Rakesh Jena

Rakesh Jena grew up in Odisha, India, where he completed a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science at the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) before going on to earn a Master of Business Administration specialising in Information Systems and Marketing from the Xavier Institute of Management in Bhubaneswar — one of India's most respected business schools. His dual grounding in engineering and business set the foundation for a career that would span the intersection of payments technology and product strategy.

Jena spent more than two decades building deep expertise across the merchant payments and SME fintech landscape. He held senior product roles at Pollinate International, where he oversaw the digital and go-to-market proposition for the Tyl by NatWest platform, and at Tyl by NatWest directly, where he served as Head of Product Design and later as Head of Product for Take Payments on an interim and advisory basis. He also worked as a Principal Consultant at Altior Solutions, managing product management and payment consultancy engagements for major clients across the UK financial services sector.

In 2021, Jena co-founded Groov alongside Mark Hazzard and Tony Simpson, drawing on their combined decades of payments experience to build the infrastructure layer they had always needed but never had access to. As Co-founder and Chief Product and Technology Officer, Jena leads the development of Groov's API platform, which gives lenders and B2B SaaS companies real-time access to structured merchant revenue and affordability data to power faster, more inclusive SME lending decisions.

Groov raised a £1.5 million seed round in 2024, led by Fuel Ventures with participation from Aperture Capital, validating the team's vision to re-architect the data infrastructure at the heart of SME lending. The company's platform has since attracted partnerships with major UK payments and automotive finance providers, including Payment Assist, as it builds toward its vision of becoming the embedded lending infrastructure for UK and European commerce platforms.