The team
Two founders who’ve been building together since 2017, and the engineers they trust to do it with them.
The founders
Co-founder & CEO. Product, capital and regulation.
Venture capital, then KPMG financial services, then fintech founder, COO and Head of Product. Across that career and Daedalus, Tesh has built a banking platform for family offices, an FCA-regulated consumer lender and blockchain proofs of concept with Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas, Sainsbury’s and Unilever, and raised money for all of it.
“Ask me what your regulator will ask first, and what your investors will ask next.”
Co-founder & CTO. Data, AI and operations.
A string theorist who became a data scientist, which turned out to be the more practical career. Across that career and Daedalus, Kaz has built a global customer service engine and predictive call routing for a multinational telco, advised FTSE 250 brands on data and run operations for a London SME.
“Ask me whether you actually need AI, and where your data is worth more than your model.”
An unresolved disagreement once cost them a company. Now they settle it first, and you get one answer, tested from two sides.
What to build, how to fund it and whether the tech will hold, answered together rather than handed between departments.
The Wingman Rule
“Have you seen Top Gun? You never leave your wingman.”
After Wathe, Tesh and Kaz interviewed at the same corporate, on the promise that they’d be hired at the same time. It turned out the corporate only wanted Kaz. Both had mortgages due and empty bank accounts.
Friday
Kaz turned the offer down.
Monday
Tesh and Kaz started Daedalus.
The founder story
2017
A product-and-capital operator from KPMG and venture capital, and a theoretical physicist turned data scientist. They knew within weeks that they’d build together.
2017–2020
You chuck your spreadsheets in and forecasts come out, hence the name. There were term sheets on the table, then Covid arrived and Shopify swallowed the market.
2021–2022
Making money from day one, sold to SME lenders and FCA-authorised. Then government bounce-back loans wiped out the market overnight. To lose one start-up to a pandemic is unlucky. To lose two feels as if the universe is making a point.
2022
A favour for a friend became a proof of concept built in five 20-hour days, then a seven-figure annual retainer. Debt-free in twelve months.
They built machine learning where something far simpler would have got them to market in half the time.
They gave two early engineers 10% each, and top-tier VCs read the cap table as inexperience. The VCs were right.
They raised 12 months of runway when they needed 18 to 24.
In the myth, Daedalus built the labyrinth for King Minos, then the wings that carried him and his son Icarus out of Crete. He gave Icarus one warning: not too low, and not too close to the sun. Icarus flew too high and the wax gave way. Daedalus landed.
Named engineers
Nobody here was hired off a CV and a good interview. We’d seen their work for years before we asked them to join.
Everyone has shipped together before, so a pod starts as a team. You don’t pay for the introductions.
Multi-million deals now run on a football-finance platform they built. And in a live run of a real-time calculation engine, with every worker killed mid-stream, every result still matched.
Head of Engineering. Fintech, distributed systems and AI engineering. London, remote, hybrid or on-site.
One of the first hires at Ethereum. Specialises in systems where being wrong is expensive, owning architecture, infrastructure and delivery from the first requirements call.
Bring Edward in for a demanding platform build, a critical system that needs technical ownership, or a team adopting agent-driven engineering safely.
Forward Deployed Engineer. Fintech platforms and data integration. Remote.
A full-stack engineer who works directly with clients and has delivered across the entire stack of two complex financial platforms, working AI-first with Claude Code and Codex.
Bring Patrik in for a remote assignment spanning complex product workflows, identity, data integration and the tools your operators depend on.
Forward Deployed Engineer. Fintech workflows and product engineering. London, remote, hybrid or on-site.
A full-stack engineer who works directly with clients and AI-first with Claude Code and Codex, with a computer science degree and an enterprise IT background at an international law firm.
Bring Dylan in for a complex finance journey, account security or billing that needs building across product and backend, especially inside an established organisation.
Data Lead and Forward Deployed Engineer. Data engineering and quantitative analysis. Remote.
A data-focused engineer who works directly with clients and builds the parts of a platform where data has to be right, working AI-first with Claude Code and Codex. With Daedalus since 2023, and holds an MSc in Mathematics and Computer Science.
Bring Ken in for third-party data that has to land in your platform correctly, live calculations on streaming data, or market data that needs turning into models you can test.
A free hour with Tesh and Kaz. If a spreadsheet and two rules would do the job, we’ll say so.