Lakeba Expands Executive Team

Head of Sales, Head of SaaS Marketing and Chief Business Development Officer hired to support the next phase of growth

“As soon as the Financial Times ranked us as a high-growth company for the second year running, we initiated the next business building phase. Critical to this is our increased calibre in marketing, business development and sales,” says Giuseppe Porcelli, Group CEO of Lakeba.

“It’s the perfect growth trinity,” comments Porcelli on the simultaneous appointments of each of the executives.

Lakeba’s growth plans always included the appointment of all three roles. Thereby ensuring that the business development, marketing and sales portfolios optimise at the same pace.

“I’ll admit the plan hoped to start them in the same quarter. But in our typical Lakeba way, we nailed it by having Carmen, Mark and Tom join on exactly the same day. Part by design, bit of luck and lots of can do – it’s how we always operate,” adds Porcelli.

Carmen Kalinowski Weaver joins Lakeba as Head of Marketing, working across all of Lakeba’s businesses and the wider Group. She’ll be accelerating each of the brands, drive customer demand generation and develop Lakeba’s marketing teams.

She joins Lakeba after having held senior marketing roles at Perpetual Corporate Trust, Equifax and Rabobank.

Mark Hughes joins in a new role as Head of Sales for the Group, with an initial focus on building out the sales disciplines and international infrastructures for Lakeba’s most mature financial services ventures.

He joins following a successful sales career in technology and data services.

Thomas Bender is Lakeba’s newly created Chief Business Development Officer. He joins to broaden the scope of Lakeba’s partnerships programs reaching grassroots start-ups while also integrating Big Tech internationally.

Bender brings his entrepreneurial experience to Lakeba, following the successful commercialisation of several of his own ventures and consulting to businesses scaling theirs.

All three join the leadership team at Lakeba, expanding the international perspectives, growth precedence, energy and best practice of Lakeba, its ventures, scale up fund and partnerships.

Each of the new executives will be based at Lakeba’s international HQ in Sydney, Australia.

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About Lakeba

Lakeba builds businesses that are optimised for high returns from low investment, at low risk when compared with the start-up sector. It utilises proprietary artificial intelligence (AI), decades of business and technology experience, and scalable shared services, to support each phase of business building. So far it has ‘conceived, created and commercialised’ 15 ventures, of which three have already been spun-out.

The unique Lakeba AI ‘neural network’ ‘conceives’ opportunities by continually interrogating the internet to establish patterns which suggest a business ‘need’ that could be solved digitally. Its entrepreneurs then double check this analysis and determine the viability of the business idea and its commercial potential.

To ‘create’ a venture, Lakeba works with partners, industry, and the wider innovations ecosystem to create digital technologies that eliminate the frictions identified by the neural network. A team of technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs build out the value proposition and establish the business. Lakeba invests its time, capabilities, capital and resources to craft ideas into reality.

‘Commercialise’ is the final stage of the Lakeba process. Once the digital proof of concept delivers on its promise, it is enhanced with radical intelligence. Working with partners, investors and the customers, Lakeba’s team refines and optimises the operations and distribution to rapidly commercialise the venture. This ensures the business continuously delivers value to customers as it scales and diversifies across industries and the globe.

Lakeba Group was founded by Giuseppe Porcelli, Entrepreneur and Visionary of Future Technology.