A smaller investor could have the money, the patience and a sensible reason to invest in private equity, and still find the door closed. Thomas Eskebaek built Titanbay around that awkward detail. In a market accustomed to large institutions, being a good prospective customer was sometimes insufficient. You also needed to arrive at the right scale, with the right relationships and enough resources to work out what you were buying.
The difficulty gave the Danish entrepreneur a business to build. Founded in 2019 and launched publicly in July 2020, Titanbay offered smaller institutions and professional private investors a route into funds they would struggle to reach alone. Eskebaek had worked in consulting and investing, but his original training was in software. His career had already taken him across several versions of the same practical question: how do you turn something complicated into something another person can actually use?
By April 2024, he was handing the chief executive role to Ossama Soliman and moving onto the board. During 2023, Titanbay had increased its business-to-business assets under management 8.2 times and served wealth management firms in 13 countries. Those were company figures, but they describe the business Eskebaek was leaving in someone else's daily care. A founder's departure from the executive chair can be a consequential act of company building, too.
His next chapter puts the question in a different setting. Heliotec, where he is founder and CEO, helps businesses understand their energy consumption and decide what to change. The journey from investment funds to electricity meters is less peculiar when you look at the work between the ambition and the result. Both involve customers facing complicated systems, limited specialist capacity and decisions that carry real costs.
Before the funds, a thesis became a company
Eskebaek's first venture began with a master's thesis at the Technical University of Denmark. He was working on technology intended to help computers interpret text and improve searches through documents, databases and the internet. While writing the thesis, he entered the Venture Cup business-plan competition and finished second. The result encouraged him to establish Sapio Systems. The university assignment had acquired the inconvenient habit of becoming a business.
That beginning places engineering near the centre of his story. Long before Titanbay, he had to consider whether a technical idea could travel beyond its inventor and find customers. Sapio became a venture-backed software company. Its path also involved the difficulties of commercialising new technology. It is an early chapter with both invention and exposure to the practical demands of selling what you have made.
His later career crossed Bain & Company, a secondment at HgCapital and Eight Roads, Fidelity International's proprietary capital business, where he served as chief of staff to the CEO. From 2016, he was part of the founding team at Oxx, helping move the UK and Nordic venture capital fund from its initial concept through fundraising and team building. He also founded Century Spaces, a UK property investment and development business.
The roles put him on several sides of a commercial relationship: building software, advising businesses, working around investment decisions and helping create an investment organisation. They make Titanbay's combination of technology and finance easier to understand. By the time he co-founded it, he had experience of both the company seeking capital and the organisations deciding how capital should be deployed.
- Before 2016Software, consulting and investing
- 2016Oxx founding team
- 2019Titanbay co-founded
- April 2024CEO to board member
- August 2026Heliotec announces EDF trial
The arithmetic of belonging
In a 2023 interview, Eskebaek illustrated the access problem with the size of a fund commitment. An investor might need $20 million or $25 million to enter certain funds. Add the ambition to hold a diversified portfolio, and the required allocation could reach hundreds of millions. These were his examples of the hurdle, rather than a universal entry price. They explain why a promising investment category could remain impractical for a smaller institution.
Titanbay used feeder funds to bring smaller commitments together and provide access to underlying private-market funds. Eskebaek described individual commitments of $125,000 or $150,000 as examples of the smaller scale the model could accommodate. The investor still needed a plan. Lowering the size of the ticket did not remove the need to understand the destination, or how long the journey might last.
That distinction matters to the picture of Eskebaek as a founder. He questioned the industry's use of democratisation, arguing that the word could suggest private equity should be available to everybody. He emphasised its long time horizon, limited liquidity and substantial capital requirements. The purpose of widening access, in his account, came with a responsibility to consider which investors were suited to it.
Titanbay therefore worked with wealth managers and private banks, connecting access to the advice those organisations provided. Its offer included fund selection, portfolio analysis, cash-flow modelling and information about underlying exposures. The product had to help an investor think beyond a single purchase. A smaller minimum commitment would be useful; understanding how several commitments fitted together would be useful for considerably longer.
“There is no silver bullet to building a perfect allocation strategy.”Thomas Eskebaek, private markets interview
A schematic of the model Eskebaek described in 2023. Selection, advice and portfolio planning remain part of the process.
