David Leftley

Non-Executive Director, Board Representative for Bloc Ventures, Paytia Limited

United Kingdom

David represents Bloc Ventures on the Paytia board. He co-founded Bloc in 2013 with former ARM executives to address the funding gap in early-stage deep technology across the UK and Europe, and leads the firm's investment focus on telecoms and compute as its CTO. Before Bloc, David spent nearly 15 years at Vodafone — first as Head of Technology Economics & Strategy and Chief Engineer for Technology Evaluation in Group Corporate R&D, where he helped build the business cases behind Vodafone's multi-billion-pound 3G and 4G infrastructure and spectrum investments. He later led Vodafone's European corporate venture team, making investments that reshaped network virtualisation and small cell technology — at the time, the fund ranked in the top five CVCs globally. David started his career as a research and design engineer in defence, working on radar and airborne electronic countermeasures at Raytheon Cossor and Racal Defence, before moving into TV and film on video compression, transmission, and digital post-production.