Built by R&D advisers, for R&D advisers

Tom, a co-founder of Novel, brings over ten years of extensive industry experience and a deep understanding of R&D tax relief. His passion for supporting small businesses and fostering innovation led him and the team to create a codified solution in the form of Novel's innovative R&D tax relief software platform. Beyond Novel, Tom actively engages with industry stakeholders and hopes to drive positive change to enhance the R&D tax relief landscape.

Ben has over ten years’ experience working with SMEs across all areas of business structuring, accounting and tax. His aim is to support business consultants and their customers with educational software products that allow traditionally manual processes to be completed more accurately and much more efficiently. Through automation, he hopes that business consultants will be able to help many more businesses, and provide a better service at a lower cost. Novel is the first of these products.

Ellis has been building technology teams for more than five years. His expertise across all software engineering domains allows him to build out of the box enterprise level solutions using a range of technologies that are effective, secure and reliable. He aims to create platforms that revolutionise the R&D and tax sector by making it more accessible through cutting edge technology and continuous automation.

Ben joins with over 3 years' experience from one of UK’s leading R&D consultancies. After helping hundreds of claimant companies across the UK, he now aims to use his knowledge to assist the R&D industry by revolutionising the way claims are prepared and delivered. He believes the industry is ready for a technological transformation and that Novel is in the best position to lead the way.

As the resident creative, Sanela is in charge of translating all of the abstract ideas and legislation into friendly software design. As a visual learner herself and someone who lives the quote, 'a picture is worth a thousand words', she believes that anything and everything should be presented in a visually striking way, especially something as dry as legislation.

Andy has been into tech from the days of his N64 and as a keen problem solver, backend engineering is the perfect union. He loves the repeatability and simplicity the cloud provides, making deploying and testing new features for Novel a breeze. He is also interested in developer experience and wants to make life easier for all the developers (and himself) within the team.

Dominik is a full-stack software engineer focused on building reliable and scalable web applications. He values clean code, automated testing, and practical engineering practices that improve system quality and maintainability. At Novel, he works on evolving the platform through thoughtful architecture decisions and continuous improvements to benefit both users and the development team.

‍

Belle comes from a strong academic background in science which fuelled her interest in innovation across a variety of different sectors. Recognising the transformative impact a R&D tax relief software can offer in improving services to clients, she became part of the Novel team. Here, she assists consultants and accountants in preparing R&D claims through the platform.

With 15 years of experience in marketing and commercial strategy across diverse industries, Nico brings an innovative approach to building solutions that drive growth and impact. Passionate about startups, entrepreneurship, and user-centric problem solving, he enjoys developing strategies tailored to each business’s unique challenges.

Sergej is passionate about writing beautiful and efficient code that translates into intuitive and user-friendly software solutions. He can often be found bickering with the UX designer over the correct shades of blue but as someone who never gives up on a problem, he is one of the most resilient and patient front end developers we’ve ever met.