Dan Wagner

Dan founded MAID in London in 1984, at the age of twenty, to sell market research online to corporate researchers. He floated the company on the London Stock Exchange in 1994, when he was widely described as the youngest chief executive of a listed British company, and on Nasdaq in 1995. In 1997 he led MAID's acquisition of Knight-Ridder Information, the American owner of the Dialog databases, and in 2000 sold Dialog's information business to Thomson, now Thomson Reuters. The company that remained was renamed Bright Station.

He went on to found Venda, a hosted e-commerce platform sold to NetSuite in 2014; to co-found and chair Attraqt, admitted to AIM in 2014; to found Powa Technologies, a mobile-commerce company that entered administration in 2016; and, within weeks of that, to found Rezolve, which listed on Nasdaq as Rezolve Ai in August 2024. He was founding chairman of Buyapowa from 2011 to 2018.

His working conviction, expressed in a weekly newspaper column in 2001 and in daily posts today, has been the same for forty years: that commerce moves onto whatever network people are using, and that British companies can build the software that moves it. The full account of his career, his writing and a dated press archive of more than a hundred clippings are on his personal site.