Ian Strang

Berkhamsted, United Kingdom0

Chief Growth Officer, Level | AI transformation | Founder and CEO of Beyond, MD of Pollen | Shipped Capo solo, used in 15 countries

I've spent twenty years building and running technology companies: founder and CEO of Beyond (acquired by Dignity PLC), MD of Pollen (800 people, £30M revenue, #7 Sunday Times Tech Track 100), operations leadership through two earlier exits. Most of that time the job was growth. At Beyond: 1.4M users a year and 30% market share, built on SEO and content, a partner network of 1,500 firms, and campaigns that got the brand talked about (the "Let's Talk About Death" ads TfL banned, coverage in the BBC, FT, Forbes and The Times, CreativePool Brand of the Year). At Pollen: a B2B2C engine of ambassador programmes and digital funnels that took a festival agency to 300 clients across Europe, the US and Asia. For the last two years I have also been building with AI myself: a SaaS product now used in 15 countries, built on my own time without a team, and at Level an AI-assisted underwriting engine, built to the standard a regulator expects, that takes a days-long process to minutes. Areas of focus: Growth systems: SEO, content, paid acquisition, partnerships, PR and brand campaigns AI transformation and AI operating model design Putting LLM systems into everyday workflows: underwriting, operations, customer service, back office Scaling organisations from 0 to 800+ Product, operations and GTM alignment Value creation in PE-backed and founder-led businesses Sector experience: SaaS, marketplaces, consumer, fintech and consumer credit, event-tech, legal-tech, digital cinema.

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Experience

Chief Growth Officer

Level

Jul 2026 — Present · London Area, United Kingdom

Level is an FCA-regulated consumer lender in family law and probate. I've joined to build the growth function and the operating model behind it. Designed and prototyped an AI-assisted case assessment engine that reads a loan application and its supporting documents, checks what is missing, applies the deterministic parts of lending policy and drafts the underwriter's summary. Then wrote the build brief and rules specifications and led the production build with an external engineering partner: Salesforce integration, audit trail and a validation harness. Design principle: the model reads, code decides, people judge. Provisional answers in minutes rather than days, with every conclusion traceable to a fact, a source document and a numbered rule. Wrote growth strategy and plan. Hiring the GTM engineering, sales and marketing team.

Founder

Capo

Jan 2025 — Present · United Kingdom

Built a casual football app used in 15 countries, for fun and because I wanted to use it. No company or funding behind it. It's how I learnt to build production software with AI, evenings and weekends. - Multi-tenant SaaS architecture, advanced algorithmic features, payments - Web platform plus native iOS and Android apps from a single codebase - SEO automated with AI - 200,000+ lines of production code, solo

Interim CEO / COO

CEO/COO

Jan 2024 — Jun 2026

Global Karting League, Interim Head of: built the commercial model, marketing funnel and acquisition infrastructure (website, booking system, ads, SEO), set up OKRs and the operating cadence. Concluded with Porsche investment stake in place of a Series A. Chatsie, Interim COO: GTM framework, pricing, messaging and operational scale-up systems for a health-tech business.

Investor

Ventures Together

Sep 2022 — Aug 2025 · United Kingdom

Ventures Together (VT) is an community of 150+ of Europe's leading tech entrepreneurs and operators who angel invest and help companies together. Selected investments include AI, fintech, IoT, and healthtech startups.