The team behind better business finance

It started in a pub.

We'd just sold ThinkHire, a green-tech equipment rental business I'd spent the back half of 2020 helping restructure and exit. The sale had gone well. What hadn't gone well was the debt. Raising the funding that business needed had been slow, opaque, and frustrating in a way that felt entirely solvable. So over a drink that night with Peter and a few others, I made the case: the finance sector was ready for technology, and we were the people to bring it.

That was the whole thesis. Peter, Richard, and I funded five people in a room, building software to make business borrowing faster and fairer.

I'd spent twenty years getting ready for that conversation without knowing it. Chartered accountant, then a partner specialising in corporate finance and transactions. CFO and later interim CEO of an equipment rental business I helped sell. A spell as managing director of a currency business that was profitable but coasting, which I grew, turbocharged, and exited. Years of M&A inside a listed group, five acquisitions taken to close. Every stage taught me a different part of the full picture.

The early days of Spark were not a straight line. We thought becoming a broker would put us at the heart of the finance community, close to the deals and the data. It did, but broking itself proved harder than the thesis allowed. We tried different teams, different approaches, and learned the unglamorous way which ones held. In April 2023 we merged with JD Capital Finance, Jamie Davies's brokerage, bringing real market expertise alongside our technology. That changed everything.

The team that came through all of that is the part I'm proudest of. After the false starts, we now have a group that's genuinely solid and loyal, over 25 people across technology, sales, and operations, many of them owners through our Employee Ownership Plan.

The numbers followed the people. As of mid 2026, we've helped over 2,000 UK businesses secure more than £200 million in funding, across retail, construction, hospitality, and professional services. We're FCA-authorised, rated 4.9 out of 5 by our clients, and we've won Business Moneyfacts' Best Use of Technology in SME Finance three years running.

We're not finished. The thesis from the pub still holds, that the firms who bring real technology and real data to business finance will define its future. We just understand the work a lot better now.

Julian Dobbin

CEO & Co-Founder, Spark Finance