Vishal Marria was about six when he started working.
After school in Clapham he would hurry to his parents' cash-and-carry in Brixton, along with his three siblings. Every day of the week. Nobody running a venture-backed analytics firm today would call that a training programme, but he later credited the counter with shaping his business instincts. One podcast listing even claims a frightening raid on the shop when he was nine. I could only find that once, so take it as unconfirmed.
He went on to study computer science at Royal Holloway, finishing with a first, according to one profile.
His parents had come from India in the 1960s. They started with deliveries, moved to off-licences, then to cash-and-carry. Money in that world is counted in coins and margins, and the lesson is simple: you see waste at once.
He went on to study computer science at Royal Holloway, finishing with a first, according to one profile. Then came jobs at Detica, SAS and EY, where he worked in risk. Here the wound turned into an itch. Banks needed to know who they were dealing with, yet analysts spent days manually combining datasets that did not agree with each other. Marria saw a gap for software that could connect the dots on its own.
What almost nobody saw coming was how big the pay-off would be for a company with no famous founder, no Silicon Valley address and a product that is hard to explain at dinner. He has said the decision to leave and start up felt like needing to "place a big brave hand on my heart". In 2016 he and Imam Hoque founded Quantexa in London.
The cost of building for banks is patience. Regulated customers move slowly, and the product has to work before anyone believes it. Then in April 2023, despite UK venture funding falling sharply, Quantexa raised $129M at a $1.8bn valuation and became the only new British unicorn of the year at that point. Warburg Pincus and Singapore's GIC had led its recent rounds.
The next step was bigger. In March 2025 it raised $175M, led by the venture arm of Ontario Teachers', at a $2.6bn valuation. Annual recurring revenue had passed $100M in October 2024, Zurich had signed on as the first insurer to use its fraud platform, and an IPO was reportedly being considered for as soon as 2026.
The pattern is familiar if you grew up behind a counter. Marria turned a childhood spent watching what customers actually needed into a company that reads what customers actually did. Founders from ordinary trading families often carry the same quiet edge: they learned to look at data before anyone called it that.