Flourish was created to enable everyone to tell stories with data. Launched in 2018, the tool is used by a huge community of creators to inform tens of millions of viewers every day. Our team combines decades of experience in visualization, tech, data, journalism and design.
The team
Anna Al-Damluji
Customer operations manager
Anna brings technical expertise to the commercial team, working on customer success and operations. She has nearly 20 years' experience looking after customers at tech startups. She has a masters in AI and computer science.
Emma Atkinson
Senior SDR
Emma communicates with new and potential customers and coordinates a team of sales development representatives. A designer by background, she studied media and communications before joining Flourish.
Luisa Bider
Head of support and content
Luisa oversees a team of product experts that operates across support, help docs, blogs, examples and training. She has an MSc in digital journalism and previously worked in product development at NZZ and social media at Metro.
Mafe Callejón
Support specialist
Mafe works across our support desk and provides content for our blog, social media, and help resources. She has a masters in computational and data journalism and has worked in newsrooms in the US, Venezuela and Spain.
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.
Verity Dack
Office manager
Verity makes sure the Flourish office is a home away from home, plans social events and activities, and helps with recruiting and hiring tasks. She has a background in drama and theater.
Adam Ben David
Customer success manager
Adam supports the customer success team on our intern program, helping our customers achieve their goals with Flourish. He has a background in commercial law.
Loukia Douka
Project manager
Loukia keeps our product development process running smoothly by connecting the dots between teams and coordinating ongoing projects and sprints. She has a background in corporate communications.
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.
Chisara Duru
Customer success manager
Chisara creates strong relations with our Enterprise customers and helps them get the most out of Flourish. She studied international business and management and has worked in customer success for a number of SaaS companies.
Vanessa Fillis
Services specialist
Vanessa helps create serviced visualizations and bespoke projects for customers on our services team. She has a background in media management and data journalism.
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 and contributing to 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
Product expert
Olivia helps our customers get the most out of Flourish through answering their requests, writing help resources and sharing her product expertise in trainings. She joined Flourish after completing a masters in data journalism at Birmingham City University.
Lucia Lau
Customer success manager
Lucia is the link between Flourish and our customers. She helps ensure a smooth experience with the tool, supporting our customers and building strong relationships along the way. She has over 8 years of experience in customer-facing roles and has a background in graphic design.
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.
Connor Musoke-Jones
Services specialist
Connor works on serviced visualizations and projects. He studied industrial product design and has a background in graphic design and teaching.
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.
Florin Oprina
Senior DevOps engineer
Florin works on maintaining and improving our technical infrastructure. He has a masters degree in neuroscience and a PhD in linguistics.
Annie Parker
Social media manager
Annie creates and manages our social media and marketing materials. She joined Flourish 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.
Andriani Pieri
Sales development representative
Andriani communicates with new and potential customers and helps the sales team identify leads. Before joining Flourish, she studied management at CASS Business School and worked in consulting.
Helena Robertson
Product expert
Helena solves problems for users and shares her product expertise through trainings and help resources. She has a masters in computational and data journalism, was a Google News Initiative Fellow, and has experience in the Guardian and FT newsrooms.
Callum Smith
Sales manager
Callum works in our commercial team, identifying and converting revenue opportunities. He has an MSc in Marketing and has previously worked as a sales representive at various software companies.
Jamie Starling
Sales manager
Jamie helps bring Flourish to new customers and has a focus on agencies and consultancies. He has a background in innovation intelligence and studied marketing and communications.
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.
Cale Tilford
Senior visualization developer
Cale develops and maintains visualization templates and components. He has a masters in computing from Imperial College London and previously worked as a newsroom developer at the Financial Times.
Simona Tselova
Support specialist
Simona supports our users with their queries and contributes to blog posts, social media and help resources. She studied journalism at City, University of London and has previously worked in social media and copywriting.
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.
Yaning Wu
Support and content intern
Yaning works across the support and content desks at Flourish. She's currently completing her undergrad degree in Population Health with Data Science at UCL.
Bandana Gill
Infosec manager
Bandana oversees our information security management system at Flourish. She has over 15 years of experience in information security across multiple sectors, more recently focusing on small to medium-sized businesses in the software industry.
You?
Get in touch
We are always happy to hear from interesting people. See our jobs page for more details. Feel free to reach out to anyone on the team individually if you want to know what it's like to work here.
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 for six months or longer 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
Felix Michel
Newsroom intern
Anna Powell-Smith
CPO
Sarah Soutoul
Developer intern
Katherine Riley
Data journalist
Richard South
Head of business development
Tim Brock
Full-stack developer
Mark Everitt
Senior developer / Tech lead
Want to intern?
The role comes up every few months but you can drop us a line any time.