MarketInvoice has appointed Rija Javed as its chief technology officer as the FinTech start-up looks to invest heavily into its technology.
Javed joins the company from Silicon Valley-based start-up Wealthfront, and will be responsible for the engineering, data science, product and design teams.
She becomes one of the first female CTOs at a FinTech in the UK.
“Having Rija on board underlines our focus on hiring the best talent and building innovative technology to deliver business finance solutions – it’s the foundation we’ll use to help thousands of business access funding quickly and easily,” said MarketInvoice co-founder and CEO Anil Stocker.
“As we scale our technology and team, Rija’s experience and insights from Silicon Valley will be instrumental. We have ambitious growth plans for the years ahead and Rija will play a significant role in making it happen.”
Javed began her engineering career in Canada with roles at IBM and Research in Motion before moving to Silicon Valley in 2012. After working at gaming company Zynga she joined automated financial adviser Wealthfront in 2013.
Over a period of four years, she helped scale the business as well as lead its biggest initiative to build a new brokerage and banking platform. This allowed the firm to expand into financial services and improve client experience.
“Technology empowers and MarketInvoice is certainly empowering business to grow, create jobs and support local economies and communities,” Javed said.
She added: “Given the exciting roadmap ahead, our immediate focus is to scale up and continue improving our clients’ experience by investing in our team and technology.
“Thus, as people are the most important aspect of any venture, we’re looking to expand our team, especially in engineering.”
To date, MarketInvoice has funded business loans and over 90,000 invoices worth more than £2.5 billion since launching in 2011.
The company currently employs 80 people and is looking to hire across the business to invest in talent and technology.
On becoming one of the first female CTOs in the UK, Javed said: “I’m very excited to help bring more diversity to the UK tech scene. Diversity for me isn’t just about gender, although we certainly need more women in tech, but ensuring we have diversity in all areas like race, culture, religious/spiritual beliefs, and socio-economic background.
“There tend to be many misconceptions about what it’s like being a software engineer. It’s more than just coding. Being an engineer involves problem solving, critical thinking, making decisions and collaboration with people across the board.
“Bringing more diversity to that role will not only enhance the engineering group but also the overall business. I want to dispel the notion that being an engineer means you sit alone in front of a computer screen coding away.”