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Dr Waqas Rafique, founder of DataHub Pro

Dr Waqas Rafique

Founder & CTO · DataHub Pro
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PhD, Machine Learning University of Cambridge University of Oxford UCL Associate Professor J.P. Morgan VP — AI Strategy Royal Academy of Engineering — Future Leader 2021

Why I built DataHub Pro

I have spent the past decade building large-scale machine-learning systems for the kind of organisations that have the budget for them — J.P. Morgan, where I currently lead AI strategy and transformation in the asset and wealth management portfolio; the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, where I led research on auscultation-based disease diagnosis; the University of Oxford Applied Machine Learning Group, where I led the technical work on a £1.5m Gates Foundation project to predict malaria outbreaks; and University College London, where I was Associate Professor in AI.

The pattern in all of those roles was the same. Smart people in finance, in healthcare, in operations had real data and real questions. The tooling to answer those questions cost £600+ per seat per month, required a data engineer to maintain, and produced output the business team couldn't audit. I watched the same problem solved badly fifty different ways.

So I built DataHub Pro. Excel in. Boardroom-ready reports out. Not a Tableau-killer for enterprise — the opposite: a serious, auditable analytics platform priced for the agency owner with five clients, the SaaS founder doing their own MRR reporting, the in-house finance lead who can't justify a £40k/year BI contract.

What's actually in the product

Today: 50+ analytics tools that work directly on spreadsheets — forecasting (Holt-Winters with auto-tuned parameters, the same family of methods I worked with on time-series outbreak prediction at Oxford), cohort retention, RFM segmentation, anomaly detection, KPI dashboards, custom report builder, AI Q&A over your data with full tool-use — the AI runs deterministic pandas operations and every answer ships with the call trace. DOCX and PPTX exports with your branding.

What it isn't: a pixel-perfect Power BI replacement. If you need fifty stakeholders editing semantic models, this isn't the tool. If you need insights from a spreadsheet, fast, without becoming a data engineer, this is the tool.

Career & research

2026 — present
DataHub Pro — Founder & CTO
Self-funded. UK Ltd. Building publicly at datahubpro.co.uk.
Feb 2024 — present
Vice President — AI Strategy & Transformation, J.P. Morgan, London
Lead AI/ML strategy and execution within the AWM portfolio. Manage end-to-end GenAI product lifecycle and a team of 15 data scientists. Define AI roadmaps, governance frameworks, KPIs, risk and compliance.
2021 — 2024
Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence, University College London
Supervised 12 researchers across responsible AI, ethical recommender systems, bias in generative models. Led the master's modules Responsible, Accountable and Trustworthy AI and Deep Representation and Learning. Secured £20k research funding for ethical-ML deployment frameworks.
2020 — 2021
Technical Lead, Applied Machine Learning Group, University of Oxford
Led the technical work on a £1.5m project for the Gates Foundation: novel deep-learning solutions for malaria-outbreak prediction. Spatio-temporal data modelling deployed in multiple countries. Managed a multi-disciplinary team across PhDs, engineers and interns.
2021
Scientific Advisor (Data Science), Alan Turing Institute
Advised the UK Government's Joint Biosecurity Centre on the Covid-19 response — feasibility study on detecting Covid-19 patients via forced cough sounds.
2019 — 2020
Senior Research Scientist, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Led a team of four on a £2.5m project linking auscultation data to coronary disease via signal-processing and ML. Deployed at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham and Royal Papworth Hospital, Cambridge. Elected postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.
2017 — 2019
Research Scientist, Department of Informatics, King's College London
Led the development of the first AI solution for humanitarian demining. Oversaw a £1.04m deployment across African and South-East Asian regions in collaboration with HALO Trust. Supervised two PhDs and four masters dissertations.
2016 — 2017
Technical Consultant, Aveillant Ltd, Cambridge
Radar-sensing R&D and ML algorithm development for clients in Singapore and France.
2013 — 2016
PhD, Statistical Machine Learning, Newcastle University
EPSRC-funded, awarded through the University Defence Research Collaboration. Thesis: enhanced independent vector analysis for blind speech-source separation. Algorithms applied in voice-recognition systems, hearing aids and biomedical engineering. Innovator of the Year 2015 (Newcastle University).
2011 — 2012
MSc Digital Communication Systems (Distinction), Loughborough University
Thesis on fast independent vector analysis for frequency-domain blind source separation.

Recognition

How I think about the product

Auditable beats clever Every AI answer ships with the pandas operations it ran. No black boxes — the same auditability standard I built into AI products at J.P. Morgan.
Spreadsheet-first, always Excel and CSV in — not a multi-week data-warehouse setup.
Honest pricing from $14.99/mo for everything. No "talk to sales." No annual lock-in.
Boardroom-ready exports DOCX and PPTX with your branding — not a screenshot-and-paste workflow.

What I write about

Practical analytics methodology for small teams — how Holt-Winters actually works, RFM segmentation without a data scientist, cohort retention from a CSV, anomaly detection that doesn't need ML, and a 2026 comparison of every AI tool for Excel. The free tools page lists everything that doesn't require an account: forecasting calculator, anomaly detector, cohort retention tool.

Get in touch

If you're a finance lead, agency owner, or founder thinking about analytics tooling and want a second pair of eyes — I read every email. hello@datahubpro.co.uk.

For product trials, the fastest path is the 2-minute interactive demo or 7-day free trial.