Jonathan Brassington kept a $500 million secret at the Super Bowl

Jonathan Brassington went to the 2018 Super Bowl with clients, an allegiance to the Eagles, and an unusually expensive conversational restriction. He could cheer. He could entertain. He could not tell his guests that a deal to sell LiquidHub, the company he had helped build, was about to become public. A secret worth roughly half a billion dollars is quite an accessory to bring to a football game.

He was in Minneapolis when Philadelphia won. The acquisition announcement followed on Monday. For someone whose working life had revolved around helping businesses communicate with customers, the timing had a certain comic precision: an occasion full of customers, and one rather substantial piece of news he had to keep to himself.

That weekend makes a tempting final scene. Brassington has since supplied several more chapters. His career now includes a public-company board seat, a return to an investment firm that once backed LiquidHub, and Proofpoint Capital, which he co-founded with Matt Wallach and Dan Goldsmith. The recurring activity is building companies, with a changing view of the workbench.

Guyana, Pennsylvania, and a change of plan

Brassington came to the United States from Guyana at 16 to attend Misericordia University in Pennsylvania. His aunt, a Sister of Mercy nun, helped look after him. He studied computer science and mathematics, then entered Penn Engineering with an ambition to become a telecommunications engineer and help design the internet’s backbone.

Penn gave that ambition a different direction. Courses at Wharton exposed him to operations and information management. The business uses of the internet began to interest him as much as its underlying engineering. He graduated from Penn in 1997, having already started work at Broadreach Consulting.

There were personal reasons to stay in Philadelphia, too. He had met Linda Zebrowski, who became his wife, and acquired an attachment to the city’s sports teams. “I’m a rabid Eagles fan,” he said. Some educational outcomes are less easily expressed on a diploma.

His early career also included technology roles at Metropolitan Life and Nabisco. At Broadreach, he became a partner with responsibility for consulting services. The combination mattered: technical training, experience inside established companies, and responsibility for a growing consulting operation. Entrepreneurship would draw on all three.

A name that could move with the business

LiquidHub emerged at the turn of the millennium, founded by Brassington with fellow Broadreach colleagues Rob Kelley and Leighton Yohannan. It was a technology business with a name chosen to allow movement. The founders wanted something more memorable than another consulting-company label. Liquid suggested adaptability; the hub brought different parts together.

Brassington described his arrival in entrepreneurship as opportunistic. After graduate school, he chose an entrepreneurial company over a larger employer and started a business unit. The experience appealed to his interest in creating businesses and applying technology to commercial problems. There was no childhood destiny required, just an opportunity he decided to take.

Inside LiquidHub, he favoured a culture that rewarded people for going beyond their assigned responsibilities. Internal contests recognised entrepreneurship. His own description of leadership was deliberately modest: “I never attribute anything to myself.”

That approach makes practical sense in consulting. The chief executive cannot attend every client meeting or solve every problem. The business needs other people who can exercise judgment, take responsibility, and keep the customer’s confidence after the founder has left the room.

The growth behind the name

LiquidHub’s expansion has a useful intermediate checkpoint: March 2014, when NewSpring announced its exit through a recapitalisation. Over its holding period, revenue had grown by more than 250 percent. The geographic footprint had expanded from three offices to six, and the company had 28 executives at partner or managing-director level.

The financial detail makes this more interesting than a simple tale of adding offices. NewSpring also reported a 50 percent increase in EBITDA margins during its investment. That is a relative increase in the margin, rather than 50 percentage points. Growth had arrived alongside improved profitability, an encouraging pairing for investors who would quite like the expansion to pay for itself.

Brassington credited NewSpring and its co-founder Marc Lederman with guidance and support. The relationship would eventually bring him back to the firm in another capacity. First, LiquidHub had more expanding to do.

In January 2014, it appeared on Forbes’ list of America’s Most Promising Companies. Later that year’s financing cycle brought new capital partners. ChrysCapital led a $53 million round, with existing investors PPM America Capital and Credit Suisse participating. Acquisitions were part of the plan for deploying that money.

