David Graeme Farquhar

David Graeme Farquhar is a Scottish technology entrepreneur, angel investor and board adviser. Companies House records list him as David Graeme Farquhar, born December 1958, with a long sequence of directorships including SeeByte, Workplace Systems International, Swipii Labs, 2in10, Pivot Capital Partners and Northface Ventures. Public biographies consistently describe him as a serial entrepreneur who has started, developed or invested in about 20 companies and sold 13.

Farquhar’s early career included service in the British Army after graduating from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He returned to Scotland around 1990 and started his first software company, later building a career mainly in enterprise software. In 2005, he was described by the University of Dundee as founder and CEO of Idesta, COO of the Interactive University and CEO of 2in10, a venture management firm helping early to mid-stage technology companies with product, marketing, sales and channel development.

Before IGS, Farquhar led the turnaround of Workplace Systems, a global enterprise SaaS workforce scheduling company backed by LDC. He joined as executive chair in 2013, became CEO, repositioned the business, and led its sale in 2016 to WorkForce Software. He has repeatedly framed that turnaround around “Culture as a Platform,” product-market positioning and international sales execution.

In November 2017, Farquhar joined Intelligent Growth Solutions as CEO. He helped move IGS from what he later called “an R&D project with no real business structure” into a global vertical farming technology company, raising Series A and Series B capital from investors including AgFunder, S2G Ventures, Ospraie Ag Science and Scottish Enterprise. In January 2024, IGS announced a £22.5 million Series C and Andrew Lloyd’s promotion to CEO, replacing Farquhar. Since stepping down, Farquhar has focused on Northface Ventures, university entrepreneurship, Tech Tour, ProfessorMe, and ESG-aligned work.

• Farquhar focuses on companies where his operating experience can materially improve scale-up execution: strategy, culture, product positioning, board effectiveness, fundraising, sales process, channel development and international go-to-market.
• He describes his own experience as “30 transactions as a founder/CEO, angel investor and business mentor,” including PE, VC, family office, acquisition and trade-sale work.
• His Northface Ventures materials emphasize culture as a growth platform: “everything gets done by humans,” so creating a strong place to work is a core CEO job, not a soft extra.
• He looks for teams that can be empowered rather than micromanaged. In his own leadership language: “Never Hire Yourself,” “Permission to Succeed,” and “Proceed Until Apprehended.”
• In deeptech, he is interested in both the underlying technical discipline and the application market. In Tech Tour’s 2025 interview, he grouped the strongest themes as health, sustainability and digitisation.
• In agritech, he has argued for capital-efficient technology-provider models rather than asset-heavy farm-operator models. At IGS, he said the strategic choice was to supply technology to growers, not compete with them by growing crops for commercial sale.
• Public sources do not disclose a standard personal angel check size.