The Team
The Partners
We back founders who have worked inside the system they want to rebuild. The same principle governs who we are — every member of the Pemberton team came to venture from financial services, not the other way around.
Partner profiles
Edward Pemberton
Managing PartnerEdward spent eight years as a Director at a City of London merchant bank, specialising in structured finance and fintech advisory. He worked across origination, credit structuring, and the bank's technology sector practice — advising early-stage financial services businesses at a time when open banking was theoretical and real-time payment infrastructure was still a Treasury consultation document.
Between 2015 and 2019, he made eleven personal angel investments in payments and financial infrastructure startups, backing founders who were rebuilding the plumbing of financial services before that framing was common. Most were pre-revenue. Several were pre-product. The conviction came from watching, from inside the system, which parts of it were genuinely fragile and which problems were large enough to sustain substantial companies.
He founded Pemberton Ventures in 2019 with a specific thesis: that the convergence of open banking regulation, cloud-native infrastructure, and genuine advances in machine learning would create a window to rebuild financial services at the infrastructure layer — not to add features to legacy systems, but to replace the decisioning and connectivity architecture underneath them. That thesis has only sharpened with time.
Edward leads investment decisions and manages LP relationships across both funds. He writes regularly on the Pemberton Insights desk, covering payments infrastructure, regulatory policy, and the structural conditions that make this a particularly interesting moment for early-stage fintech.
Olivia Marchetti
General PartnerOlivia joined Pemberton in 2021 from a Head of Product role at a growing neobank, where she led the build of the open banking integrations layer serving approximately 400,000 SME accounts. Before that she worked in product and commercial roles across payments infrastructure, giving her a practical view of where the friction in financial data connectivity actually sits — not in the regulation, but in implementation quality, liability frameworks, and the commercial models that sit above the API.
Her time operating inside a regulated financial institution shaped how she evaluates fintech infrastructure companies. She is sceptical of products built for the happy path — real financial infrastructure has to work when the data is messy, when the counterparty is slow, and when the regulator is watching. The companies she has found most compelling are the ones whose architecture anticipates that friction rather than abstracting over it.
At Pemberton, Olivia leads investment activity in payments infrastructure and lending platforms, with particular focus on Series A follow-on into portfolio companies where product-market fit is established and the architecture decisions that will determine long-term defensibility are being made. She also covers embedded finance — an area where her product background is directly relevant to evaluating which orchestration layers will prove durable.
Olivia writes on the Pemberton Insights desk on embedded finance, account-to-account payment architecture, and the practical implications of open banking for mid-market businesses. Her 2022 piece on A2A payments at the tipping point remains one of the most-read pieces on the desk.
Ravi Choudhury
PrincipalRavi spent five years in management consulting working on financial services technology transformation programmes — the kind of large-scale core banking modernisation and digital infrastructure projects that give you an unusually granular view of how slowly financial institutions move, and precisely why that creates space for well-positioned challengers. His clients included retail banks, payment processors, and insurance groups across the UK and continental Europe.
He transitioned to venture through an Entrepreneur-in-Residence programme at a London accelerator in 2022, which deepened his operating knowledge of the early-stage company environment and sharpened his view of what distinguishes teams with genuine infrastructure ambitions from those building features dressed up as platforms. He joined Pemberton shortly after, where his background in financial services technology transformation maps directly onto Fund II's thesis areas.
At Pemberton, Ravi covers early-stage diligence across embedded finance and regulatory technology — two areas where his consulting background proves directly useful. Regulatory technology, in particular, benefits from someone who has sat inside regulated institutions and understands the compliance function as a buyer and an operator, not just as a market category. He approaches diligence on regtech companies with a different set of questions than a generalist investor would bring.
Ravi writes on the Pemberton Insights desk covering treasury management, compliance infrastructure, and the structural underpinnings of identity and fraud prevention in financial services — topics that were at the edge of his consulting work and are now at the centre of his investment focus.
Contact the partners
We meet with founders at every stage of development. The best route is a direct email.
[email protected]+44 20 7946 0258