The Queen Bees behind Forsyte
They’re not your usual regtech founders. Forsyte’s founders are unique and have amazing stories.
One grew up on a sink estate outside Liverpool, the other as the “black sheep” of a very traditional Bradford family. One spent 20 years fighting injustice in courtrooms and council offices; the other was knocking on every law firm door in town selling software they didn’t know they needed yet.
Together, they’re the kind of energy you don’t usually see in a boardroom – and it is so refreshing to see!
Jane Pritchard – The Justice-Orientated Visionary
Jane grew up surrounded by inequality and injustices, watching people get chewed up by systems that were never built for them. By eight years old she’d already decided: she was going to “stick it to the man” – properly, not performatively.
She’s the girl from the rough estate who became the legal aid lawyer in Tower Hamlets, doing 12-hour shifts for nine grand a year, taking on police, councils and government in cases that ended up in the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. When most people chased corporate salaries, she chased test cases and bail applications – sometimes literally to get herself a lift home.
Jane is wired for problem solving. If there’s an injustice, a broken process, a system that punishes the wrong people, she cannot leave it alone. That’s how she went from legal aid to redesigning whole firms as fully digital practices, long before “digital transformation” became a LinkedIn cliché. Law firms started calling her in to rethink how they worked, not just what they argued in court.
Outside work, she still can’t sit still:
- She’s a trustee in education and former chair of governors, obsessed with access to justice and opportunity.
- She volunteers as a “river scientist” – wading into rivers to test water quality and invertebrates for the Environment Agency.
- She’s gone back to acting, training in the evenings like a part-time drama school student, because the stage itch never really went away.
Her world is yellow, pink and bees: her walls are bright and colourful, her pens, her hoodies all express a free and energetic soul. The bee started as a joke on Miro boards – worker bees fetching “honey” (data) across product boards – and became a whole identity: bee compliant, find the honey, don’t get stung by compliance.
At her core, Jane is a human-centric product brain. She doesn’t build tech for vanity or valuation slides; she builds it because she can’t bear watching people wrestle the same broken risk processes over and over again. She takes impossibly complex AML / CDD problems and somehow makes them feel simple, usable, human.
She’ll tell you she’s “just a facilitator”. Tracey (and anyone who’s seen the product) will tell you she’s the visionary.
Tracey Longbottom – The Rebel Operator & Commercial Engine
Tracey is what happens when a Bradford girl with a “be a good homemaker” script decides she’d rather set the script on fire.
Her dad was army then police, her mum worked a stack of humble jobs – cleaner, carer, childminder. The model for Tracey was clear: don’t take risks, be sensible, don’t make noise. She did the opposite.
She was academically strong, but also “a bit naughty”, by her own admission. The black sheep of the family – bad boy boyfriends, rebellious choices, three years at uni then a very late realisation you’re supposed to get a job at the end of it. While her friends went to the Big Four, she landed in IT recruitment, hated it, then stumbled into legal tech.
No driving licence. No polished corporate background. Just sheer graft.
Tracey took a massive pay cut, started in business admin at a legal software company in Bradford, and within a few months they realised she was wasted there and pushed her into sales. Her “sales training” was basically: walk down a street of personal injury firms in Bradford and knock on every single door selling case management software.
She did it. And she sold.
From there she built a serious black book across the legal sector, heading up sales for multiple businesses, growing one from $3m to $10m in a short burst. She’s worked across utilities, cyber, software and back into legal, but the constant has always been the same: give her something she believes in and she will drag it, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the market.
Tracey calls herself a “problem maker” to Jane’s problem-solver – and she’s only half joking. Her superpower is:
- Hearing and understanding the market
- Absorbing a product idea in seconds,
- then saying, “If we want to win, we need this” – and always being right.
She’s the filter, translator and diplomat. Jane will say the unvarnished thing; Tracey will package it so the world can hear it, without losing the honesty. She can see how Arsalan will see something, how a GC will see it, how a risk partner will see it – and she forces the product and the messaging to meet them where they are.
She’s chaos, but it’s high-functioning and motivated chaos with a quota.
How They Work Together
Jane sums it up simply: “We are two sides of the same coin: I’m product, she’s commercial.”
- Jane sees a knotty, ugly, systemic problem and immediately starts sketching flows, journeys, human impact.
- Tracey sees the same problem and immediately thinks: who cares about this, who pays for this, what do they need to see, what can we actually sell?
Jane will design an entire universe; Tracey will say, “Cool. For now, build this slice first – this is what wins.”
Tracey will dream up something borderline impossible; Jane will quietly go away and build it anyway.
They are:
- Yin and yang – visionary + operator, justice + hustle.
- Aligned on values – access, fairness, diversity, no bullshit.
- Proudly non-corporate – loud, authentic, unapologetic, not interested in pretending to fit the “Vanilla” mould, with an aspiration to smash every glass ceiling.
They run Forsyte with two very clear, very lived rules:
- No d***heads – team, partners, clients, investors. If someone breaches the rule, they’re out.
- Human first, tech second – the product is there to guide lawyers through an overwhelming risk landscape, not to erase them.
The bee ties it all together:
- Worker bees harvesting data (pollen) from any system in the ecosystem.
- Symbiosis with others, not replacing them.
- A queen bee hoodie or two, sure – but everyone in the hive matters.
- A hive, not a hierarchy.
Jane likes to say, “Most tech companies start with ‘where’s the money?’ and then work backwards to a problem. We started with a problem we couldn’t walk away from.”
Tracey’s version is shorter: “Here’s what the market needs, If Jane can build it, I will sell it.”
That’s the engine. That’s the story. That’s why this doesn’t look – or feel – like anyone else in the legal or regtech markets.
If you’d like to hear more about Forsyte, or to book a demo, drop them a line on: hello@forsyte.co
