Ian Merricks
Corporate Ventures Lead
Ian is Managing Partner at White Horse Capital, involved in £100m of fundraising and M&A each year within the tech, media, telecoms sectors.
In 2011 Ian co-founded the Accelerator Academy, providing intensive training, mentoring and access to capital for high growth start-ups, (covered by the FT, City AM, The Sunday Times, Fresh Business Thinking, Angel News, NESTA, Innovation Investment Journal and Virgin Media Pioneers). Ian’s background includes launching a range of tech and media businesses. He also worked with the boards of FTSE100 company EMAP, plus IPC and The Wireless Group PLC as a commercial and corporate troubleshooter.
Ian has spoken on early stage finance, business acceleration and investment trends to MOBIP, TechWorld, British Business Angel Association and directly to Government / BIS, City Hall / the Mayor of London, Houses of Parliament, the Icelandic Embassy and the EU Commissioner for Industry and Enterprise.
He has evaluated entrepreneur competitions for UCL, Bright Ideas Awards, London Business Angels, Entrepreneur First, New Entrepreneurs Foundation and Sweden’s Digital Media Management Masters Programme.
He helped to launch the UK Technology Funding Gap White Paper for GLA / Barclays Bank and UKTI. At a regulatory level he lobbied HM Treasury for changes to the tax regime for seed investment, had input into the March 2012 Budget on behalf of entrepreneurs through Start Up Britain, and also for the Financial Services Industry through TheCityUK.