A startup set up by Dragons’ Den star Steven Bartlett has appointed a new chief data officer.
Flight Story is a new service platform for social-first investor relations and was founded by Bartlett and former Social Chain colleague Oliver Yonchev.
The company has recruited former Social Chain head of data and insights, McVal Osborne, as its new chief data officer.
Flight Story provides public companies with the people, processes and technology to capture their retail investor community and communicate their story effectively within culture.
According to Bartlett and Yonchev, Flight Story could change the way companies approach IPOs and communicate with the increasingly influential retail investor sector.
In his new role, Osborne will be responsible for the growth and development of Flight Story’s proprietary data platform: Flight Deck.
Flight Deck will aggregate financial, news, search, social and forum data enabling companies to understand the impact of the combined messages being shared about their brand, to discover what online factors are moving markets.
With more than 10 years of experience in research and data science, Osborne has a successful track record of developing research arms which leverage social media data to harvest key consumer insights.
Prior to joining Flight Story, Osborne was responsible for building Social Chain’s data and insights offering, Data Chain.
Steven Bartlett, Flight Story
He was then instrumental in the scaling of the Data Chain research arm, to provide clients with social media analytics and primary research data to provide clients with holistic insights to fuel growth.
McVal said: “One of my passions and hobbies has been finance, particularly the world of investing. I am incredibly excited to join Oliver Yonchev and the rest of the team to build something truly unique in the investor communications space.”
On McVal’s appointment, Yonchev said: “We are incredibly excited to have McVal join the group as chief data officer. Having worked closely together at Social Chain, we know just how instrumental McVal will be in Flight Story’s next phase of growth, with the deployment of Flight Deck.”
Flight Story was launched with a mission to prevent companies crashing by helping them tell their story in the most impactful way.
Steven Bartlett said: “Flight Story is aiming to modernise investor relations and develop a unique communication solution. The link between online activity and capital markets has never been closer and being able to quantify our services via Flight Deck, that McVal is developing, is going to be revolutionary to the business and our clients.”