Our Team

Founder + CEO

Marcus Ralphs

Before founding ByzGen Marcus served in the British Army. In addition to taking part in several high-tempo combat commands, Marcus held posts in Financial and Military Capability and Defence Policy, working at the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and British Army headquarters. Marcus’ fascination with technology was first sparked by the challenges facing the defence and security sectors when it comes to managing and assuring sensitive data to inform complex and time-sensitive decisions.

In addition to running the business, Marcus heads up the development of ByzGen’s academic and commercial partnerships

Co Founder + CTO

Terry Leonard

Terry has a background in development and technology and has previously taken a senior role in growing a semantic web start up business to being acquired by the leading global information services company.

Since that acquisition Terry has been building technology products for bigger corporates having previously held senior IT roles at Experian and online gaming giant, GAN. Terry assumed the position of CTO in 2017, and now is responsible for overseeing the management and development of ByzGen’s platform.

Terry is passionate about bringing new solutions to ByzGen’s clients and informing our platform development based on their needs.

Head of Delivery

Matt Birks

Matt spent 11 years as a Combat Engineer Officer in the British Army where he learned to lead, plan and deliver everything from bridge demolitions to school infrastructure projects. He completed numerous operational deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq; latterly serving within the army’s bomb disposal organisation where he held several senior operational and training roles.

Upon leaving the Army Matt joined Jaguar Land Rover to manage the commercial aspects of new vehicle programmes. Followed by a stint managing teams delivering business process improvement and data analytics.

Matt is ByzGen’s Head of Delivery, responsible for leading the successful design and execution of ByzGen’s bespoke software projects. He enjoys engaging with clients and getting to the bottom of their business needs; before leveraging the agile ByzGen engineering team to deliver the best possible business solutions.

Head of Engineering

Giuseppe Persiani

Giuseppe started is software engineering journey in 1982 using a Texas Instruments TI-59 calculator that had an amazing 480 instruction steps and impressive 60 memory positions, since then he is always looking for ways to fill up all the available computer memory!

Giuseppe has lead teams in a variety of sectors including military, banking, e-commerce, insurance and network security for both small and large companies. The majority of Giuseppe’s career has been in large corporates, but his real passion remains in start-up land; building high-performing teams of software engineers from the ground up.

As ByzGen’s Head of Engineering, Giuseppe leads the development team.

Head of Business Development

Tom Bright

Tom’s career has seen him build and lead business development functions in IT and Business Consulting, with start-up experience gained in both the UK and Australia. Having always been passionate about long-standing business relationships which realise value, he is proud of the portfolio of clients he has worked with, and maintains relationships with, across numerous sectors.

Tom proactively sought a move into the innovative technology space, as he believes this is where value will truly be added in business and society in future. He joined ByzGen as Head of Business Development, responsible for client relationships and working closely with internal teams to grow the external presence in our target markets. For Tom, this represents an exciting opportunity to build a business development function which focuses on using our technology to solve the daily challenges our clients face when managing data.

Head of Product

Mohammad Salam

Mo views successful start-ups as mini labs that truly care about customers and innovate around them. With tech start-up experience in Legal, Fintech and Insurtech sectors, Mo is passionate about building products that customers love.

As ByzGen’s head of product, Mo bridges the gap between the founder’s vision, customer needs and the company’s products.

Senior Software Engineer

Demiro Massessi

Demiro started his career as a Software Engineer out of a fascination with High Frequency Trading. Launching his first HFT tech Start-up in 2010, Demiro spent the next 5 years identifying tech solutions to build the fastest HFT Software on the market. In addition to his gaining a wealth of engineering experience, Demiro used this period to hone his architectural and leadership skills.

In 2016, Demiro started his blockchain journey, building applications and systems in his own free time. The move to become one of ByzGen’s senior software engineers was therefore a natural one; providing the opportunity to work with agile squads of like-minded developers on a software architecture that he understands inside-out.

Senior Software Engineer

Rob Evans

An experienced software engineer with over a decade of experience in multi-national corporations, including Accenture, UBS Investment Bank, Expedia, and, more recently, Springer Nature. During this time Rob has built a reputation for exceptional software design and engineering across a broad array of applications including: small desktop applications, eTrading platforms and partner solutions.

Rob relishes the challenges associated with building systems and solutions from the ground up. He also fervently believes that blockchain technology can empower individuals, organisations (and even machines) by creating a safer environment to manage sensitive data securely.

As one of ByzGen’s senior software engineers, Rob works closely with his team to design and build systems that address the most pressing information management business challenges.

Software Engineer

David Whyte

Having graduated with a Masters Degree in Computing and Information Systems, David has immersed himself in multiple programming languages and frameworks. With a keen interest in emerging technologies, he is particularly drawn to blockchain technology and its potential as a new architectural standard.

David is one of ByzGen’s software engineers and is rapidly building experience as a full-stack developer.

Software Engineer

Shristy Bhati

Shristy started her IT career in 2014. Since her childhood she was fascinated by software engineering; a fascination that saw her graduating as an Engineer in Computer Science. An experienced and proficient Java developer, Shristy fully embraces evolving technology trends, particularly blockchain.

As one of ByzGen’s software engineers, she has thrown herself into getting to grips with decentralised networks and distributed ledgers.

Software Engineer

Ramona Mohan

Before joining ByzGen Romana was a software engineer at arm. Naturally drawn to a more dynamic software cycle approach, with a particular emphasis on emerging technologies, she realised that a future in cooperate software development was not for her.

Moving to ByzGen as a software engineer provided Ramona with the opportunity to gain broader experience; taking on tasks beyond the remit of the archetypal software engineer role.

UX / UI design + Software Engineer

Leo Leite

Leo is an experienced UX/UI product designer with a background in corporate e-commerce, FinTech and data visualisation.

Adopting the latest design technologies and techniques. Leo’s design approach is user-focused and his goal is to create products that are both practical and easy to use. In addition to his expertise in interface design and user ergonomics, Leo is a capable software engineer. This rare mix of experience means the gap that often occurs between UX/UI and developers simply does not exist; making Leo an integral part of the ByzGen development team.