Celium — Section 9: Team

Matt [Surname]

CEO & Co-Founder

Background in nature finance, impact investment, and structured payment programmes. Has worked directly on the evidence-to-payment problem in BNG, carbon, and natural capital schemes. Understands both the buyer’s governance requirement and the operator’s cashflow constraint.

Nature financeImpact investmentBNG / carbonStructured paymentsGTM

Tech Co-Founder

CTO & Co-Founder

Engineering background with experience building policy engines, audit-grade systems, and data pipelines. Has shipped production software in regulated environments. Responsible for the core EP → VD → PE artefact chain, the policy engine, and the integration architecture.

Policy enginesAudit systemsAPI integrationsData pipelinesRegulated environments

The founding team covers the two hardest problems: knowing what “payment-grade evidence” actually requires in practice (domain), and knowing how to build a deterministic, replayable system that produces it reliably (engineering). Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient alone.

Expertise coverage across the eight dimensions Celium requires

Nature finance

Deep — core founding domain

Payment / settlement

Strong — structured payment design

Product engineering

Strong — CTO domain

Audit / compliance

Good — reinforced by advisors

Enterprise GTM

Growing — seed hire priority

Construction sector

Partial — advisor coverage

Financial regulation

Partial — advisor coverage

Data / AI / ML

Good — agent fleet development

Public sector / gov

Building — Series A hire

The gaps are known and sequenced. Enterprise AE and construction sector expertise are the seed-round hire priorities. Government / public sector depth is a Series A priority. The founding team’s nature finance and engineering depth is sufficient for Phase 1 and Phase 2 without additional hires.

Advisory board — domain coverage across the four verticals and key functions

Nature Finance Advisor

Nature & Capital Markets

Senior figure in UK nature finance and biodiversity net gain policy. Connects Celium to institutional buyers and policy-setting bodies relevant to BNG and natural capital schemes.

Value: buyer introductions, policy credibility

Construction Payments Advisor

Construction & Contracting

Experienced in construction payment legislation, adjudication, and retention reform. Helps design the construction pack acceptance logic and validates the payment chain architecture against industry practice.

Value: product validation, industry access

Audit & Assurance Advisor

Audit & Compliance

Partner-level experience in audit, grant compliance, and public sector assurance. Validates the audit-grade artefact chain against professional standards and helps structure the partner programme with assurance firms.

Value: artefact quality, partner channel

Fintech / Payments Advisor

Fintech Infrastructure

Operational experience scaling a B2B payments infrastructure business. Advises on revenue architecture, pricing strategy, and the path from Series A to infrastructure-scale monetisation.

Value: revenue model, investor introductions

The advisory board fills the gaps in the founding team’s domain coverage at zero dilution. Each advisor brings direct access to buyers, partners, or investors in their vertical — not just advice.

Hiring roadmap — aligned to funding rounds

Role	Round	Timing	Why now	OTE / Cost
Senior Engineer (full-stack)	Pre-seed	Q2 2026	Pack build velocity for IT and government verticals	~$140k
Solutions Engineer	Pre-seed	Q3 2026	Customer implementation — currently on founders	~$120k
Account Executive (AE 1)	Seed	Q3 2027	Scale beyond founder-led sales	~$180k OTE
Head of Partnerships	Seed	Q4 2027	Build audit firm and MRV partner channel	~$160k OTE
Product Manager	Seed	Q1 2028	Roadmap ownership as engineering team scales	~$140k
AE 2 + AE 3	Series A	Q3 2028	Construction and government verticals require dedicated AEs	~$180k OTE ea.
Head of Government	Series A	Q1 2029	Public sector procurement expertise required for Phase 3	~$180k
VP Engineering	Series A	Q2 2029	Engineering team expected to reach 8–10; leadership needed	~$220k

The pre-seed hires prioritise build velocity over sales headcount. The founders carry sales through Phase 1. Adding an AE before the playbook is proven wastes burn and dilutes product focus. The Seed round is the right trigger for the first commercial hire.

Culture & operating principles

Artefact quality is non-negotiable

Every output Celium produces must be audit-defensible. We do not ship features that compromise the determinism or replayability of the EP → VD → PE chain. Quality is a constraint, not a tradeoff.

One deep win before broad expansion

We do not pursue the next vertical until the current one is proven to repeatable-deployment standard. Scope discipline is how we avoid becoming a professional services business.

Pack-first, not bespoke-first

Every deployment must contribute to a reusable pack. We say no to custom work that doesn’t generalise. The goal is 90% pack reuse rate within 5 years — that number is a cultural commitment, not just a product target.

Honest about what we don’t know

We distinguish clearly between what is proven in deployment and what is a working hypothesis. Investors, customers, and team members should always know which category they’re hearing. We correct our model when the evidence demands it.

Export-first by default

Every integration starts from the PE export format that the downstream system needs. We work backwards from the payment instruction, not forwards from the evidence. This keeps the product boundary clean and the integration tractable.

Infrastructure mindset, not software mindset

We are building something that other things depend on. That means uptime, auditability, and long-term API stability matter as much as feature velocity. We hire people who understand this distinction.

Culture is particularly important for a company building audit-grade infrastructure. The commercial temptation to compromise artefact quality for deal speed is real. The culture cards above are the internal commitments that resist that pressure.