Lone, who is Danish, is a computer engineer turned operational powerhouse. For six years she was with Startup Wise Guys, the European B2B early-stage investor, as its managing director and then COO. Startup Wise Guys was named Hottest Accelerator at the 2021 Europas Startup Awards, has been consistently listed among the most active European seed stage investors by PitchBook.
Lone is Fractory’s first COO and her appointment follows a funding round announced earlier this month. Lone will work mostly from Manchester but will regularly be in Estonia and Finland where Fractory has considerable presence.
Martin Vares, Fractory CEO and co-founder, said with a background in the tech sector and with expertise and experience in operational growth and development, she is exactly what Fractory needs. Her skills are complementary to the CEO and she has been successfully involved with companies at similar stages, with similar structures.
“We know we are becoming a bigger company with bigger clients and we need people who have already been there, who have done it before,” Vares said. “The COO role is always partly administrative and organisational, but in our case its aim is transformative. It is concerned with handling the expansion already happening and readying us for future expansion.”
Jensen said: "Fractory is processing ever larger orders and is seeing bigger organisations coming to rely on its service, so the company structure must be diligently arranged to manage current demand as well as ongoing growth. Certain things need to be in place in a mature company and Fractory is maturing fast following recent investment and the strategic partnership that comes from it.”
Earlier this month Fractory secured £4.2m in an investment round led by a new Finnish VC fund, Kvanted, whose focus is on industrial tech companies. Their fund investors include prominent industrialists such as Oras Invest and they act as a connector, bringing their tech investments together with traditional industrial companies in their networks.
Lone seeks to create a positive impact and promote sustainable growth in companies that combine innovation and purpose. Bringing economies and efficiencies to the manufacturing world, Fractory presents exactly that opportunity.
In further appointment news, three new sales development representatives have joined Fractory in the UK. Heidi Preston, Boris Sinju and Connor McQue now bring outbound sales expertise to the Manchester engineering team which is necessarily focussed on existing clients and inbound enquiries.
