Six companies, one idea, forty-two years

Daniel Maurice Wagner was born on 28 July 1963 and grew up in Edgware, on the northern edge of London. He was not a natural student. He left school at sixteen and took a job selling hi-fi equipment in a shop in central London, which taught him something formal education had not: that he liked selling, and was good at it.

From the shop floor he moved to the advertising agency WCRS, then one of the most fashionable in London, joining as a runner on a salary of £2,400 a year and working his way up to junior account executive. The job involved a great deal of market research. Every client brief needed data about a sector, and the data existed, in thick printed reports from firms such as Mintel and Euromonitor, but it was expensive, slow to obtain and impossible to search. An account executive who needed one paragraph had to find, buy and read the whole report.

The idea that became his first company was to put those reports on a computer and let people buy them a page at a time, over a telephone line, at their desks. It seems obvious now. In 1984 the World Wide Web did not exist, few offices had a modem, and the publishers whose reports he wanted to sell saw no reason to hand them to a twenty-year-old.

MAID, for Market Analysis and Information Database, began trading in 1984 and was incorporated as a private company in February 1985. Its proposition was simple to describe and hard to build: a single online service through which a researcher could search across the reports of many publishers and pay only for the pages they read. Persuading publishers to participate took years. Once they did, MAID had something no rival could quickly copy, because each contract had been negotiated one at a time.

The service that made the company's name was Profound, a Windows application launched in the mid-1990s that combined market research, company data and news in one searchable interface, with a technology the company called InfoSort for structuring the content underneath. An internet version of Profound followed in March 1996. Within a year, a quarter of the service's usage had moved to the web.

MAID floated on the London Stock Exchange on 15 March 1994. The shares were placed at 110p, valuing the company at £89.1 million, a price the press noted was well below earlier forecasts. Dan was thirty, and widely described as the youngest chief executive of a listed British company. He wore a cartoon-duck waistcoat to the flotation photocall, a decision he has been reminded of ever since. The following year the company sought American investors: MAID placed American Depositary Shares at $15.10 and began trading on Nasdaq on 1 December 1995, one of the first British internet companies to do so.

The mid-1990s were the company's expansion years. It signed licensing and distribution agreements with the emerging platforms of the day. On 9 August 1995 it announced a strategic alliance with Microsoft to supply business information to the Microsoft Network, the online service launching with Windows 95; MAID's shares doubled in a day, from 82p to 168p, and the deal, which began with a cold call from Dan to Microsoft's Bill Miller, made the front of the City pages. In April 1996 came an agreement to supply research and news to IBM's new infoMarket internet service, described at the time as the first stage of a wider partnership. Other partners included CompuServe, EMI and Nokia. By the end of 1996 MAID had 23 offices, fourteen of them opened that year, and 3,800 corporate customers, up from 1,200 twelve months earlier. Revenue for 1996 was £21.4 million, up 57 per cent, and the company was still loss-making, as it had been for most of its life. Investors were being asked to back growth, and for a time they did.

In 1997 Dan made the move that turned MAID from a fast-growing British company into a global one. Knight-Ridder, the American newspaper group, had put its information division up for sale. Knight-Ridder Information owned Dialog, the original online database service, founded in the 1960s and by then home to 650 databases, 20,000 customers and revenue of almost $290 million a year. MAID, with revenue a tenth of that, agreed to buy it: a company of thirteen years acquiring the business that had invented its industry.

The deal completed on 14 November 1997 at a price of $420 million in cash, plus a working-capital adjustment of around $15 million, financed with new equity and debt, including $180 million of senior subordinated notes. MAID renamed itself The Dialog Corporation plc and became, overnight, one of the largest online information companies in the world, with 57 offices and sales in 39 countries. Within days it announced a restructuring of the combined group, closing 16 offices and targeting $45 million of annual savings, and set about moving Dialog's customers onto MAID's newer technology.

Integrating a business of that size while servicing the debt that had bought it was demanding. In September 1998 the shares fell 13 per cent in a day when the company disclosed that database revenue had dropped 10 per cent in a single month after a pricing change. By the end of 1998, Dialog's indebtedness stood at £154.5 million against net sales of £170.8 million, and the group had reported a first-half pre-tax profit of £7 million. The American headquarters moved from Mountain View, California, to Cary, North Carolina, and headcount was brought down to around 900. The share price fell heavily over the period, as did those of most internet-era companies carrying debt.

