Discover Who We Are

Our Solution

Encapsulating Trust - The immutable linking of a unique digital record, incorporating its identity, intrinsic value and all associated affinity data, Digital Cognate is a trusted, resilient and transparent solution that enables real time controlled-access to critical business insights and data.

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Our Reasons Why

Our Purpose

Securing data integrity for the long term

Our Mission

To ensure absolute trust and certainty in the critical data that sits at the heart of complex multi-party processes, transactions and agreements

Our Vision

Encapsulating trust for everyone, everywhere

Our Values

Trust

We build trust into everything we do; core to our technology, trust also sits within every one of our solutions, relationships, connections and networks. Our number one desired outcome is always for enhanced trust

Learning

We thrive on new insights, perspectives, challenges and opportunities; taking our trust solutions to new sectors and technologies; always listening and learning every step of the way

Responsibility

We believe in delivering secure, scalable and sustainable solutions that provide benefit both today and tomorrow, enabling new opportunities, mitigating risks and always enhancing best practice, compliance, audit and governance

Leadership

We lead by example, pushing forwards in our thinking and approach, breaking boundaries, driving change and delivering true innovation

Accessibility

We prioritise simplicity and accessibility in all our design solutions; through system integration, user interface, data interrogation, analytics, output and ease of business interpretation

Our People

Digital Cognate is driven by a strong team of genuine sector experts and
world-class technology specialists, alongside experienced and commercially astute business leaders.

Dr. David Landsman OBE

Chairman

David is a former British diplomat and senior executive. His recent appointments include British Ambassador to Greece and Executive Director of the Tata Group’s subsidiary in Europe. He now holds a number of non-executive and advisory positions with large and small organisations, including Strategy International, Circklo, the British-Serbian Chamber of Commerce and the London Institute of Banking and Finance.

Paul McCarthy

Chief Executive Officer

Business leader and serial entrepreneur, Paul has a strong track record of successfully starting running, and growing companies. With over 25 years of experience within the Fintec and Payments industry, Paul has held Plc board level roles at Morse plc and Monitise Mobile Payments. More recently, Paul founded HeleCloud, now the leading AWS only premier partner in Europe, and which sold to SoftwareOne in 2021. Paul’s areas of speciality include digital transformation, cloud computing, M&A and fund raising

Stephen O'Donnell

Chief Technology Officer

In a career stretching over four decades, Steve has obtained deep and wide experience in technology-driven businesses. He has served as CIO at Gallagher, G4S, Coventry Building Society and CTO at MS Amlin. With a strong reputation in international high-tech businesses as a leading Industry Analyst at ESG, as CEO at GreenBytes (now Oracle), he has been an active member on a number of high-tech corporate advisory boards. He also has hands-on experience in telecommunications, banking, insurance, supply chain and logistics and is a Bank of England SMF24 approved executive.

Lesley Leone

Chief Operations Officer and Co-Fund

Lesley started her career working for a multinational telecommunications company within the HR department, before moving to Operations. She was responsible for pre and post sales, executing training initiatives and delivering key capabilities for clients, whilst managing the implementation of new technologies across head office and stores ahead of launch. Since then, Lesley and her husband, Philip Leone, co-founded several successful start-ups together, the latest being Digital Cognate. Lesley is passionate about solving real world problems by translating technology into viable business offerings.

Simon Rendell

Legal Advisor

Simon is a technology partner at the international law firm FieldFisher LLP, chairman and advisor to a large number of companies including Elemental.io, Aistream, Loco Soco Group Limited and Shamal. Simon was previously a legal director to Vodafone and has advised companies such as Facebook, Yahoo!, EE, EA and Verisign. He was also chairman of the Security Committee at the London Chamber of Commerce.

Jon Cooper

Chief Finance Officer and Company Secretary

Jon is an extremely knowledgeable and versatile accountant with over thirty years’ experience both in providing accountancy consultant services and running his own businesses. As a result, he understands the myriad pressures on business owners from negotiating credit facilities to securing venture capital investments to challenging iniquitous business rates to dealing with the seemingly endless red tape. Since 2019, Jon has acted as Company Secretary to Docuchain Limited to support the board of directors and guide them with their investment strategy and internal business decisions.

Our Heritage

Digital Cognate was founded in 2018 by Philip Leone, a serial entrepreneur with a career in technology and finance. His goal was to build a new generation of software to embed real trust in operations and transactions across multiple sectors. Philip sadly passed away in September 2021 after a short illness.
The team at Digital Cognate remain determined and committed to continue Philip’s legacy and achievements.

Our Partners

Digital Cognate’s technology has been developed in close collaboration with some of the world’s leading tech companies and potential end-users, to ensure that it meets real needs head-on.

This includes a number of blue-chip key players including
AWS, CMS Law, Fujitsu, Helecloud, KPMG, PwC and TALL Group.

Digital Cognate’s business model is to license its software to channel partners who will remain the first point of contact with their customers.

Go to Market

Advisors & Investors

Our Commitment to Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG)

Digital Cognate is a responsible business, committed to playing our part for a better future, with our corporate values of Trust, Learning, Leadership, Responsible and Accessibility sitting at the heart of our innovation and sustainability aspirations.

Digital Cognate supports the delivery of the United Nations Global Compact and the achievement of its Sustainability Development Goals. We are contributing to the realisation of these goals through the solutions we deliver and the way in which we do business.

Trust sits at the core of our solution and is built into everything that we do. Digital Cognate’s technology ensures that complete and trustworthy data is fully accessible to all parties involved in operations or transactions. Trust Informs critical decision making and reduces both risk and cost, benefitting individuals, businesses, society and the environment as a whole.

With our solutions, data is globally accessible, immediately available anytime of day or night and without restriction for permissioned access holders. This facilitates flexible and remote working from anywhere in the world.

At Digital Cognate, we are committed to reducing waste, increasing our use of renewable and recycled / recyclable resources and maximising efficiency.

Using only green energy to power our business and a cloud-based approach to hosting our platform and solutions, we are minimising the carbon footprint of our operations. Digital Cognate solutions are broadly carbon neutral compared with legacy systems while enhancing trust as a key ESG enabler. Cloud-hosted solutions generate an estimated -88% carbon footprint versus traditional data centres (AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog: IT and ESG: How IT can and must further the company’s ESG efforts, by Mark Schwartz February 2022).

At Digital Cognate we are an equal opportunities organisation and fully embed both the actions and principles of diversity, inclusivity and belonging. We are also committed to the training, investment in and personal development of our staff, encouraging flexible working and a focus on mental health and well-being.