The Bravyn story
Bravyn was born from a partnership between two co-founders with complementary expertise and a shared vision: to democratise access to world-class leadership coaching.
Kirsty, a professional accredited executive coach who has coached hundreds of senior leaders over 15 years, had long been thinking about the impact of making coaching available to managers much earlier in their careers. She witnessed this potential firsthand through a leadership training and coaching programme she ran for new and early leaders in scaling companies.
David brought over 30 years of technical experience to the partnership. Together, we began building what would become Bravyn with a clear vision: to change the future of leadership by ensuring future leaders are competent, emotionally intelligent and more diverse, encouraging those who may shy away from leadership due to how they see it being enacted currently.
We started building an early version well before generative AI had been released. Essentially we built a digital expert learning system with coaching conversation scenarios, using NLP, ML and pattern recognition to understand user behaviours. We soon learnt this was challenging, inflexible and not scalable – which, given our vision and level of ambition, was essential to get right.
Combining generative AI with traditional ML and AI approaches has enabled us to build a robust and scalable platform with the governance and rigour needed to deliver quality coaching on a global scale.
— Kirsty & David, Co-founders
The team
Kirsty Bathgate
Chief Executive Officer & Cofounder
A professionally accredited executive coach with over 15 years of experience coaching senior leaders, Kirsty founded Bravyn with a clear vision: to make world-class leadership coaching available to managers much earlier in their careers. Her deep expertise in leadership development and emotional intelligence is at the heart of everything Bravyn builds.
David Nicol
Chief Technology Officer & Cofounder
With over 30 years of technical experience spanning AI, software engineering and product development, David leads the engineering and technical strategy behind Bravyn's coaching platform. He co-founded Bravyn to combine cutting-edge AI with rigorous coaching frameworks, building something genuinely scalable and trustworthy.
Les Gaw
Chief Information & Security Officer
Les brings 24 years of experience leading technology companies from pre-revenue through to profitability and trade sale, with a strong commercial and financial acumen. At Bravyn, he leads our information strategy and security framework — ensuring the platform is built on a foundation of trust, governance and operational rigour as we scale.
Daniel Winterstein
AI Advisor & Strategy
Daniel is a leading AI researcher with deep expertise in natural language processing and machine learning. He advises Bravyn on the AI architecture and governance that underpins our coaching platform, helping ensure our technology is both effective and responsibly deployed at scale.
Ruyi Wang
AI Researcher: Computational Linguistics
Ruyi's research focuses on how AI can detect and interpret patterns in human emotion and cognition to build more adaptive, psychologically informed agents. She applies this expertise directly to Bravyn, helping make our coaching conversations more contextually aware and emotionally intelligent.
Our values
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