Stephen Fitzpatrick is the founder and CEO of OVO, the UK’s leading greentech company. Since launching in 2009, OVO now serves more than 1.5m customers in the UK and Germany, with a vision for clean, affordable energy for everyone. The company believes that enabling a zero carbon grid is critical to achieving this, and has pioneered many new technologies including distributed energy storage and electric vehicle to grid integration. OVO has consistently been named amongst the UK’s most loved companies and in 2016 was named as the World’s Best Energy Brand. Stephen is also the Founder and CEO of Vertical Aerospace, the electric aircraft company. Bristol-based Vertical flew the UK’s first full-scale electric vertical take off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in June 2018. The company has been developing its pioneering eVTOL technology since 2016, as part of its mission to make air travel personal, on-demand and carbon free. Stephen was named Entrepreneur of the Year at The Telegraph National Business Awards in 2014. Prior to founding OVO, Stephen held roles in at Societe Generale and JP Morgan.

Vinny has been chief financial officer in the energy sector across a range of companies. He joined OVO in 2013, leading the group’s corporate finance activities. Vinny started his career at PWC in their corporate finance team. He has a first class masters in Mechanical Engineering from University of Southampton and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

In 2019 Melissa Gander took on the role of COO at Kaluza. Melissa oversees the delivery of Kaluza’s services across the operational areas; from installations services, to hardware design and production. Melissa was part of OVO Energy’s launch team in 2009 and headed up the Customer Services and Operations departments before moving to set up In Home Technology, OVO’s smart metering business, in 2013. Since then IHT have installed over 1,000,000 smart meters in customers’ homes, with a large number of these being installed through our IHT’s Field Force of 200 engineers; with the team now a core part of Kaluza’s operations. Before joining OVO Energy, Melissa spent three years at Envoy Asset Management (part of Inexus Group) with her final role being Customer Manager responsible for operational service and energy supplier engagement. Melissa graduated in Economics from Sheffield University.

Tom Pakenham is Director of the Electric Vehicles division at OVO. Since joining OVO in January 2017, he has been instrumental in the transition of OVO from a pure kWh retail business into a diversified energy services company, leading the move into the electric vehicles market with the launch of the EV Everywhere energy bundle and ongoing development of smart-charging customer propositions. In 2017 Tom oversaw OVO’s strategic partnership with Chargemaster, the UK’s biggest provider of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, along with investments into electric vehicle charge point installer, ChargedEV and Indra Renewable Technologies, providers of electric vehicle components and services. Prior to joining OVO, Tom founded greentomatocars in 2006 - the world’s first low emission taxi company, which he sold to global transport conglomerate Transdev. After selling greentomatocars, Tom launched greentomatoenergy - an energy efficiency and micro-renewables business - which was acquired by a private equity firm in 2013. After this, Tom led the Business Development and Innovation team at Transdev Plc. Tom graduated from Cambridge University with a History MA and has a Postgraduate Diploma in Law from BPP Law School. He is a qualified solicitor.

Steve is Kaluza’s Director of Business Development, responsible for building partnerships, adding capability and scaling the business. Steve joined in July 2016 and was instrumental in the formation of Kaluza and building it through organic and inorganic activity into the business it is today. Prior to joining OVO Steve spent ten years in gas and power origination, business development and M&A. First at ExxonMobil and laterly at Shell where he was responsible for building Shell’s structured supply business to European energy retail businesses. Steve holds a First in Mechanical Engineering MEng from the University of Nottingham.

Yoann leads the Engineering and Product function for the Kaluza Platform. With an ambition of becoming the world leader in distributed energy technology the platform we build is complex and bring together suppliers, grid operators, IoT devices and end customers. To achieve our mission we solve the most exciting Technological challenges that include high availability, scalability, real time intelligence and security. Since arriving at OVO, Yoann has transformed the way Product is thought of and being developed at Kaluza, with a focus on operational excellence as well as unlocking agility and innovation capabilities. Our teams are proud to connect, manage and control devices at scale and use advanced AI and machine learning techniques to optimise the ecosystem in realtime. Prior to joining OVO in february 2018, Yoann has successfully helped multi-million pound pureplay digital organizations scale their Product and customer offering through maturing their Technology stack and engineering teams in period of high growth. It includes the likes of Lastminute.com, Net-a-porter and Notonthehighstreet where he was Technical Director.

Toby is OVO Group’s Director of Strategy. Prior to his current role, Toby was COO and MD of VCharge, an award winning technology company acquired by OVO Group in 2016. Before joining Kaluza, Toby was CEO of Hanergy Solar, UK, one of Europe’s largest residential solar installers. At Hanergy he launched a partnership with IKEA, making it possible to buy PV through their stores in four countries.