The team behind PeerIndex is made up of experts from a range of fields, including data science, journalism, web development, marketing and sales. Our aim is not only to build a world class product, but a world class team. We passionately believe that who we are is as important as what we do. Every person is a valued member of the team, trusted to own and deliver important work.

Azeem Azhar – Founder

Azeem founded PeerIndex in 2009. He’s been launching and building internet services since 1993 when he put his University newspaper on Gopher. His career has covered journalism (at the Economist and The Guardian), strategy (at the BBC and Reuters) and more than a decade of start-ups. He is a wanna-be maths geek with an interest in the Vietnam War and innovation, and lives in North London with his wife and three kids. Knows just enough to be dangerous.

Phil Guest – Chief Commercial Officer

Phil joined PeerIndex in September 2011 with an impressive track record in customer development having worked in senior commercial roles with a number of media and technology companies including AOL, Capital Radio, Emap, Fox TV and more recently, social games company Sulake. His team help PeerIndex Partners with the practical application of the science of influence. As an ex-rugby playing Royal Marine Commando, Phil loves to sail and stay fit.

Andy Lucas – Director of Engineering

Andy is a start-up veteran, having started a web hosting business during the late 1990′s. Post dot-com boom he moved to networks & operations, managing the European IP network for a global telco. In the last 5 years he has delivered software and managed engineering teams for three startups, working in Java, in the cloud, with big data and machine learning, across ad tech and now influence marketing. In his spare time he likes to drink coffee and cook experimental dishes.

Mary Criebardis – Head of Business Operations

Mary joined PeerIndex in August 2012 to manage internal operations. She brings her expertise in project and product management, client relations, and internal process optimisation. Prior to PeerIndex she worked with the mobile applications development company Xtreme Labs. Mary has an MBA from INSEAD, has lived in the UK, Canada, France, Singapore and Brazil, loves travelling, and her day always starts with a good run.

Mischa Tuffield – Head of Research Engineering

Mischa is responsible for PeerIndex’s Big Data platform that delivers influence at scale. PeerIndex is Mischa’s second start-up after helping Garlik through to sale. As an active member of the Web community, he authored/edited W3C’s report the future of Social Networking and was part of the RDF Working Group. Mischa holds a PhD in Computer Science (University of Southampton) and an AI degree (University of Edinburgh). He also doesn’t really do funny that well.

David Galbraith – Advisor

David is a designer of the obvious. He designs things that are trivially simple, but they are the right trivially simple. David created the visual bookmarking concept behind Pinterest, the one line bios used by Twitter and Facebook and co-authored the RSS standard. Originally an architect and set designer, over the last 18 years he has designed things used by nearly a billion people, on the web.

Our board, investors and advisors

PeerIndex is backed by a group of leading angels and VCs who have backed firms like Simple, Last.fm, Mendeley, Zoopla, Climate Corporation, Omnifone, Betterment, Skimlinks and others. They include Antrak Capital, Anthemis Group, DFJ Esprit, Tom Glocer, Sherry Coutu and Stefan Glaenzer.

Our board includes Russell Buckley (former GM for AdMob) and Bill Emmott (former Editor-in-Chief of The Economist).