Hartford Corporate Limited Esse Quam Videri

Private investment and board level advisory

Strategic corporate advice from founders and investors who have more than 30 years of combined experience.

Hartford Corporate is a private investment company. Alongside investing our own capital and actively managing our portfolio, we work with founders and boards on getting a company ready for external capital, on the acquisition and disposal of whole businesses and controlling stakes, and on assembling the right team around a corporate transaction. Careers spent in these sectors have built a network of brokers, lawyers and accountants, and our clients get the benefit.

Founded, chaired, listed or led by our directors

The company

A family investment company that works like an operator.

Our own capital

Hartford was founded on a clear understanding that companies have to survive in tough, competitive environments. The company was built on principles of pragmatic commerciality, supported by the right resources to take a business to its next stage.

Hartford seeks out and partners with companies that create sustainable long-term value for all stakeholders. Led by its directors, Melissa Sturgess and Jeremy Sturgess-Smith, the company holds investments across several industries, including biotechnology, industrial manufacturing and mining. Both directors have deep experience as finance and mining executives, with directorships across a number of quoted and private companies. Hartford invests its own balance sheet. We do not manage money for third parties.

Advice for other boards

We now make the same team available to companies outside the portfolio. As directors and executives we have taken our own companies onto the London, Canadian, American and Australian markets, funded them through good markets and bad, and negotiated acquisitions across several continents and regulatory regimes. That is what we bring to a board.

We work with a small number of clients at a time, at board level, from first plan through to completion. Where a transaction needs a regulated firm, we help you choose one and then work alongside them.

Sectors

Five markets we know from the inside.

  • UK public markets and IPOs

    Admission documents, the regulatory process and the years of reporting that follow. We have sat on the issuer's side of all of it, and we prepare boards for what a nomad, sponsor or broker will ask of them.

  • Metals and mining

    Gold, platinum group metals, iron ore, diamonds, coloured stones and critical minerals, across southern and eastern Africa, Australia and beyond.

  • Biotechnology

    Clinical stage companies, trial funding and the particular problem of financing a business whose value arrives all at once.

  • Oil and gas

    Upstream and service companies preparing for institutional scrutiny, with the same discipline we bring to resource projects.

  • Advanced manufacturing

    Industrial technology businesses moving from first revenue to scale, where growth is a question of process as much as capital.

People

Two directors. Both of them in the room.

Director

Jeremy Sturgess-Smith

Jeremy joined the Hartford board in 2025 and leads the day to day management of the company and its portfolio.

He co-founded Ananda Pharma and led its IPO in July 2018. As finance director he has led every capital raise since, including more than £2.2m in 2024, and led the acquisitions of MRX Global and DJT Plants. He owns the group's audit, budgeting, tax and investor relations functions and sits on the boards of MRX Global and MRX Medical.

At Gem Resources, where he is chief operating officer, he drove the company's re-admission to the London Stock Exchange in 2022 and worked on the acquisition of critical mineral licences in Zambia, the Gravelotte emerald mine in South Africa and the Curlew emerald project in Australia. He was part of the team that restructured and refinanced Cloudbreak Discovery. He is also a director of Laser Green, an industrial laser cleaning business held by Hartford, and a co-founder of Mendia, a women's health technology company.

jss@hartfordcorporate.com

Director

Melissa Sturgess

Melissa has been a director of Hartford since 2017. She holds a BSc and an MBA from the University of Western Australia and has served as a director and chairman of companies quoted in London and Australia since 2001.

She was a founding director of Sylvania Resources, a platinum group metals producer in South Africa, and of Ferrum Crescent and Churchill Mining. She chaired Nyota Minerals in Ethiopia and Luiri Gold in Zambia, where she negotiated the reinstatement of the company's mining licence with the government, and is a non-executive director of Lexington Gold, chairing its audit and remuneration committees. She has worked across southern and eastern Africa, the Philippines, Indonesia, Georgia and Israel.

Since 2018 she has been chief executive of Ananda Pharma, a clinical stage biotech whose CBD formulation is in two Phase II randomised controlled trials at the University of Edinburgh. She was named Executive of the Year at the 2019 Malta Cannabiz Awards, and in 2024 the most influential chief executive in cannabinoid medicines in the United Kingdom by CEO Monthly.

ms@hartfordcorporate.com

Contact

Start with a conversation.

Tell us what you are trying to do and when. If we are the right people for it we will say so, and if we are not we will usually know who is.

Jeremy Sturgess-Smith jss@hartfordcorporate.com
Melissa Sturgess ms@hartfordcorporate.com