Co-founder and CTO at Dex
Harry Uglow
I've spent my entire career focused on delivering new product experiences through cutting-edge software. I led engineering on Atomico's industry-leading data analytics and insights platform, as well as deploying LLMs and GenAI products to support the investment team. Previously, I led product and engineering at Kinscape, leading the business through a pivot and platform redesign. Before this I was an early engineer at Ava Security, a CCTV software startup later acquired by Motorola. I am the youngest person to row the English channel solo. I've been lucky enough to have worked with some excellent recruiters when making career moves, and want to bring that experience to everyone at Dex.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
At Atomico I led the engineering team building big data pipelines, powering our investments by systematically identifying the top startup teams. Late in 2024, my co-founder Paddy and I were building a tool for Atomico to track and identify talent for portfolio founders - we scraped all of LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Twitter, GitHub, etc, to identify and attempt to introduce talent to our founders. We quickly realised that despite having almost every public and private data set available, there was simply not enough candidate data available to make meaningful, long-term matches. It was at the moment the penny dropped - you have to create a deeper data set to make high-quality matches at scale. To create the data, you need to have a reason for people to engage with you. And thus, Dex was born. We wrapped up our jobs at Atomico in February 2025 and launched Dex shortly thereafter.
What inspired you to start your business?
As an engineer that's hired teams, and worked with both great and terrible recruiters as a candidate, I know first-hand what it looks like when hiring is done well, and why that is so rare. And when looking at how the hiring landscape is shifting with the emergence of AI hiring tools, it's clear that great outcomes are only becoming less likely. Competition for top engineers exploded, GPT-generated applicants swamped teams, tenures dropped, churn rose. Meanwhile, every “AI for hiring” pitch we saw just scaled spam, outbounding or is LinkedIn search with lipstick. None actually solved the problem. Working from first principles we landed on Dex as the solution. An opportunity to actually make hiring work and help companies build the next best high-performing teams by finding the right candidates at the right time. That's what inspired me to quit my job and embark on a mission to solve this problem.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
If we’re lucky we’ve got 18,000 days left on the planet. Too many people will spend those days at jobs they hate. The way companies evaluate candidates and present their opportunities is fundamentally broken, as evidenced by the fact that 46% of hires that fail before they get to 18 months in role. The days of matching JDs to CVs, needs to be over. I’m excited by solving these big issues and having a profound impact on both employees' fulfilment and on businesses ability to innovate and grow.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
1) Industry expertise - Paddy has spent the last 12+ years recruiting and building teams. No competitor has this level of domain knowledge. We understand the real problem in the hiring industry and that's how we'll build the best product. To build a matchmaking engine like ours is a path frought with local maxima, we know what good looks like and won't get lost on the way there. 2) Market access - we have done virtually zero business development, yet we count a number of the world’s leading start-ups, scale-ups and hedgefunds as clients - this is because of our strong reputation and brand. Paddy's personal network amongst Europe's recruiting leaders is very helpful in this regard.
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
At Atomico, I led the engineering team building a big data asset ingesting all the companies in the world and everyone on LinkedIn, combining a large number of data sources to produce a proprietary data asset that powered all our decisions. We built products on top of this to support every stage of the investment lifecycle, make our processes more efficient and driving better investment outcomes. Our team only had 3 engineers, and yet we were consistently named in the Top 20 Data Driven VC firms. Before my tech career I was an elite athlete, rowing at an international level as an U23 and junior, where I won medals for Team GB. At age 15, I became the youngest person ever to row the English Channel solo, raising £20,000 for the Make-a-Wish foundation after they helped my brother during his battle with leukaemia.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
Watching the quality of candidates that are signing up to Dex every day, we're seeing incredibly accomplished engineers from places like Citadel, Meta, Tower Research, Google Deepmind, and other illustrious businesses sign up - it shows that our strategy of starting high, with elite talent, can and will work.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
Paddy - CEO - 10+ years hiring elite talent, Globally recognised top 100 talent leader. Ex Atomico VC, Improbable Harry - CTO - Built a talent and company graph for identifying talent and companies at Atomico - Imperial CompSci - International level rower - Youngest person to row the English Channel solo Kemi - CoS - Recovering Venture Investor - Ex NEA, General Atlantic and GS Petr - Founding ML Engineer - Ex-Lead ML engineer @Perplexity & Yandex - expert in recommender systems Ryan - Founding Engineer - AI Lead at Convergene (acq. Salesforce) - 10x engineer Rob - Head of Growth - Ex-Cleo Growth Product Lead Siva - Software Engineer - 1st class graduate from Birmingham, previously founding engineer @ StudyStash