In the spring of 2000 Dan concluded the transaction that realised the value of what had been built. Thomson Corporation, now Thomson Reuters, agreed on 23 March to buy Dialog's information services division, including the Dialog name, in a $500 million transaction. The sale completed on 4 May 2000. Two and a half years after buying Knight-Ridder Information for $420 million, the business had been sold on to one of the world's largest information groups, where the Dialog name remains in use today. The remaining company, keeping its web-solutions and e-commerce businesses and its stakes in a number of start-ups, including a young hosted-commerce subsidiary called Venda, renamed itself Bright Station plc.

The idea for Venda came before the Thomson sale. In 1998, while Dialog was still integrating Knight-Ridder Information, Dan established Venda as a subsidiary within the group to pursue a proposition that did not yet have a name: a retailer should be able to run an online shop without owning any of the software, paying instead for a hosted service shared with other retailers and priced on results. The term for that today is software as a service. In 1998 it was simply an unusual way to sell e-commerce, and Venda was among the very first companies anywhere to try it.

After the Dialog sale, Bright Station concentrated on its remaining businesses. It wrote off its database assets, reported a loss of £111 million for the first quarter of 2000, and closed its Sparza and OfficeShopper subsidiaries as the dot-com market turned. The group was renamed Smartlogik in 2001 around its search and categorisation software, and in April 2002 sold those assets to Applied Psychology Research and was wound up. Two things carried forward. One was Bright Station Ventures, the private investment vehicle through which Dan has since backed his own and other people's companies. The other was Venda.

In 2001 Venda took its decisive step. James Cronin, formerly chief technology officer of boo.com, the fashion retailer whose collapse had come to symbolise the crash, joined the company, and Venda acquired boo.com's technology assets for £250,000 and rebuilt them as a true multi-tenant platform, with a single codebase serving every client's shop from a data centre near Reading. Retailers paid a share of sales rather than a licence fee, which aligned the two sides in a way the enterprise-software model of the day did not. Clients over the following decade included Tesco's F&F clothing brand, TK Maxx, Laura Ashley, Virgin Megastores and boohoo.com. The company raised $20 million from Investor Growth Capital and GF Private Equity in December 2006, appeared in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 in 2006 and 2007, and grew to around 240 staff in London, New York and Bangkok, becoming the European leader in its category.

Dan ran Venda as chief executive until 2010 and remained chairman afterwards. In July 2014 Venda was acquired by Oracle NetSuite, the American cloud-software company, and its platform became the foundation of NetSuite's commerce offering. Oracle's $9.3 billion purchase of NetSuite in 2016 brought Venda's technology inside the world's second-largest software company, sixteen years after the idea had first been sketched inside Dialog.

Alongside Venda, Dan founded Locayta in early 2003 with Andre Brown, who ran it. Locayta built search and merchandising software for online shops, the tools that decide which products a shopper sees and in what order. Renamed Attraqt, it was admitted to London's AIM market on 19 August 2014 at 50p a share, with Dan as chairman until he stepped down in 2016 or 2017, a date on which published accounts differ. In 2011 he also backed BuyaPowa, a refer-a-friend platform founded by Gideon Lask, through Bright Station Ventures, investing $4.6 million in 2013 and joining its 2015 Series A. Lask still runs it.

Powa Technologies was founded in 2007 and for its first six years was funded largely by Dan himself, to the extent of some $20 million. It set out to put the shop into the phone at a time when most retailers still regarded mobile as a marketing channel. Its products were PowaWeb, a hosted e-commerce platform for smaller merchants; PowaPOS, a tablet-based point-of-sale system; and PowaTag, an app that let a consumer buy a product by scanning a code or listening to an audio watermark in an advertisement, a poster or a television commercial. The idea, that any piece of media could become a checkout, is the one every major platform is now pursuing under the name of agentic or contextual commerce.

In August 2013 Powa raised $76 million from Wellington Management, the Boston fund manager, in what was reported as the largest Series A round for a technology company at the time. A further $80 million from Wellington followed in November 2014. In June 2014 Powa bought the Hong Kong mobile-payments company MPayMe for $75 million in shares, and Dan put the enlarged group's value at $2.6 billion; a figure of $2.7 billion was later attributed to Wellington. On those numbers Powa was among the most valuable private technology companies Britain had produced. By the start of 2016 it had fifteen offices and more than 500 staff, and announced in August 2015 an agreement with China UnionPay to take PowaTag into as many as 400,000 Chinese retail locations.