India was part of the design

By 2016, LiquidHub had about 2,000 people globally, roughly half of them in India. Brassington discussed the business’s Indian operations in Hyderabad and Bengaluru and plans to expand them. His emphasis was on specialised capabilities and the meeting of creative design with technical competence.

The distinction helps explain the company he was assembling. Customers wanted digital services that people could use, supported by systems that worked. Designers and engineers had to understand one another. A business could spend handsomely on either discipline and still disappoint customers at the point where the two met.

He saw Indian graduates bringing experience in design thinking and described the task as developing and refining talent for the company’s needs. A distributed delivery model gave LiquidHub a way to bring those skills into work for clients elsewhere. The geography was part of the operating model.

Acquisitions added further pieces. Electronic Ink brought human-centred design expertise in 2016. Annik brought market research, data management and analytics, along with a team of about 1,000 professionals. These purchases show the company’s direction more clearly than the broad term digital transformation: understanding customer behaviour, designing interactions, and supplying the data and technology underneath them.

“The challenge of omni-channel is connecting all the parts and pieces to deliver a unified and pleasurable experience to your customers.”

Jonathan Brassington, 2018

A buyer for the whole collection

Capgemini’s acquisition announcement put estimated LiquidHub revenue for 2017 at around €200 million and the acquisition price at roughly twice revenue. It described a collection of design thinkers, user-experience designers, digital architects and analytics specialists. Those disciplines were the purchase.

The business addressed marketing, sales, commerce and service across the customer relationship. Capgemini wanted to strengthen its digital consulting capabilities in North America; LiquidHub offered a team already working across those connected problems. An acquisition price can occupy an entire headline. The more revealing question is what the buyer believes it can do with the people on Monday morning.

For Brassington, the transaction also meant working inside a much larger organisation. He went on to lead Capgemini Invent in North America and later its North American Digital Customer Experience business. The founder who had once preferred an entrepreneurial employer now had experience of both sides of that choice.

In June 2018, he was among the recipients of EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year award for Greater Philadelphia. The regional recognition arrived in the same year as the sale, a neat punctuation mark for LiquidHub’s independent chapter.

Back across the table

SEI appointed Brassington to its board in April 2022, adding him to its audit, compensation and nominating committees. His experience advising asset and wealth managers gave that appointment a specific commercial rationale. He had spent years working on the technology problems of the kinds of institutions SEI serves.

His connections to education continued through Penn Engineering, and his regional business involvement included the board and executive committee of the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technology. In 2024, he joined NewSpring’s growth investment strategy. The former portfolio-company chief executive had become an advisory partner.

Proofpoint Capital followed in 2025. Wallach brought experience as a co-founder of Veeva; Goldsmith brought his own record in software leadership. Brassington’s public introduction of the firm stressed winning enterprise customers, assembling teams and creating systems for execution. The proposition was recognisably drawn from his operating career.

At Proofpoint, his work with founders includes hiring plans, routes to market and the regular routines through which a company makes decisions and measures progress. These subjects may lack the theatrical appeal of a funding announcement. They do have the advantage of being useful when the announcement is over.

Another beginning, with better questions

In July 2026, Brassington joined Wallach and Goldsmith for a conversation on The First Customer. The discussion returned to beginnings: growing up around traders in Guyana, earning customers’ trust and learning how young businesses survive their earliest tests. It also examined their present interest in vertical AI, software built around the requirements of particular industries.

The conversation connected that investment focus with questions about markets, founders, proprietary data and defensibility. New technology changes what a company can build. It also gives an investor fresh reasons to ask whether customers will buy it, whether competitors can reproduce it, and whether the team can keep delivering.

Those are familiar concerns in a career that began with the internet’s commercial possibilities. Brassington’s tools and titles have changed. The work still brings technical choices into contact with customers, colleagues and the practical business of getting something done. His next company may arrive across an investment table. He will have questions ready. And, if the Eagles are playing, another matter requiring his attention.