Our story
Flourish was co-founded by Duncan Clark and Robin Houston. Duncan comes from a storytelling background in data journalism and publishing, while Robin is a mathematician and developer. The pair started working on visualizations as a side project in 2012.
Their first projects, such as the Carbon Map, generated a lot of interest, so they set up a visualization studio, Kiln. Over the next few years, they worked with clients from the Guardian and Google to the WHO and LSE, and won prizes at the Data Journalism Awards and the Information Is Beautiful Awards, among others.
Throughout this time, Duncan and Robin were working on an idea: a tool to allow non-coders to create high-end visualizations and stories without the cost and delays of commissioning bespoke projects. By 2016 they had a clear vision for such a tool and Flourish was born.
The team
Anna Al-Damluji
Head of customer success
Anna helps our customers get the best from Flourish through training, support and account management. Before moving to Flourish, she was first employee at ElasticHosts, later acquired by GoDaddy. Anna has a BSc in AI/maths and an MPhil in computer science.
Tim Brock
Template developer
Tim works on core templates such as maps and charts. Before joining Flourish, he completed a PhD in nuclear-structure physics and established his own data visualization consultancy.
Duncan Clark
CEO
Before co-founding Kiln and Flourish, Duncan was a data journalist (Guardian), author (Profile Books) and publisher (Rough Guides/Penguin), with a focus on technology, energy and climate change. Duncan is an honorary researcher at UCL.
Jane Glentworth
Operations manager
Jane keeps Flourish running smoothly, communicating with partners and customers in addition to overseeing operations. She was previously an Executive Editor of Web Design and Production at the Guardian, managing teams and working on production tools.
Robin Houston
CTO
Robin is Flourish’s technical architect. Before focusing full time on data visualization, he ran the pathogen informatics team at the Sanger Institute, created web applications for mySociety and built the original Guardian website. Robin has a PhD in computer science.
William Keashock
Platform developer
William adds features to the Flourish platform to make it more powerful and easier to use. He has decades of experience building apps and user interfaces in the news and publishing sectors.
Hugh Kennedy
WebGL developer
Hugh develops WebGL templates such as the 3D time maps. He previously worked with the Google Creative Lab in Australia and has contributed to a number of open source projects including stack.gl and glslify.
Mark Longair
Head of development
Mark oversees technical development at Flourish. Before joining the team, he worked as a senior developer at civic-technology charity MySociety, building data-driven websites and applications. Mark has a PhD in neuroinformatics.
Daan Louter
Head of design & newsrooms
Daan is the Flourish design lead and oversees our newsroom work. He works on UI/UX, templates and everything in between. Daan joined Flourish from the Guardian where he created award-winning interactives, data projects and VR experiences.
Anna Powell-Smith
CPO
Anna is Flourish’s chief product officer and also works on development. Before Flourish, Anna was technical director at Oxford University’s Evidence-Based Medicine Data Lab. She has an MPhil in computer science.
Katherine Riley
Data journalist
Katherine writes blogs and creates visualizations to showcase new Flourish features and templates, in addition to supporting newsroom users. She was previously a Google News Fellow at the FT and an Editorial Fellow at The Atlantic.
You?
We are always happy to hear from interesting people. See our jobs page for more details.
Alumni
Following are staffers and interns who were part of the Flourish team in the past and contributed greatly to the company’s development. Thanks to you all!
Daniel Gavrilov
Developer
Daniel worked on all aspects of the Flourish platform backend. A visualisation enthusiast from his teenage years, Daniel studied computer science at UCL and did stints at the Open Data Institute and UCL Interaction Centre before joining Flourish.
Anoushka Khandwala
Anoushka is a London-based designer. She graduated from Central Saint Martins with a BA in Graphic Design, where her dissertation was published in Creative Review. At Flourish she worked on template design, training videos and more.
Felix Michel
Felix is a Swiss data journalist and developer. His many contributions to Flourish include various mapping templates. After leaving Flourish he went on to work at the TagesWoche newsroom.
Julien Assouline
Julien joined us in the summer of 2018. He focused on coding templates and was the lead developer for our first chord diagram and parliament charts.
Want to intern?
The role comes up every few months but you can drop us a line any time.
Investors and advisors
We are proud to be backed by two of the world’s leading seed funds (LocalGlobe in the UK and FounderCollective in the US) and to be alumni of the media accelerator programme at FoundersFactory. We have also assembled a team of expert advisors to help us make Flourish as useful as possible for each sector. These include Aron Pilhofer (Temple University, Guardian, New York Times) for newsrooms and Nigel Morris (DentsuAegis) for agencies.
