Ewan Kirk
Major Career Roles
- Founder and Chief Investment Officer, Cantab Capital Partners
- Partner and Head of Quantitative Technology, Goldman Sachs
- Non-Executive Director, BAE Systems plc
- Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence, University of Cambridge
Other Career Highlights
- President, GAM Systematic Cantab LLP
- Chair, DeepTech Labs
- Chair, Isaac Newton Institute
Ewan Kirk is a technology entrepreneur, early-stage investor, philanthropist, experienced Chair and the founder of Cantab Capital Partners. He has a wealth of professional experience within deep technology, financial services, quantitative investment management, fundamental mathematics, defence, security, clean-tech, education, private equity and venture capital.
Ewan sits on the Board of a number of UK technology start-ups and is a Non-Executive Director of BAE Systems plc. He is also Chair of DeepTech Labs, a Cambridge-based start-up accelerator that identifies, invests in and scales start-up companies which commercialise frontier scientific technology.
He has over 30 years of experience identifying and commercialising research opportunities in mathematics, technology and physics, especially across data science, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). He has a special expertise in establishing “horizon scanning” functions to identify key areas of emerging science that provide commercial opportunities and risks to the organisations he has led and invested in.
Ewan founded Cantab Capital Partners in 2006, a science-led quantitative investment management firm, one of the first hedge funds to apply cuttingedge data-science research to the financial markets to develop algorithm-led strategies. The business was acquired in 2016 by GAM Investments, after which he went on to serve as President of GAM Systematic Cantab until March 2021.
Prior to Cantab, he was a Partner at Goldman Sachs. During Ewan’s tenure at Goldman Sachs, he helped establish the bank’s European quant operations through the recruitment of more than 120 scientists, mathematicians and technologists, and created an exploratory scientific-research culture at the bank to appeal to the most competitive STEM talent.
Ewan is also the co-founder and Co-Chair of the Turner Kirk Trust, an evidence-led, strategic charitable foundation, which supports STEM, education and conservation causes in the UK and the developing world. The trust is one of the largest private funders of fundamental mathematics research in the UK.