FB Roundup Nik Storonsky, Jane Simpson, Mike Lynch

Nik Storonsky plans next move

Nik Storonsky, the billionaire co-founder of Revolut, is planning an up to $500 million sale of his stake in the London-based financial services firm. 

Britain’s Sky News reports that Revolut has hired Morgan Stanley to organise the secondary share sale. It adds that the share sale is expected to be restricted to company employees.

It comes at a time when the company is booming. Early in July, Revolut reported earnings of £438 million ($578 million) for 2023 on revenues which nearly doubled to £1.8bn.

The company's growth has taken place at what Sky News calls “breakneck speed”. Customer numbers have soared from 16.4 million at the time of its Series E fundraising three years ago to more than 40 million today. Revolut wants to be a financial one-stop shop and offers help with everything from currency exchange to global transfer payments as well as budgeting.

Storonsky has been tight-lipped about what he plans to do next. MoneyWeek reports that he has his sights set on the venture capital sector with an investment in a quantitative investment firm for early-stage firms that uses algorithms and AI to source deals. 

Born in 1984 in Dolgoprudny, Russia, Storonsky got his start trading derivatives at Lehman Brothers and then Credit Suisse. He founded Revolut in 2015 to be what has been dubbed a “challenger bank”. He renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022, after the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Forbes estimates that Revolut is worth around $13.8 billion while Storonsky’s stake sits at around $2.7 billion. He opened a family office in London in 2021. 

James Dyson appoints Jane Simpson as CIO

Jane Simpson has been appointed chief investment officer at Weybourne, James Dyson’s family office. 

Bloomberg reports that she was appointed following the departure of Bjorn Thelander. 

At the company since 2018, filings show that the accountant by training, previously looked after businesses owned by John Botts, a former executive at the European private equity giant CVC Capital Partners, between 2008 and 2015, and was a director of Oxfordshire-based military publishing house Osprey Publishing. 

Founded in 2013, Weybourne was established to manage the funds for James Dyson, best known for his vacuum cleaners, though now more focused on farming. Forbes estimates that he has a net worth of around $13.9 billion. 

Frustrated with his family's domestic vacuum cleaner, Dyson set himself the task of inventing a better version in 1978 which uses a cyclone to lift dirt. Although not an engineer by training, so Dyson's mythology goes, it took him five years of testing and 5,127 prototypes. The firm now employs more than 5,000 engineers around the world. 

As we reported last year, Dyson is vocal in his views. A public supporter of Brexit, he criticised the English prime minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to turn the UK into a science and technology superpower as a “mere political slogan”.

“Ministers talk hubristically of Britain becoming a ‘science and technology superpower’ but their woeful policies diminish this to a mere political slogan,” he said in a letter to The Times.

Weybourne has more than 60 employees between the UK and Singapore who help support Dyson’s fortune. 

Mike Lynch dies as superyacht sinks

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch died after his yacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily in mid-August. 

The founder of Autonomy, a Cambridge-based software business, he had been mired in legal difficulties since 2011. 

He founded the firm in 1996 and then floated it on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 with himself as chief executive. At the time, the company was valued at £4 billion ($6.9 billion). By 2011, it had been taken over by IT giant Hewlett Packard for $11 billion. 

But as we reported previously, Lynch was then accused of deliberately overstating the value of the business during the sale and the legal problems were to run and run.

Lynch, who always denied any wrongdoing from the deal in which he personally made $800 million, long argued that he was being made a “scapegoat” for mismanagement by HP. 

Then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved his extradition to the US in January 2022 and he was finally flown to San Francisco to face charges in March last year. 

In the end, the jury there rejected all 15 charges of conspiracy and wire fraud against him and Lynch’s lawyers were able to speak of the US government’s “profound overreach”.

Lynch was a non-executive director of the BBC from 2007 to 2012, and a board member of the British Library as well as the Crick Institute. He was also a trustee of Nesta, a foundation that supports innovation for the social good, and a fellow of the Royal Society. 

He was appointed OBE in 2006.

As well as Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah; Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, a women's health champion; Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda, a jewellery designer, all died in the accident as well. 

Lynch is survived by his wife Angela Bacares.