Spotlight on our COO, Maria McKavanagh

4 min readMay 18, 2018

Maria McKavanagh is the Chief Operating Officer at Verv, otherwise known as Peter Davies’ right hand woman! At very much the front and centre of the business, you may have read her recent interview with Forbes.com talking about our plans to create a new data marketplace for energy, or seen her present at conferences and meet-ups around the world. It’s safe to say that her passion to change the face of the energy system, and her belief in our technology to make this happen shines brighter than the sun! It’s very common for us to be told that Maria steals the show at events she talks at and it’s great to have a COO with genuine passion and drive to change the world for the better.

For those of you who don’t know, Maria is a women in tech advocate and a prominent figure in the industry having been recently nominated for the Computer Weekly top 50 Most Influential Women in Tech! As many of you may be aware, the number of women in tech and engineering specifically isn’t where it could be. Maria is never one to miss an opportunity to speak about this and encourage women to follow their dreams. At Verv, we couldn’t agree more and believe that a team made up of people of different genders, backgrounds and ethnicities is key to cultivating creativity and innovation and always try to ensure we are diverse in our hiring.

For a bit of background, Maria holds an MEng degree in Electronic Systems Engineering from the university of Manchester. She came to us following a role in Field Sales Engineering at NASDAQ data acquisition specialist National Instruments where she was responsible for a multi-million pound sales territory across a wide range of industries from Aerospace and Defence to Consumer Electronics (Impressive right?!). Earlier in her career she worked in telecommunications consulting, advising (among others) the European Railway Agency on future operational communications systems having spent a year in postgraduate research studying radio frequency and wireless sensor networks.

As we touched on earlier, Maria has been presenting at a number of events world-wide, spreading the word about the VLUX token and how we believe our energy trading platform can create a smarter and more flexible energy system which improves access to affordable, green energy for all.

She just got back from Antwerp where she was invited to speak on a panel at CleanTech Forum Europe about scaling up new energy solutions like our peer-to-peer energy trading platform. She featured alongside other amazing panellists including the Grid Singularity Co-founder and Co-founder of ClearWatts!