The team
Anna Al-Damluji
Head of customer success
Anna oversees the Flourish support team and also works on account management. Before moving to Flourish, she was the first employee at ElasticHosts, later acquired by GoDaddy. Anna has a BSc in AI/maths and an MPhil in computer science.
Emma Atkinson
Business development manager
Emma communicates with new and potential customers. A designer by background, she studied media and communications before joining Flourish.
Luisa Bider
Head of content
Luisa oversees blogs, newsletters, help resources and examples. She has an MSc in digital journalism and previously worked in product development at NZZ and social media at Metro.
Tim Brock
Head of components
Tim creates reusable code modules for everything from chart axes to data processing. Before joining Flourish, he completed a PhD in nuclear-structure physics and established his own data visualization consultancy.
Duncan Clark
Cofounder & CEO
Before co-founding Kiln and Flourish, Duncan was a data journalist (Guardian), author (Profile Books), honorary researcher (UCL) and publisher (Rough Guides/Penguin), with a focus on data, technology and climate change.
Peter Cook
Senior visualization developer
Peter is a leading visualization developer, the author of “D3 in Depth” and founder of the visualization consultancy Animated Data.
Raphaëla Dubreuil
User researcher
Raphaëla uses a mix of analytics, user testing and direct user interaction to help us better understand Flourish users and base product decisions around them. She has a PhD in ancient Greek history.
Mark Everitt
Senior developer / Tech lead
Mark is a tech lead on the Flourish platform, overseeing the development of new features. He has more than a decade of engineering experience in addition to a PhD in quantum optics.
Solana Gaspari
Head of hiring & happiness
Solana oversees hiring and staff wellbeing, making sure Flourish is a fun and rewarding place to work, and that job candidates have a great experience. She has a decade of experience in HR roles in startups and corporates.
Jane Glentworth
Operations manager
Jane keeps Flourish running smoothly, overseeing finance, operations and admin. She was previously an Executive Editor of Web Design and Production at the Guardian, managing teams and working on production tools.
Eade Hemingway
Visualization developer
Eade maintains and develops Flourish templates and components. She started her career as a coder after studying PPE and furniture design.
Freddy Hoban
Sales manager
Freddy introduces Flourish to new customers. After studying History & Politics he developed an interest in tech and visualization while working in business development for an innovation intelligence platform.
Robin Houston
Cofounder & CTO
Robin is Flourish's technical architect. He previously 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.
Hugh Kennedy
Senior 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.
Olivia Lawlor
Support specialist
Olivia helps our customers get the most out of Flourish across the support, services and content teams. She joined Flourish after completing a masters in data journalism at Birmingham City University.
Daan Louter
Head of product
Daan oversees Flourish product development, from platform UX to visualization templates. A developer and designer, Daan joined Flourish from the Guardian where he created award-winning interactives, data projects and VR experiences.
David McNicholl
Senior DevOps engineer
David oversees the technical infrastructure of Flourish. He has over 15 years of DevOps experience and previously worked for Arts Alliance Media, Fonix Interactive and UCL.
Chris Newell
Designer developer
Chris is a graphic designer and developer specializing in visualization and interactive content. Before joining the team at Flourish he worked at several leading newsrooms, including the Guardian, the Telegraph and Tortoise.
Annie Parker
Business development manager
Annie helps introduce Flourish to new customers. She joined the Flourish commercial team after graduating with a first in media studies from UEA.
Lyndsey Pereira-Brereton
Head of services
Lyndsey runs a team that helps Flourish customers achieve great results through custom templates, serviced visualizations and expert consultancy. She was previously Data Visualization Editor at the Bank of England.
Allan Rechtman
CCO
Allan works across key customer accounts, new business and commercial strategy. He previously held similar roles at startups and agencies including Freespee, Vitrue and Havas.
Helena Robertson
Support specialist
Helena contributes across the support, services and content teams. She has a masters in computational and data journalism, was a Google News Initiative Fellow, and has experience in the Guardian and FT newsrooms.
Ilias Stathatos
Support & newsrooms
Ilias supports our customers and administers our newsroom program. A data journalist by background, he co-founded the Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting and won fellowships from Columbia University and Google.
Bobby Sebolao
Developer
Bobby works on the Flourish backend, across everything from testing and features to accessibility. He joined Flourish from Founders & Coders and has also worked at the British Council.
Richard South
Head of business development
Richard is responsible for taking Flourish to new customers. He was previously the first employee and VP of Sales & Marketing at Squared Up, a visualization tool for enterprise IT.
Simona Tselova
Support & content intern
Simona works between our support and content desks on our intern program. She studied journalism at City, University of London.
Joe Turner
Senior developer / Tech lead
As a tech lead on the Flourish platform, Joe oversees the development of new features. He has more than a decade of experience as a full-stack developer and previously worked in tech education.
Lars Verspohl
Senior visualization developer
Lars develops visualization templates and works on bespoke projects. He has over 20 years of experience as a data scientist, visualization designer and developer and founded the visualization consultancy datamake.
You?
We are always happy to hear from interesting people. See our jobs page for more details.
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.
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!
Julien Assouline
Newsroom intern
Daniel Gavrilov
Developer
William Keashock
Platform developer
Anoushka Khandwala
Intern
Felix Michel
Newsroom intern
Anna Powell-Smith
CPO
Sarah Soutoul
Developer intern
Katherine Riley
Data journalist
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 program 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.
