Gabriel Investments was founded in 2012, aiming to help entrepreneurs make the leap to first-stage funding by creating disciplined, high-growth businesses. To date we has helped to nurture over 100 early-stage businesses, advising on everything from start-up and business development to investment and exit strategies. Our Board of Directors have a wealth of business acumen and have been instrumental in the growth and success of many early stage Scottish organisations.

Our Board of Directors

Gill MacAulay - Gabriel ISGill Macaulay

As the founder of Gabriel IS, Gill is a development-savvy professional, specialising in boosting innovation, managing disruption, and navigating start-up companies and early-stage businesses across the road to commercial success.

She spent much of her early career working in marketing roles in London and the USA, before returning to Scotland to focus her talents on the start-up sector.

Gill was instrumental in the success of Scotland’s first business incubator at Strathclyde University, holding the position of CEO and Managing Director for 19 years. During this period, she provided a wealth of critical business support and funding to over 230 businesses spanning a variety of industry verticals, many of which now have established international presence.

She also steered the incubator to achieve multiple awards, industry recognition and appreciation in print and digital media platforms such as the ‘Incubator of the Year’ and the ‘Entrepreneurial University of the Year’ awards.   

Gill has and continues to be hugely influential in improving access to funding in Scotland, with a strong focus on creating a solid pipeline of investors and network partnerships that support new and innovative entrepreneurs with a social impact.

Her work with Gabriel places her at the centre of a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem with unique business support frameworks, focussed mentorship, networking and a robust connection of funding and investment portfolios.

Lynne Ross - Gabriel ISLynne Ross

Lynne is an experienced investor, Chairman and Non-Executive Investor Director. She has focused on angel stage investments since 2013 with a bias towards cleantech, sustainability and impact investment.

She has chaired Gabriel Investments since 2018 and is also Chairman of Trojan Energy and Global Surface Intelligence and serves as investor director at pureLiFi.

With a background spanning early to late-stage investment, Lynne has wide commercial skills and experience of raising equity and other forms of finance to fund the commercialisation of technologies in a range of sectors.

She has a diverse background in the energy sector ranging from renewables, energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, conventional generation and supply, government relations to commercial negotiation, having worked in senior policy roles for SSE and Scottish Power. In addition, she has lectured and researched in environmental law, policy and investment at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to that Lynne worked in institutional investment management in the city.

Lynne has a strong interest in cleantech and deep knowledge of the energy sector. Lynne has advised many entrepreneurs how to overcome the barriers they encounter identifying routes into the energy sector for their innovative products and solutions.

She has carried out pro bono advisory work for Scottish Enterprise, Social Investment Scotland and the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund.

Les Gaw - Gabriel ISLes Gaw

With extensive experience in business planning, strategy and commercial management in a variety of sectors, and having worked extensively in technology companies in a number of CEO and COO roles, Les is an experienced company director with a strong technology background. He also has passion for emerging technologies.

Since 2014, Les has worked with early-stage companies, both as an investor and advising on product development strategy, commercial strategy and raising investment.  Les also delivers workshops in Corporate Governance and is a Charity Board Trustee.

Les is passionate about ensuring product development is driven by customer need and brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to any business, and works with our portfolio companies to help them to deliver data-driven results.

Guy Stenhouse

Guy Stenhouse is Chairman of Shancastle Investments Limited, a private family investment company.

Guy was formerly Managing Director of Noble Grossart, an independent merchant bank based in Edinburgh.  Noble Grossart specialises in providing long-term relationship based advice to a wide range of companies throughout the UK on such matters as strategy, governance, mergers and acquisitions, sales, restructurings, valuations, internal share markets, banking and shareholder issues.

Guy has acted as an adviser to businesses in a wide range of sectors as well as being involved in the sourcing and structuring of investments. He has held board appointments at a number of companies.

During his time at Noble Grossart, Guy developed a particular expertise in advising employee owned businesses and has a longstanding interest in renewable energy.

Richard Cooper - Gabriel ISRichard Cooper

Richard is a chartered engineer from Strathclyde University with over 40 years of experience with SME and blue-chip companies in operations/manufacturing, quality, business development, commercial/sales, company formation and funding.

He was one of three founders of Cascade Technologies Ltd taking it to £8m annual sales and exiting to Emerson Process Management in 2014. Richard was the commercial director responsible for Marketing and Sales.

Richard co-founded Novosound Ltd an ultrasound business and has moved from Commercial Champion to CEO and is now a non-exec Board Member. He has been instrumental in the completion of the company development from proof of concept, initial customer traction and raising 2 rounds of funding totalling nearly £6.0m.

As Chair of Dyneval Ltd, which works in the improvement of reproduction, Richard has helped form the company and raise over £2.0m of funding. It is bringing its products to market in early 2022.

He was on the Board of Roylance Stability Storage Ltd (representing Gabriel) and was closely involved in and supported the formation of Roylance Pharma which was subsequently sold to IBX, a US biobanking company. This was the first successful exit for Gabriel Investors.

Richard now splits his time between non-exec positions on boards of technology companies and angel investing.