Our Team
Our young, dynamic team is guided by an East-meets-West management approach, bound by the Confucian virtues of Benevolence, Righteousness, Respect, Wisdom, Trust, while upholding Western standards in institutional deal-making and execution.
Partner
Suhail Qureshi
Suhail started his career, as a Software Developer, after graduating as an Electronics Engineer from University of London in 1984. He specialised in writing software code for banking applications that sustained the banking infrastructure. His role evolved to managing large transformational projects for leading banks - Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). Suhail led the programme office with budgetary responsibility (£10m+), recruitment of resources, gathering functional specification and deployment of applications within time/budget. He managed teams of both onshore and offshore developers. His exposure to the financial markets technology meant that over time, he became proficient with all aspects of financial transactions, fundraising and accounting.
In mid-nineties, Suhail wrote an early application for portfolio trading and built one of the first online social community dedicated to equity trading. At its peak, the application attracted over 5,000 active users with aggregated trading volume of £12m/day. Suhail nurtured young talent via an accelerator program and some of his students went on to found start-ups with one reaching a valuation of £500m. By late 1998, Suhail curtailed the platform and focused on running his own trading portfolio and descaled his exposure just prior to dot com crash in 2000.
After a 2 year career break, Suhail joined the wider family office to focus on real estate. He was instrumental in tendering and securing government contracts worth in excess of £17M/year, to supply high-profile property/people management services in Liverpool and London, where he single-handedly managed a team of 40 staff members and housed over 3,000 families. During his time in Liverpool, Suhail stood as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for a major political party in the 2010 General Election and gained the highest number of votes, for several decades, in his constituency. He successfully completed the Government contract (and winning awards as the gold standard for service delivery), and set the Gold Standards for the provision of housing for central government. Suhail continues to sit on the Investment Committee of AA Homes & Housing Limited, to oversee a family property portfolio in excess of £100M in UK. He has recently relocated to Malaysia to focus on incubating venture pipeline in ASEAN.
Managing Partner
Dr Naila Ansari
Dr Ansari MBBS DRCOG DCH MRCGP, has more than 30 years of entrepreneurial and public health experience in Integrated Healthcare (GMC registered GP, Occupational Health, Clinical Governance, Clinical Leadership and Provision of Healthcare Services). Dr Ansari qualified in medicine at Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School (Imperial College School of Medicine) in 1991. Dr Ansari was until recently a GP partner in London and held senior clinical leadership positions in the NHS. She was formerly the Deputy Chair of NHS Croydon Clinical Commissioning Group (CCCG), with siginficant budgetary oversight on provision of services, integrated healthcare, and its implementation. She was an early adopter and proponent of new technology, including telemedicine and working at scale.
During her Corporate tenure, Dr Ansari was one of the youngest Directors at Marks & Spencer’s and advised on all Occupational Health matters to the Board. She worked closely with HR team, Group Resilience, Health and Safety, Legal, Insurance, Data Protection, and Audit Risk Management teams. She contributed to the wider Corporate Strategy and was nominated by the Board to lead the Retail Pharmacy JV initiative with DuPont's Nutrition & Biosciences. Dr Ansari also led the Occupational Health contract with IKEA UK, covering southern England. She was responsible for the management, development, and improvement of the provision of effective and efficient evidence based occupational health service.
Outside of her Clinical experience, Dr Ansari is an accomplished entrepreneur. She led her family’s Office investments into Social Care, Real Estate, Agriculture and Technology. As a principal, Dr Ansari conducted all negotiations with JV Partners, Lenders, Regulatory Bodies, Clients, and Co-Investors. She managed to scale her own portfolio to £25m and has successfully exited from ventures at a double digit IRR. She was the chairwomen of her family investment office’s investment Committee that oversaw AUM of approx. £200m. In 2021, Dr Ansari led negotiations with Pharmaniaga Bhd and signed a JV to cover UK as an exclusive partner. Dr Ansari is currently mentoring a number of start-ups out of Cambridge University, UK with a focus on Biotech. She has adopted Malaysia as her second home and is an advocate for knowledge transfer, linking local entrepreneurs with UK markets and seeking investment.
Partner
Shehzad Toosy
Shehzad started his investing career whilst still at school. In 2015, he led the leveraged buyout of Latitude Serviced Apartments, a distressed portfolio of 29 apartments in London. Alongside the team, he worked tirelessly to turnaround Latitude from £6.8m in 2015 to £18m valuation in 2022 with income increased by 4x.
Shehzad attained 11 A* at GCSEs and 3 A* in A-Levels (Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics) and Grade A in Further Mathematics. He went on to complete a BSc in Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK. During his university years, Shehzad did summer internships at KPMG, Boustead Group and Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM). At Boustead, Shehzad carried out comprehensive review of Boustead’s distressed property assets in London. Shehzad proposed a comprehensive turnaround plan, debt restructuring and asset repositioning to Boustead. At BNYM, Shehzad assisted with the secondary disposal of a fully invested fund (circa $1.3bn) where BNYM carried both LP/GP interest. He was in charge of financial modelling - valuation of GP carried interest, provisions for the tax treatment of carry, accounting treatment (Fair value vs Equity method) and regulatory compliance. In secondary capacity, he participated in BNYM’s ESG initiative to socialise new investment ideas in either Funds of Funds and direct buyside initiatives that complied with UN Sustainable Development goals. He researched into potential companies and presented the investment pitch to senior leadership at BNYM in both London and New York.
In 2022, Shehzad relocated to Malaysia to work for Gobi Ventures – one of the largest Malaysian domiciled Venture Capital fund in ASEAN. He worked directly with the Managing Partner (Jamaluddin Bujang – considered the pioneer in Malaysian VC ecosystem). Shehzad assisted with evaluating prospective investee companies with a focus on pre-seed and Series A funding. Shehzad interviewed entrepreneurs, evaluated their business models, conducted on-site due diligence and presented his findings to senior colleagues. Shehzad is currently studying towards CFA certficiation and is incharge of screening the deal pipeline and presenting to Latitude IC.
