Team
Josh Bell
Josh is a General Partner at Dawn and leads our Fintech investments. Josh works with portfolio companies iZettle, Property Partner, Sonovate, Zumper, Obillex and Fanduel.
Before joining Dawn in 2007, he worked with McKinsey & Company, managing teams that advised boards of Fortune global 500 financial institutions based in London, Geneva, Amsterdam and New York. While at McKinsey, Josh was recognised within the firm as a leading financial services expert in Europe. Within his retail and wholesale banking work, Josh devoted significant time to informing clients on the impact of new technologies on their industries, and helping to assess and implement these technologies for their businesses.
In addition to his private sector client work, Josh was also integral to supporting McKinsey’s relationship with the World Economic Forum, leading McKinsey support for the WEF’s financial services knowledge initiatives and activities, principally for the Davos conferences in 2006 and 2007.
Josh was a Graduate Scholar at Oxford University in Mathematics. He was subsequently a Research Fellow at Harvard University in Economics and Game Theory, publishing papers in Game Theory and IT Security journals before studying operational research and advanced financial modelling at Cambridge University, as part of an MPhil in Statistics; his MPhil research was supported by the Rand Institute of Santa Monica, California.
Dan Chaplin
Dan is focused on B2B software and FinTech across Europe.
Prior to joining the Dawn team in 2018, Dan was working in the corporate finance department of J.P. Morgan in London where he spent time advising companies across the financial services and financial technology sectors on a range of M&A and capital markets transactions.
Dan holds a BA in Modern History from Oxford University where he graduated with First Class Honours in 2014. He went on to complete his Masters (with Distinction) there the following year.
Norman Fiore
Norman co-founded Dawn Capital in 2007. Since that time he has invested in several of Europe’s leading SaaS businesses including Mimecast [MIME], Collibra, Showpad and Automile and in B2B/B2C e-commerce business Gelato.
Prior to Dawn, Norman was Partner at the Reuters Greenhouse Fund, Reuters Plc’s global technology VC fund. At Reuters, Norman co-managed one of the largest corporate technology funds that invested over $450M in over 80 early, mid and late stage companies globally.
In 2001, Norman and his fellow partners acquired the Greenhouse Fund and subsequently sold companies in the online media/advertising sector (Advertising.com (to AOL), Forbes.com (to PE buyer), Bitpipe (to TechTarget), Moreover (to VeriSign)), internet services (WhereOnEarth (to Yahoo), UltraDNS (to NeuStar), Radialpoint (to TA), Investis (to PE buyer)) and software (Packetvideo (to NextWave), ID2 (to Sonera), Metamerge (to IBM), Persistence (Nasdaq IPO, now PRGS).
Prior to Reuters, Norman worked at Bain & Company in London, initially in the Telecoms practice and then the Private Equity group.
Norman is a graduate of Stanford University with dual BS and BA degrees in Engineering and Economics and holds an MBA with distinction from INSEAD business school.
Joyce Liu
Joyce focuses on Enterprise Software across Europe.
Before joining Dawn in 2017, she was a Senior Associate and part of the Founding team at Columbia Lake Partners, a London-based fund seeded by the partners of Bessemer Venture Partners to provide growth loans to Series A/B European technology companies. Prior to this, she worked as a Data Scientist at London-based TRULY Experiences. Before moving to the UK, Joyce lived in the US while working at Ares Management in Los Angeles and in the Leveraged Finance team at J.P. Morgan in New York.
Joyce graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA), Honours Business Administration (with distinction) from the Ivey School of Business, Western University in Canada. She is a member of the Organizing Committee of the C100UK, the London Ivey Chapter Alumni Board, and Founders of the Future.
Henry Mason
Henry focuses on B2B software and FinTech throughout Europe.
Previously, Henry worked in consultancy for clients in financial services and the public sector, where he was involved in digital transformation of government. His experience includes working within agile product teams and on cyber security strategy.
Henry holds a PhD in Classics from Oxford, where he concentrated on Greek literature.
Haakon Overli
Haakon Overli
General Partner
Involved in
Conversocial
Crate.io
Leaddesk
Minute Media
Neo4j
WongaBlog
Get in touch
Haakon started Dawn Capital with Norman Fiore in 2007. He has extensive investing, operational and venture capital experience. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Self Trade – an online sharedealing platform – and acted as the CEO for the highly successful British part of the business and was a member of their European Executive Board. Self Trade was floated in April 2000 and then sold in October 2000 to DAB (a subsidiary of HVB of Germany) for €911M.
Haakon has served on the boards of Self Trade and Wonga.com amongst others, and currently represents Dawn’s interest at Conversocial, Crate.io, LeadDesk, Minute Media and Neo Technologies.
Prior to formalising early stage investing at Dawn, Haakon worked with early stage companies from their first commercial efforts through to managing accelerated growth, often by serving as an interim manager or board member. They include G-Cluster (sold to Softbank Broadmedia) and Lateral Logic (sold to Electronic Arts).
Mr. Overli studied Mathematics at the University of Oslo and holds a B.A. (Hons) in Economics from University of Durham.
In his investment-banking career when the world was covered in ice, Haakon was a Director and Co-Head of Technology Investment Banking at ING Barings. Prior even to that, Haakon worked for JP Morgan in the M&A departments of New York and London.
Evgenia Plotnikova
Evgenia focuses on B2B software and fintech across Europe.
Prior to joining Dawn, Evgenia was responsible for sourcing, due diligence and execution of investments at Atomico, where she helped spearhead the firm's efforts in France and supported portfolio companies on operational projects and research. Before joining the world of VC, she was an investor at TPG Capital in London and worked at J.P. Morgan in London and Dubai.
Evgenia holds a Masters degree in Finance and Strategy from SciencesPo Paris and studied abroad at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania in the US. At SciencesPo, she worked with a number of entrepreneurs at Junior Consulting, the university’s non-profit consulting organisation. Evgenia is fluent in French and Russian, has lived in five countries and travelled to fifty five (and counting). In 2017, Evgenia was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list of leading young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers.
Archna Tharani
Archna is the CFO at Dawn and manages all the operations and finances for the business.
Before joining Dawn she was the CEO of an award winning business, Oculus Accountancy, which delivers accountancy services to a range of SME clients using all the latest technology solutions. She is a speaker on technology solutions for the accounting industry and has extensive experience in setting up efficient systems for finance, compliance and operations.
Prior to this Archna was Head of Finance at RVC, which managed the Reuters Greenhouse Fund which invested over $450m in technology companies, and worked alongside Norman. She has specialist knowledge of the VC industry.
Archna qualified as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG and is a graduate of the London School of Economics with a BSc in Business, Mathematics and Statistics.
Henry focuses on B2B software and FinTech throughout Europe.
Previously, Henry worked in consultancy for clients in financial services and the public sector, where he was involved in digital transformation of government. His experience includes working within agile product teams and on cyber security strategy.
Henry holds a PhD in Classics from Oxford, where he concentrated
on Greek literature.