Partners who brought more than a cheque
In May 2022, Titanbay closed its Series A with backing from Motive Partners, abrdn and FNZ. Each represented a different part of the environment the company wanted to serve: financial technology investing, asset management and wealth management infrastructure. For Eskebaek, the commercial relationships were part of the attraction. The round offered funding and opportunities to connect the product to established expertise and distribution.
The planned partnership with abrdn brought fund-selection resources and experience in constructing private equity solutions. FNZ's participation offered integration into its marketplace and wider wealth management ecosystem. Motive supplied financial technology investment experience and industry connections. Those were specific ways the new relationships could support Titanbay, rather than three names arranged decoratively on a fundraising announcement.
Eskebaek's own announcement returned to the ambition he said had motivated the company in 2019: giving smaller investors the resources to construct diversified private-market portfolios. He also credited the team and the people who had helped it reach the funding milestone. For a business whose proposition involved connecting different institutions, the announcement was a reminder that the company itself depended on a network of people and capabilities.
There is a certain symmetry here. Titanbay sought to make investment access less dependent on an individual customer's scale and connections, while building partnerships of its own to make that possible. Established organisations offered investment experience, technology reach and relationships. Eskebaek was assembling a business around their participation, with the platform providing a way for those capabilities to meet the smaller investor.
The founder changes seats
On 8 April 2024, Titanbay announced Soliman as its next chief executive. He had joined as chief operating officer in June 2023, taking responsibility for technology, product, data, analytics and operations. The succession placed someone already working inside the business in charge of its daily leadership. Eskebaek moved onto the board, retaining a formal role in the company he had helped establish.
The handover also separated two phases of his relationship with Titanbay. He had overseen it from inception through the 2023 growth reported in the announcement. Continuing as a director meant staying connected while changing the nature of his contribution. Founders are often described through the job they hold; here, the title changed while the relationship with the institution continued.
In October 2024, after that transition, Titanbay announced it had passed $1 billion in assets under management and appointed Michael Gruener as co-CEO alongside Soliman. Gruener brought experience from BlackRock's retail business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The milestone belongs to the company's subsequent chapter, built on earlier work and reached under the new executive leadership. Keeping that sequence straight gives each participant their proper place.
Eskebaek described himself as proud of the business and ready to pass responsibility to fresh leadership. The decision opened room for another area of work. His experience remained available to Titanbay through the board, while his public professional interests increasingly pointed towards energy. The story had acquired a new subject without requiring him to erase the previous one.
Company-reported figures from the April 2024 leadership announcement, covering Eskebaek’s CEO tenure.
A meter reading needs somewhere to go
At Re:Co, where he is listed as a senior advisor, Eskebaek described an ambition to combine engineering, finance and company building to address the energy transition. Generation, distribution and storage were among the areas of interest. That is a broad ambition, but Heliotec provides a concrete expression of it: using business energy data to identify waste and give customers practical actions.
The company lists Eskebaek as CEO alongside colleagues responsible for technology and sales. Its platform is intended to connect to existing meters and turn consumption information into guidance across business sites. The distinction between seeing a problem and knowing what to do about it is central to the offer. A dashboard can display an expensive pattern with immaculate composure. The customer still needs someone to explain the next step.
On 4 August 2026, Heliotec and EDF Small Business announced a partnership beginning with a four-month trial for more than 1,000 eligible customers. Participants across hospitality, retail and light industry were offered free platform access, using existing energy data for analysis. A selected group of early adopters would also receive sensors for more detailed information about equipment-level consumption.
The partnership gives Eskebaek's newer venture a route to customers through an established organisation, a familiar arrangement from his Titanbay years. The industries and products differ, but the commercial problem has a recognisable shape: specialist capabilities need a workable route into businesses that have other things to do. The trial will inform future collaboration; its announcement is a starting point, rather than a report of completed savings.
Eskebaek's career now contains a software company born from a thesis, time inside investment organisations, a private-market platform and an energy business. The connection is clearest at the level of use. Can the customer search the information, assemble the portfolio, understand the consumption, take the next action? His latest work brings that question to an everyday bill. A door into private markets once supplied the opportunity. Now the meter is waiting.
“Small businesses don’t need more data. They need to know what action to take.”Thomas Eskebaek, Heliotec partnership announcement, August 2026