ThriveGrowth

Providing Fractional CFO services to various startups in Fintech, SaaS, E-commerce, Digital Marketing, and Sustainability.

Highlights:
•	Built 20+ financial models, resulting in $10m+ investments and an acquisition.
•	Collaborated with startups to extend runway by an average of four and a half months.
•	Advised on metrics dashboards, enhancing Founder understanding of unit economics.
•	Guided startups in successful completion of Seed rounds.
•	Led incorporation of India "tech hub" entity and UK office setup for an Australian fintech, including FCA license application.
•	Raised venture debt funding, extended Fintech startup's runway.
•	Advised on share option schemes using Seedlegals and Vestd.
•	Implemented financial tech stacks for scalable growth.
•	Assisted startups in expanding their operations to the US market, providing strategic guidance and overseeing the successful establishment of US subsidiaries.

Fractional CFO

SHAY CPA P.C.

Fractional CFO helping investment backed companies with a range of services from financial modelling, fundraising to systems and processes.

NatWest Accelerator

The NatWest Accelerator supports and empowers UK entrepreneurs to scale their businesses to the next level.

Mentor

Wilbe | Home for entrepreneurial scientists

Wilbe educates, builds and invests in scientists solving some of the world's hardest problems. Based in London, Wilbe works with scientists from leading research hubs from Cambridge, Imperial, Oxford in the UK to Max Planck in German.

Finance Lead

Highview Power

Highview Power is a technology company which has developed the CryoBattery, a proprietary solution to extending wind and solar energy throughout the day. The company is now positioned to roll out the technology on a commercial basis. Involved from the very early stages to c. £200m valuation.

•	Raised £55m (equity and debt) over 5 rounds, with thorough investor engagement and due diligence.
•	Pioneered go-to-market strategy for proprietary CryoBattery technology.
•	Secured £22m grant funding for commercial and innovation efforts.
•	Developed finance, legal, IT, HR functions to sustain growth.
•	Implemented scalable systems including Xero, Receipt Bank, CapDesk, and more.
•	Spearheaded Corporate Governance policies.
•	Led tax strategy, including transfer pricing, patent box, and R&D tax credits.
•	Setup US subsidiary included navigating regulatory requirements, coordinating legal processes, and liaising with local stakeholders for seamless entry into the US market.

Finance Director

ENGIE

Assistant Reporting Accountant

Publicis Groupe

Senior Management Accountant

I help you grow and scale your business as an outsourced CFO. Through the company I founded, ThriveGrowth, I get to do what I love: support startups and SMEs with my finance expertise. With nearly two decades of finance experience — six as the Finance Director of a technology startup — I know what it means to step into a fast-paced business and pinpoint areas for growth.

During my six years at the aforementioned startup, I:

•	Helped it grow from 10 to 50 people
•	Raised £55m over 6 rounds
•	Created a finance function and the necessary team
•	Enabled the company to expand abroad
•	Watched as the company almost went under and helped turn it around 
•	Grew its valuation to £200m 

Now, I bring everything I’ve learned to founders and entrepreneurs through ThriveGrowth. With real hands-on experience, I can help at each stage of your journey (startup, growing, scaling). If you need a CFO, advisor, consultant, or mentor to help you grow your company, get in touch.

👉🏽Schedule a call: https://calendly.com/thrive-growth
👉🏽Email me: enquiries@thrivegrowth.co.uk
👉🏽Call: 0203 920 8210

Rakesh Shah

Aarish Shah

I’m a founder, a CFO, and a builder of things that (hopefully) outlive me.

Over the last two decades, I’ve sat on both sides of the table — leading startups as CEO and CFO, raising capital, building from scratch, and seeing what happens when things don’t go to plan.

Today, I run EmergeOne, a fractional CFO consultancy working with some of the UK’s fastest-growing venture backed startups — from Seed to Series B and beyond.

Our team has raised tens of millions, supported nine-figure exits, and partnered with companies backed by funds like Stride, Hoxton, Playfair, Octopus, Founders Factory, and more.

But this isn’t just about finance.

It’s about making sure founders don’t fly blind.

It’s about helping early-stage businesses make better decisions, faster — without waiting until it’s too late or too expensive to fix.

And it’s about changing how this ecosystem understands finance:
→ Not as a blocker.
→ Not as a back-office function.
→ But as a core driver of strategic growth.

Outside of EmergeOne, I host Nothing Ventured — a podcast digging into the stories behind the people shaping startups, VC, and tech. 

Join tens of thousands of subscribers here: https://www.youtube.com/@nothingventuredpodcast

I am also writing Off Balance — the 100 lessons I have learned from 20 years as CEO and CFO - sign up for early access here: https://airtable.com/appr5NwjdkUBLaFhz/pagzDXf7qM4vgnVO9/form

Everything I do — from the boardroom to the podcast mic — is driven by the same purpose:

To educate, empower, and elevate the next generation of founders, operators, and CFOs.

If you’ve got a question about startup finance, venture, or what the numbers really mean, feel free to drop me a DM, I'll be happy to grab a chat.

In the meantime,

Stay liquid.

Founder

Business advisory providing Part Time and Portfolio Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Finance Director (FD) and finance ops services to startups and growth ventures.

We help you build a better finance stack.

Financial Modelling
Financial and Business Strategy
Financial Planning and Analysis
Treasury and Cash Management
Debt and Equity raises
Performance Dashboarding

Absolutely banging evening at Web3 Demo Day at 194 Piccadilly 🔥

Nothing Ventured is back out and about capturing conversations from the people behind the stories that make the venture ecosystem go around.

