leading on marketing and events, from founder dinners to portfolio company gatherings, with a particular focus on strengthening the firm’s presence across the wider venture landscape. She sees the role as an extension of how Forestay shows up in the world, shaping how the firm is experienced by founders, partners, and the broader ecosystem it’s part of.

She has always worked in finance, spending several years at Renaissance Capital as an Executive Assistant and Office Manager. Prior to joining Forestay, she spent two years on the Events Team at J.P. Morgan, where she planned and delivered a wide range of events.

Outside the office, Stacey is a qualified swimming instructor and a lifelong music enthusiast who’s no stranger to a good gig, these days, though, it’s less likely to be a music venue and more a muddy touchline, with her playing chauffeur rather than fan. Weekends are spent pitch-side rain or shine, or by the sea with friends and family.

At Forestay, the areas that excite Jacob most are physical AI, digital health and AI agents that blur the line between software and services. Whatever the sector, the team comes first and is the one thing he won't compromise on. From there, he looks for founders taking on massive industries that are ready to be disrupted.

His route into investing did not start where you might expect. He grew up in a small village in the Swedish countryside, driving tractors and working in construction, before studying management and machine learning at KTH in Stockholm. He spent a semester in Singapore focusing on computer science, and set up an internet café in Mozambique along the way. He then wrote code at Goldman Sachs and spent two years at McKinsey working on private equity and AI projects. Before joining Forestay, he invested in early-stage AI companies at a Nordic venture capital fund, and he still keeps an extra close eye on the Nordics.

In his free time he skis, rides motorbikes and dives deep into the latest research on health and longevity. He is also training for his next marathon, having apparently learned nothing from the first one.

Nico is interested in the second-order effects of AI. Less the car, more the suburbs it creates. He has worked with AI companies across robotics, healthcare, logistics, and payments, and enjoys studying how the same technology shifts play out in very different markets.

Nico grew up on university campuses, which shaped his love of tech and rarely kept him in one place for long. Boston, Paris, Toronto, and Singapore followed. London is now home.

Before Forestay, he worked at Blenheim Chalcot, the UK's leading venture builder, where he saw companies built from scratch. He then joined the Product & Strategy team at Modulr, a London-based FinTech, wearing many hats from seed to Series B.

In another life, Nico was a competitive fencer, though today he'd trust himself more with a racquet than an épée. You'll find him on the slopes or eating ramen. Ideally at the same time.

Jannat has a keen interest in products that sell into financial services, as well as the CFO stack and solutions that make boring administrative problems go away (the more vehemently boring the problem, the better). Jannat loves to get into the weeds of operations and is a qualified executive coach and used to code quite some years ago.

Prior to joining Forestay, Jannat worked in senior finance leadership positions at tech scaleups: Hopin which she saw grow to over $100M in ARR within two years; and Lean Technologies which provides open banking rails in the Middle East. Before that, she spent several years at AXA Venture Partners as a generalist Venture Capital investor. She started her career in investment banking at Deutsche Bank covering financial institutions and FinTech.

Jannat was born and raised in London and continues to work through her bucket list of eating places and cultural activities in the city, especially watching stand-up comedy. Jannat speaks Gujarati and Hindi at home and pretends not to speak French when around her Francophone colleagues. She enjoys several creative hobbies and loves to play cards, boardgames, quizzes, and puzzles and has weird pockets of useless knowledge, just ask, or don’t.

Jonas’ interest has always been in Vertical AI, especially Physical AI. He believes successful companies will be built on top of proprietary data and clear infrastructure moat, allowing AI agents to be deployed faster and at scale onto tangible, real-world problems. Whatever the vertical, he looks for founders chasing something big within a few years, and he brings an intense, relentlessly positive energy to help them get there. He acts less like an investor ticking boxes and more like a sparring partner thinking outside of these boxes, keeping the dream honest and the ambition even bigger.

Over 15 years, Jonas has worked alongside founders across Europe and Israel through every stage of exponential growth, from fundraising, go-to-market expansion, and hiring to M&A and the occasional unicorn IPO. He did this first as a tech investment banker at global banks and later as a growth investor. Never one to take things for granted, he went after the same kind of growth in his own life, working or studying in 7 countries and picking up 5 languages along the way.

Outside of work, Jonas resets in the Alps, where he says nature makes him feel even more alive. His idea of resting, though, starts with a dawn ski tour and an alarm set before the mountain guides are even awake. It ends by the fire with a book by Cognetti or Frison-Roche, which he insists is relaxing reading, though it’s really research for the next climb.

