Tell us a little about yourself and your background. What led you to found GOODFOLIO and ultimately build SEPANTA?
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After graduating from the University of Oxford in 2013 I embarked on my machine learning and data aggregation journey in my first role at Record Currency Management. I designed new products across portfolio teams and this early experience shaped my path towards creating my own products which lead me to set up GOODFOLIO which has now relaunched as SEPANTA.
I am now a serial entrepreneur, AI strategist and product leader with a track record of building and scaling applied artificial intelligence products and companies. I lead the vision and growth at SEPANTA, transforming cutting-edge AI concepts into practical products that deliver measurable value in real-world markets.
With deep experience at the intersection of technology, strategy and product development, I focus on translating complex AI capabilities into solutions that solve meaningful business challenges. My work centres on building defensible products that leverage AI to enhance human productivity and create long-term value.
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Tell us more about SEPANTA, the evolution from GOODFOLIO and why now?
We have become SEPANTA to reflect the company鈥檚 evolution from a portfolio of products to an operational system as we enter our next phase of rapid growth and a major investment round.
Rebranding to SEPANTA reflects both how far we鈥檝e come and the overarching AI technology that powers our products, strategy and future. Sepanta is derived from the ancient Avestan word sp蓹峁噒a or Spenta, meaning 鈥渂eneficent,鈥 or 鈥渂ounteous鈥 and carries strong connotations of growth, echoing our operating system designed for growth, not just cutting costs.
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What is the business need that SEPANTA answers? Who are your core customers?
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AI systems for organisations with complex ecosystems. Summarising an email is easy. AI in the real world is not. Data rights, governance, speed, accuracy, lots of moving parts and lots of stakeholders who all need to sign off before anything goes live. That鈥檚 where most enterprise AI stalls, and it鈥檚 the problem we work on.
Our core customers today are in financial services, major international consumer goods, and businesses going through strategic change. But the platform lets us build and scale custom systems across a much wider range of domains. The underlying problems for messy workflows are the same whether the work is regulated compliance, retail execution in emerging markets, or strategic decision-making at the top of the business.
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How have the conversations you鈥檙e having with customers changed over the past year as AI adoption has accelerated?
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The conversation has moved from 鈥渄oes it work?鈥 to 鈥渄oes it scale?鈥 A year ago, most leaders wanted to know whether AI could actually do the job in a demo. Now they want to know whether it can do the job under real conditions. Inside their workflow, on their data, under their governance rules, at the volume their business actually runs.
That鈥檚 a much harder question, and it鈥檚 the right one. It鈥檚 also the one the foundation labs themselves have started answering out loud. The industry鈥檚 public pivot into deployment and services over the last year is the clearest sign yet that model access alone doesn鈥檛 turn into enterprise value.
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What are the current product offerings in SEPANTA? Can you explain more about the current products and the business issues they fix?
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Our three flagship products include , a financial marketing compliance software which won a Greater London Enterprise Award, , an AI-powered sales growth engine for CPG brands designed to capture real-time shelf demand and , a strategic intelligence platform, highlighting where structural misalignments hold teams back.
Alongside the applications, we鈥檙e productising the layers of the platform itself. Our agentic product builder, agent governance monitoring and orchestration to keep model costs under control.
These are the tools we built for ourselves to build, scale, and govern multiple product lines, and now customers have started asking for them directly.
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Of the products currently available, which are seeing the strongest demand from customers and why?
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The most interesting demand trend is what鈥檚 happening at the platform layer. The agent monitoring and governance capability inside SEPANTA is increasingly being asked for on its own terms.
C-suite are all asking a version of the same question: what AI is running in my organisation, how is it being used, and is it doing what our policies say it should?
Twelve months ago that was a compliance afterthought. Now it鈥檚 often the entry point to the whole conversation. It鈥檚 a healthy signal that governance being pulled forward means AI is finally being treated as a system, not as a series of experiments.
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How does your AI product impact businesses and their people?
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We go beyond a business鈥 organisational chart by bridging the gap between external teams and data, allowing companies to thrive and embrace the point of no return of AI deployment. We drive tangible business growth whilst enabling employees to unlock strategic value; welcomed by teams rather than feared as a headcount cutter.
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There is still concern in some organisations that AI will replace jobs. How do you ensure your solutions are viewed as tools for growth rather than headcount reduction?
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Honestly, if the ROI number depends on cutting people, you can鈥檛 frame your way out of it. The maths gives you away.
Look at what we actually do. In marketing compliance, retail execution, the judgement calls our customers care about are still made by humans. What we take off people鈥檚 plates is the queue of routine work sitting in front of those decisions. The numbers our customers hold us to are things like time-to-decision, or how much more the team can now cover. Headcount is rarely the line that moves.
So it鈥檚 not a positioning choice. It鈥檚 about how the product is built and how the business is underwritten. If it鈥檚 only in the marketing, people see through it.
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What is the biggest misconception business leaders still have about AI?
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That AI is a tool. It isn鈥檛. It鈥檚 a system.
A tool sits on the desk next to the work whereas a system reshapes how the work runs. Treating AI as a tool is why so many enterprise pilots stall. They start with a chatbot here, a copilot there, none of it connected to data, to workflow, or to the decisions the business actually makes.
When you treat AI as a system, you have to design it that way from the outset: what does it discover, what does it remember, what does it decide, what stays human, how is it governed.
That鈥檚 a much more demanding conversation. It鈥檚 also the one that produces value at scale. The leaders who make that mental shift first are the ones we see pulling ahead.
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What AI trends are you most excited about right now, and what developments do you think businesses should be paying closer attention to?
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Governance moving from an afterthought to a design principle.
Regulators are catching up quickly, and boards are asking harder questions about what their AI is doing and why. The businesses treating governance as something you bolt on at the end are going to find that it鈥檚 the thing that stops them scaling.
I鈥檇 say the value in AI is shifting away from the models themselves and towards the layer that turns them into governed, contextual, working systems.
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What is the future looking like for SEPANTA? What are the plans and goals?
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The team is currently launching five new products with plans to enter five new international markets by 2027. The goal is to grow the team, grow the products and ultimately become a publicly listed company on the stock market via an IPO process. The future for SEPANTA is unlimited, and that is really exciting.
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Looking further ahead, where do you hope SEPANTA will be in five years鈥 time?
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In five years, when a CEO asks their team 鈥渉ow are we running AI?鈥, I want SEPANTA to be the honest answer. The operating system underneath the way the world鈥檚 leading organisations discover, build, and govern their business.
Practically, that means staying live and compounding across the sectors we鈥檙e already strong in: financial services, consumer goods, healthcare, strategy, operations plus domains we haven鈥檛 touched yet, in multiple markets, deep rather than wide.
And it means we鈥檝e held onto the thing that started us: unleashing AI for growth. An IPO is on the horizon, but it鈥檚 a milestone, not the mission itself. The mission is proving that AI can enter the enterprise in a way that puts people first and still wins commercially. If we鈥檝e done that in five years, everything else follows.
