British technology entrepreneur · London
Building for theonline worldsince before it had a name.
Dan Wagner has founded and led technology companies for more than four decades: MAID, the online information service he started at twenty and grew into the global Dialog Corporation; Venda, the first eCommerce platform sold as a service; Powa, which put the shop into the phone; and now Rezolve Ai, listed on Nasdaq. This site tells that story.
Every company Dan has built has done the same thing in a different decade: take information that was locked up, expensive or scattered and put it within reach of the person who needs it at the moment they need it. In 1984 that meant market-research reports and news articles sold by the page over a dial-up line to advertising executives who had been paying thousands of pounds for the printed versions. By the late 1990s it meant a shop's entire catalogue run for the retailer as a service rather than installed on their own servers. In the 2010s it meant the shop itself pulled out of a poster or a television advertisement and into a phone. Today it means an answer a shopper can trust when the thing doing the shopping is a piece of software.
The pattern has a second half. Each time, Dan arrived early, often years before the market and sometimes before the technology was ready for what he wanted it to do. MAID went online five years before the World Wide Web was proposed. Venda was selling hosted commerce software from 1998 before "cloud" was a word customers used. Powa built mobile checkout before phones were trusted with payment and the idea it pursued is the one the largest platforms are chasing today. Being early is the thread that runs through all of it and it explains both the scale of what was built and the pace at which each company had to move. The story runs in order, with a timeline of dated milestones; the archive holds the contemporary reporting.
I have been warning of this for years. That's why Rezolve Ai has spent years developing processes and IP to prevent hallucinations. It's only going to get worse.Dan Wagner, X, May 2025
The current chapter follows directly from the rest. Rezolve Ai's argument is that AI will not be trusted to buy things on people's behalf until it stops inventing prices, products and promises and that the layer which makes an AI purchase verifiable is worth more than the agent doing the purchasing. It is, once again, a bet on information that can be relied upon. The Today page sets it out.
Companies founded
Four decades in six lines
- 1984 – 2000MAIDLater re-named The Dialog CorporationAn online database of market research, started when Dan was twenty. Floated in London in 1994 and on Nasdaq in 1995; acquired Knight-Ridder's Dialog in 1997; the information business was sold to Thomson, now Thomson Reuters, in a $500 million transaction in 2000.
- 1998 – 2014VendaBegun as a subsidiary of Dialog in 1998, Venda was the first eCommerce platform offered as a service. Grew into the European market leader in hosted commerce and was acquired by Oracle in 2014.
- 2003 –Locayta / AttraqtSearch and merchandising software for online retailers, founded with Andre Brown and later listed on London's Stock Exchange as Attraqt.
- 2007 – 2016Powa TechnologiesMobile commerce and payments: PowaTag, PowaPOS and PowaWeb. Backed by Wellington Management with more than $200 million and valued at $2.6 billion in 2014, it was among Britain's most valuable private technology companies before entering administration in February 2016.
- 2011 –BuyaPowaA refer-a-friend marketing platform founded by Dan and Gideon Lask, who runs it today, and financially backed from the start by Dan's Bright Station Ventures.
- 2016 –Rezolve AiNasdaq: RZLVBegan to solve the problem of checkout attrition and cart abandonment by using generative Ai minus hallucinations; now delivers proprietary AI, checkout, payments and data infrastructure for retailers and their customers' software agents. Listed on Nasdaq in August 2024.
Recent posts