Daniel Ballin

Daniel’s career has focused on steering innovative businesses through the corridors of large multinationals to win contracts and to secure capital from angels, corporates and venture capitalists. 

Daniel is the Founder and CEO of Ideas Crucible, a company allowing entrepreneurial businesses to accelerate their growth and internationalise. This includes providing an advisory service, access to corporate clients, access to investment, intellectual property, marketing, and business operations. Ideas Crucible has a particular but not exclusive focus on B2B and deep tech startups. 

Over the past 10 years, Daniel’s track record is of supporting young innovative businesses to win more than £1 billion worth of profitable revenue, through contracts from customers across multiple sectors including banking and financial markets, retail, aviation, telecoms, media, mining oil and gas, defense, and pharmaceutical. 

Daniel provides deal-flow to venture capital and angels, and wealth management banks, is an advisor to a private wealth bank, and has been an advisor to a venture fund. He also sits on the board of several startup and young companies in the private and charitable sector, and had two startups with a soft exit. 

Prior to this Daniel was a Principal Consultant in the Chief Information Office in BT where he led innovations from idea through trial and into launch. He led M&A activity, and launched products and ventures in every BT market facing business. Daniel was heavily involved in the creation of BT's corporate accelerator, as well as working as a technology scout. Whilst at BT Daniel launched their pan-European mobile service. 

Daniel has published in conferences, journals, and book chapters, and has lectured widely; he is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Virtual Reality published by Springer-Nature (2 year impact factor 2.906) and is the inventor of 9 granted patents. Daniel is a mentor at Techstars, StartupBootCamp, Central Research Lab, and Impact Hub.