Team

The team building it.

A venture studio is only as good as the operators behind it. Brightstead is built by people who have done hard things at scale — led national crisis responses, built AI at the frontier of the field, scaled companies across continents, and moved serious capital. The studio model demands execution. This is the team that delivers it.

Scroll
Leadership
Samuel Sells, Founder/Chief Executive Officer

Samuel Sells

Founder/Chief Executive Officer

Samuel Sells founded Brightstead to put world-class AI in service of the people and institutions most often left behind — and to prove that mission and profitability are the same engine, not competing ones. He has led in environments where being wrong was not an option: as Director of Medical Plans and Strategy for Air Force Special Operations Command, he commanded austere medical and aeromedical planning across four continents, helped lead the U.S. response to one of the largest Ebola outbreaks in history, authored a $1 billion Congressional funding request, and directed a $62 million hospital reconstruction. He then founded Impact Growth Capital, an investment firm delivering high-return, low-risk opportunities to family offices and foundations while transforming distressed communities across the country. The results drew the attention of Housing Authorities and federal leadership, who began demanding the technology behind it — and that demand became Brightstead. Across a career spanning more than 20 countries and four continents, Sam has built health systems, scaled profitable enterprises, and led teams through the highest-stakes conditions there are. He brings that leader's discipline to Brightstead: technology is only worth building if it measurably improves lives — and a company is only worth building if it can sustain itself doing so.

Dan Worden, Chief Operating Officer

Dan Worden

Chief Operating Officer

Dan Worden runs Brightstead's operations and turns strategy into execution. Across 25+ years as a chief executive, revenue, and senior operations leader, he has repeatedly done what a venture studio demands — taking early-stage and underperforming companies and building them into scalable, international businesses. He scaled an AR/VR startup from pre-revenue to $15M+ in its first year and into 22+ countries the next; led an industrial turnaround that grew EBIT 300% while expanding the business roughly 50% internationally; and drove 30X revenue growth into a business moving more than $200M at retail — building and running operations end to end, with teams of 100+ across four continents. A multilingual leader equally at home in startups and global enterprises, he brings the discipline that lets a studio move fast without breaking what matters. That track record — repeatedly turning small or stalled companies into large, multinational operations — is the engine he now applies to building Brightstead's companies from product to billion-dollar-scale enterprise.

Maximus Blackbourne, Chief Technology Officer

Maximus Blackbourne

Chief Technology Officer

Maximus Blackbourne leads the technology behind GrantAuthority's AI and helped shape the deterministic verification engine at the core of Brightstead's portfolio. An MIT-trained technologist with more than two decades across defense, aerospace, fintech, and AI, he has built and secured systems where being wrong carries real consequence — as a Principal Engineer at Lockheed Martin, a Lead Security Engineer at Meta, and Director of Cloud Architecture for a major global bank, environments defined by classified data, regulatory scrutiny, and zero tolerance for failure. His specialty is AI-native architecture: systems designed to reason about their own state, explain how they reached an answer, and operate reliably in production rather than guess. He has chosen to apply that expertise where it matters most — building intelligence the institutions Brightstead serves can actually trust. That conviction shaped the company's founding principle: an AI must verify, not predict, and must refuse to be wrong. GrantAuthority, Search My Data, and everything that follows are built on the foundation he helped design.

Jesse Sells, Chief Marketing Officer

Jesse Sells

Chief Marketing Officer

Jesse Sells leads Brightstead's marketing and capital positioning. He spent 11 years as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Air Force, where his work was to synthesize complex data, assess high-stakes risk, and provide decision support to executive leadership — discipline he now applies to how Brightstead tells its story and engages capital. As Principal of Impact Growth Capital, he has built a private investment firm to more than $70 million in assets under management, serving family offices and accredited investors and scaling a 70-plus-person operation grounded in a single thesis: protect the downside to capture the upside. Rather than chase yield, he built relationships with sophisticated capital seeking disciplined alternatives to public-market volatility. He brings to Brightstead a rare combination — the analytical rigor of military intelligence and the capital-markets fluency to position the company with the investors and partners who matter most, with the restraint serious capital responds to.

Investor inquiries.

Investors evaluating Brightstead at any stage can reach the team directly.

investors@brightstead.com