Massive respect to Lorae Knight for putting together such and incredible event bringing together phenomenal entrepreneurs and investors to celebrate the next iteration of the web3 world.

Great that EmergeOne | Fractional CFO services has been able to get involved next to sponsors like Visa and Wirex.

 Thanks to all the guests who jumped in for some on the fly chats, can't wait to share them with the world 🫡

Helping venture backed founders scale | $500M+ in exits & capital raised | Bootstrapped EmergeOne to ​>$1M | Host of Nothing Ventured – real talk with VCs, founders & operators

No alternative text description for this image

For those in the cheap seats: PAPER VALUATIONS ARE NOT EXITS.

Capital One buying Brex for ~$5.15bn is almost certainly one of the most honest deals we’ve seen in a while.

And I say that precisely because Brex wasn’t any kind of a failure.

It wasn’t a fraud. It wasn’t poorly run.

It was just priced at a moment in time for a world that no longer exists.

A peak valuation of ~$12.3bn in the early 2020s ran straight into the reality we’re all now living in again: growth, margins, and the cost of capital actually matter.

This is the bit that seems to trigger people:

If you think a company exiting for multiple billions — with founders and employees walking away with real money, and early investors getting actual liquidity — is a “bad outcome”… you might want to ask yourself whether you’re optimising for optics or actuals.

Because the real lesson here is that the last cycle pulled a lot of outcomes forward… and now the market is methodically unwinding them.

Also: bank–fintech consolidation isn’t some future prediction anymore. It’s just the shape of the market.

Check out my thoughts on Brex and more in this month's Nothing Ventured - on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curious: what do you think we'll see more of in 2026 — down-rounds, secondaries, or “honest” M&A like this?

As always — stay liquid.

Web3 Demo Day wrapped 🫡

Congrats to Cairon Clarke, founder of Zynta and winner of the competition. That pitch had the judges hooked from start to finish 🔥

And by the way, those judges did not hold back so kudos to all the other founders who braved the stage - never easy 💪🏾

And who were those judges?

Samir Beg Ceric, Eda Taskin, Bola Ranson, Afzaal Mauthoor - all bringing nothing but straight talk to each and every pitch.

Shout to Aylin Kate Aydogan from the EmergeOne | Fractional CFO services team and Jesse Kettle from LaunchPod Studios for the support in making sure Nothing Ventured brought the conversations to the table.

And, of course...

Huge respect to Lorae Knight for standing up such an effortless and enjoyable event 🙏🏾

Founders, stop burying the lede.

Don't wait until your pitch is 70% done to mention you've already closed 1m in revenue or got a global partnership in play with a large corporate.

Yes, venture is about finding and funding great innovation. 

Team, tech, TAM all worthy of mention.

But venture is also about funding fund returners and what's the best way of showing you're on that path?

Traction.


I guarantee if your numbers are worthy of attention, they'll get attention.

So lead with that, because a solution that folk are already are willing to part cash for is a better indication of value than any number of slides about how complex your tech build is.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Now get out there and kill it in 2026 🫡

The only scorecard in life is the relationships you nurtured throughout...

In today's episode of Nothing Ventured I had the pleasure to speak with Court Lorenzini, a multi time, venture backed founder best known for founding Docusign, taking e-signature from niche to default and building one of the most valuable SaaS franchises of the past two decades - currently ~$14bn market cap. 

Since then he’s started and led multiple companies, serves as a strategic advisor and board member, and now founded and runs FounderNexus, a global, stage segmented community where experienced VC backed founders solve problems together by sharing lived experience rather than generic “advice.” 

We talked about:

🚀 How FounderNexus wants to triple your odds of success.
🧑‍⚖️ How at Docusign, Court hired a judge, prosecutors, defence attorneys and a jury to litigate the case for digital signatures.
🤔 Why the vast majority of modes of failure can be traced back to founder decisions.
＝ Court’s Success equation: every action or decision can be assigned an integer variable - if only one decision is a failure, the whole business might collapse.
✅ How FounderNexus prioritises experience over advice.
💯 But that failure is as valuable as success - if not more so.
🇬🇧 How Court wants to help build the future of entrepreneurial London.

Join our audience of over 54,000 venture curious individuals and listen, like, share and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts 🎧

Links in comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

So I'm now pretty deep into editing my book and... 

Oof, it ain't half hard mum.

But the awesome thing is that it's now flowing in a way that I hadn't expected it to.

Here's a taster from the primer for Section I: Reality Installer


"Why this book? Why me? These may be just two of the questions you are asking yourself, though the fact that you are reading already suggests you’ve already answered those for yourself.

But if I were to answer, I would say this: there is an incredible body of information out in the world today - especially around business. But where much of it falls over is that it is often overly generic, and because much of the time it assumes that we all operate in a rational and predictable system, the advice comes through as theoretical. Selling the book, not solving the problems you’re likely to face.

Because businesses aren’t linear, they aren’t homogenous. They are messy, irrational, emotional and driven by all sorts of incentives - just like us as individuals. And the best business books acknowledge this reality, they don’t preach from a place of success, they inform from a place of failure, of having been in the trenches and borne the scars that are the reality of building a business in the real world."

I can't wait to get this out into the world now, and since restructuring it I've had a fire in my belly to get it done.

I'll be looking for a few people to do some proof reading shortly - if you're interested just let me know 🙏🏾

taplio

The Battle

Rakesh Shah

Aarish Shah

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreAarish Shah's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Rakesh Shah

Aarish Shah

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Aarish Shah's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreAarish Shah's LinkedIn Performance