Deb is a Partner at Forestay, where she looks for the problems hiding in plain sight, the unglamorous processes that quietly keep a business running. She backs founders building in AI, data infrastructure, and cybersecurity, turning messy enterprise data into real infrastructure and building the tooling that keeps complex IT environments secure. More than any sector, what keeps her engaged is the people, founders from wildly different backgrounds and cultures who share one trait, a relentlessness to keep pushing on what they believe long after it would be easier to stop.

Deb’s path into investing wasn’t a straight line. She studied medical engineering, then economics and law, and spent several years on Pictet’s private equity team, investing across technology, industrials, and business services, before joining Forestay in its early, startup days.

Swiss-Dutch by heritage and born in Geneva, Deb has also lived in Spain and Argentina. A lifelong collector of interests, from Latin and Greek to golf and skiing, she now channels that same restlessness into improv theatre, taking on a different character each time, with no script to fall back on.

Lab focuses on what AI changes beneath the surface: the infrastructure businesses rely on and the security systems that protect them. At Forestay, he studies how that shift is reshaping enterprise software, with a particular focus on cybersecurity and software/data infrastructure as AI raises the stakes – and backs the founders doing the rebuilding.

Before joining Forestay, Lab spent five years in PwC’s M&A team, collaborating with entrepreneurs through acquisitions, company sales, and fundraising – including the exits that defined their journeys. His work spanned businesses in technology, industrials, retail, and life sciences.

Born in Kosova, raised in Switzerland, and educated in the US, Lab speaks French, English, and Albanian – he regrets his German that is now gone. Football has long been part of his life: he was a Swiss U17 champion and remains an avid player and sports enthusiast. His outlook is summed up by a simple motto: “A day without laughter is a day wasted.”

Julien is drawn to the interplay between frontier models and the application layer. As models get better they reshape what software can do, which is either a gift or an existential threat to the companies built on top of them, depending on the week. The ones he backs stay ahead by out-executing on product, and by owning what the models can’t: the proprietary data and the workflow itself, whether in legal, tax, finance, procurement, or manufacturing.

Julien grew up in Belgium alternating between French, German, and English. He then moved to London, then Hong Kong, then London again, and is truly in love with the city. The Sunday roast, the queueing, the weather, the pub. He’ll defend every one of them.

Before Forestay he was at HarbourVest, investing in private equity across Europe. It was his first experience on the investing side and a thorough education in the gap between a good story and a good business. Before that he spent his time at Strategy& advising on M&A and value creation in software.

Largely to compensate for his flat-lands origins and London’s total absence of hills, Julien now (tries to) explore peaks and trail run across mountains. He is reliably mocked on both the ski slopes and the tennis court, but maintains this is a coaching problem.

Varun is a generalist investor at Forestay, but what excites him most is physical AI and vertical AI. The question he keeps coming back to: what becomes possible when a team has an unlimited number of agents, each with perfect context, working around the clock? And how does that change the way the team works? He’s less interested in software that speeds up the old way of working, instead looking to back the companies rebuilding how entire industries run.

He has always had an entrepreneurial streak. At 15, he ran a side business selling smartphones online, and he has been drawn to people who build things ever since. His career has kept him inside B2B software, first on the deals and then on the strategy. Most recently he spent four years at OC&C Strategy Consultants, advising private equity, enterprise, and growth-stage clients on where software markets were heading and which companies would win them. Two of those years were in Sydney, where he moved to help build the firm's Australia office from scratch. Along the way, he saw up close what good, great, and terrible look like in a software business. Before OC&C, he worked on technology M&A at Arma Partners.

Outside the office, he is usually hunting down London's best coffee and restaurants, or breaking his ankle playing padel.

Fred is the Founding and Managing Partner of Forestay. He brings a unique perspective to investing in enterprise software, having come to it from the other side of the table. Before becoming an investor, he spent more than two decades inside large organisations driving software transformation: deciding which software to buy and leading its implementation.

That story starts at Serono, which he joined in 1991. Over 16 years he rose to Group Chief Information Officer, leading software adoption across the business as the Bertarelli family built it into the third-largest biotech company in the world. After Merck KGaA acquired Serono, Fred ran information systems for its pharmaceuticals and chemicals divisions before being promoted to Group CIO.

In 2013 he rejoined Ernesto Bertarelli as Group Chief Digital Officer of Waypoint Capital, now B-FLEXION, a multi-asset investment firm. There he began investing in enterprise software on the group's behalf, and in 2018 he founded Forestay as its dedicated enterprise software fund.

Born in Afghanistan and raised in Thailand, Italy, and Switzerland, Fred has built his career between Geneva, Frankfurt, and Boston.