The end came quickly, and before the UnionPay deployment that Dan believed would transform the company's revenues could complete. In January 2016 a funding round under negotiation did not close in time. On 17 February Wellington called in its loans, and on 19 February Deloitte was appointed administrator of Powa Technologies Group plc, followed on 22 February by the main operating subsidiary. Around 300 people worldwide lost their jobs. The businesses were sold separately: PowaTag to a consortium led by Ben White, who had joined the board weeks earlier; PowaWeb to its management with Greenlight's backing, saving 69 jobs; and PowaPOS to the Israeli company SuperCom.

The administration was widely reported at the time, including by the Financial Times and the BBC. That coverage is collected, with its dates, on the Press & Archive page.

Dan's account of what happened is a matter of public record. He has said that the company was within reach of completing the UnionPay agreement, which would have put PowaTag in front of hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers; that a director who had joined weeks earlier worked with the lender to force the administration and acquire the assets at a fraction of their value; and that every payment to companies connected to him was approved by the board and audited by PwC. The director in question disputed that account, and a loan dispute between the two was settled in December 2017. Dan has never disowned Powa. He regards it as the right idea, executed at scale, that ran out of time before its largest contract could complete, and the company he founded within weeks of the administration picked up exactly where it left off.

I don't like the term "unicorn".Dan Wagner, Elite Business, January 2016

Rezolve began within weeks of Powa's administration, as a continuation of the same mission with a new company and new backers. The company that became Rezolve Limited was incorporated in September 2015, renamed Powa Commerce in February 2016 and then Rezolve in March 2016; Dan has been its chief executive and a director since June 2016, and the company dates its founding to that year. Its first product carried PowaTag's idea forward, using image and audio recognition to make advertising and packaging shoppable from a phone, and it spent its first years selling in Asia and to mobile operators and banks as much as to retailers.

The company's direction changed with the arrival of large language models. Dan's conviction, expressed repeatedly since 2016, was that general-purpose AI models would never be reliable enough to run a shop unsupervised, because they generate plausible answers rather than correct ones, and that the opportunity lay in building AI grounded in a merchant's actual catalogue, prices and rules. Rezolve developed its own commerce-tuned language model, brainpowa, and a suite of products under the Brain name: Brain Commerce for search and recommendation, Brain Checkout for completing a purchase, and Brain Assistant for conversation.

Rezolve stayed private for eight years. In March 2021 it sold a $20 million stake at a valuation of $750 million, with the UK government's Future Fund among the investors. In December 2021 it agreed to combine with Armada Acquisition Corp I, a Nasdaq-listed special-purpose acquisition company, in a transaction that valued the combined business at around $2 billion. The deal took more than two and a half years to complete. It closed on 15 August 2024, and Rezolve Ai's shares began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker RZLV on 16 August 2024, Dan's second company to list on that exchange, twenty-nine years after MAID.

The two years since have been the busiest of Dan's career. Rezolve signed a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft in October 2024 and a reseller agreement with Google Cloud in November 2024. It announced a collaboration with Tether in December 2024 to bring stablecoin payments into Brain Checkout and, in February 2025, a plan to raise up to $1 billion in convertible notes to hold bitcoin as a treasury asset. It reported passing $50 billion in gross merchandise value in April 2025, received a $50 million investment led by Citadel in July 2025, and in October 2025 bought Subsquid, a decentralised data-infrastructure business, together with the payments company Smartpay. In 2026 it raised $250 million in an oversubscribed placing, agreed to buy the rewards business Reward for $230 million, launched brainpowa inside Microsoft Foundry, signed a global resale partnership with Tata Consultancy Services, published TraceWare, an audit layer for AI agents validated in a peer-reviewed paper, and made an unsolicited, ultimately unsuccessful, all-share bid for Commerce.com.

The financial results reflect that pace. Revenue was $2 million in 2024, $46.8 million in 2025, and $130.8 million, unaudited, in the first half of 2026 alone, with more than 1,640 enterprise customers. The company is loss-making, as growing software companies generally are, and its guidance, its acquisitions and its founder's public statements are scrutinised closely by analysts and by short-sellers, as the record on the Press & Archive page shows. Dan's title is Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. What he is trying to do now is described on the Today page.

• National Portrait Gallery, London. A portrait of Dan by Sarah Dunn, photographed on 29 November 1999 at Dialog's offices in Leicester Square and acquired by the Gallery in 2000, is held in the permanent collection (reference NPG x88712).
• Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 1999. Awarded during the Dialog years and recorded in profiles of the time, including Management Today's in April 2001.
• World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow, 1997. Named to the Forum's programme for leaders under forty.
• The eVangelist. A weekly column in the Sunday Express in 2001, arguing for the internet's future in the aftermath of the crash. Sixteen columns are preserved on the Thinking & Writing page.