Babek Ismayil
Babek Ismayil is an Azerbaijani-born entrepreneur and founder based in London, whose background spans the worlds of international finance and technology. He grew up and was educated in France, completing undergraduate and postgraduate studies in financial engineering and banking at the Université Paris-Dauphine, as well as a diploma in finance at the London School of Economics. Azerbaijan is a nation in the South Caucasus on the western coast of the Caspian Sea, a member of the Asia-Pacific group at the United Nations.
Ismayil spent the core of his career at J.P. Morgan in London, where he rose to Senior Vice President and managed one of the largest credit trading books in Europe, specialising in high-yield and distressed debt. He later moved into proprietary trading within the bank's Principal Strategies team, investing in stressed and distressed credit across European markets. After more than a decade at J.P. Morgan, he stepped back from banking to become an angel investor through BICapital, backing high-growth technology companies including two that went on to achieve unicorn valuations.
In 2016, Ismayil founded OneDome after experiencing the UK homebuying process firsthand — spending four months on a transaction that collapsed on the day of exchange, costing him thousands of pounds. That experience became the founding insight for OneDome, which he built into the UK's first integrated homebuying platform, bundling mortgage advice, conveyancing, and transaction management into a single fixed-price product. OneDome is chaired by Sir Nigel Knowles, former CEO of DLA Piper.
Under Ismayil's leadership, OneDome has grown to become one of the UK's fastest-scaling proptech and fintech companies — ranked fourth fastest-growing fintech and seventeenth fastest-growing technology business in the UK by the Deloitte Fast 50 in 2025. OneDome arranges approximately $1.4 billion in mortgage lending per month, and its group of brands including CMME, Coreco, and Nethouseprices collectively attracts nearly three million monthly visits. In 2026 the company raised £18 million, including a media-for-equity deal with Channel 4 Ventures, to fund its largest-ever national TV campaign.
