Sky Futures takes off with Chief Technology Officer and Non-Executive Chairman appointments

Sky Futures is a UK-headquartered organisation that broadly operates in the much talked about ‘drones’ or ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’ (UAV) space.

In tandem with an ‘A’ round of corporate financing led by Ardent Advisors – which saw MMC Ventures and the Airware Commercial Drone Fund invest over $4m in Sky Futures – Spectrum conducted searches to appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) pre-fundraising and a Non-Executive Chairman immediately post-fundraising.

The combination of successful leadership hiring and corporate fundraising will enable Sky Futures to build upon its successful services business, and, most importantly, to build significant enterprise value through the realisation of its technology vision.

This vision is to deliver a SaaS-based, real-time data collection product on a global basis to multiple industries in which physical inspection might be inefficient or even dangerous, and therefore plays well to the widespread structural changes to global industry that both ‘big data’ and the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) offer; whilst completely avoiding the potentially highly deflationary and risky business models of drone hardware and operating systems.

For the CTO appointment, it was essential that the candidate could build an end-to-end, highly scalable and secure ICT system with software at its core, and to do so in a lean and agile way that would be optimally suited to an early-stage venture. Adrian Karl possessed such a track record within a number of different environments, and joined the executive management team, which includes co-founders James Harrison, Chris Blackford and Nick Rogers.

For the Non-Executive Chairman, it was essential that the candidate could lead the Board of a fast-growing software business; and to challenge and support the executive management team; and to contribute to the development of the company’s commercial model. Mark Wells has a track record as a successful Board member of a variety of private and publicly held software businesses in both the US and UK, and will Chair the Board at Sky-Futures, which currently includes the co-founders, investors, and one independent Non-Executive Director (NED).