Verve has appointed five new recruits into the team which delivers its rapidly growing synthetic personas proposition.
Andrew Cooper, Founder and CEO explains: “We’ve seen our VIPS proposition really catch fire after over three and a half years of investment and foundation client success. This is helping us retain and grow existing clients as well as bring new relationships on board – and it’s helping our partner agencies do the same. Our new hires bring expanded capabilities, AI-native thinking and a positive, forward-looking approach to research, embracing the opportunity to shape a new model for insight”.
Chloe Stevens joins in the newly created role of Growth Director. Chloe brings over a decade of insight consultancy experience across FMCG and healthcare. Formerly at FiftyFive5 and Human8, she has led global brand and innovation programmes and grown complex multi-market and multi category accounts. She will focus on scaling strategic AI powered insight solutions across key clients.
Tana-Maria Botezat – awarded Quirk’s Outstanding Young Researcher 2025, Tana joins as Associate Director. She brings deep experience in AI-powered ideation and concept development programmes, across global CPG, healthcare, financial services and retail brands, and will accelerate the design of VIPS solutions to help clients deliver smarter innovation pipelines and commercial growth.
Nicole Seow - joins Verve as Associate Consultant, holding an MSc in Computational & Corpus Linguistics, and bringing experience in marketing strategy and client-facing content. Her expertise in language patterns, model behaviour and cultural intelligence will serve to strengthen the context engineering approaches behind VIPS, ensuring all outputs are grounded in contextual realities and nuances to deliver more credible insight.
Benjamin Huaraka also joins as Associate Consultant, bringing an MSc in Digital Anthropology from UCL, and AI model training experience from Meta. His background combines ethnographic research with hands-on evaluation of large language models, giving him a deep understanding of how AI systems interpret human behaviour. At Verve, he will help ensure VIPS are grounded in cultural reality and human context, strengthening their credibility and commercial impact.
Alongside them, Daniel Zhang joins as Technical Product Manager. Daniel has a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Computer Science and extensive experience in both AI Research and Engineering. Daniel is AI native and brings with him an academic and practical edge in applying AI to solve business problems. He will lead the development of Verve’s rigorous VIP validation processes and use them to create new models for quantitative insight.
Rich Preedy, Head of Vero Build Studio, the team at Verve responsible for delivering AI empowered solutions, adds: “I’m excited to welcome this brilliant group of joiners to Verve. The exciting work we’re doing at the leading-edge of insight is reflected in our ability to attract such exceptional AI-forward talent - people who will help Verve continue to build, prove and shape a new model of insight for our industry”.