Fractional CFO - Stride

UK (Hybrid) | Reporting to CEO | 2-3 days a week from January 2027

About Stride: 'Normal' health is no longer good enough. Normal is code for tired, stressed, barely functioning and slowly declining, and calling that a life. We think everyone has a right to better than that. Stride is turning tracking your entire internal biology into a lifestyle, with a next generation preventative health membership. Every member builds a multi-omic health profile covering DNA, microbiome, blood biomarkers, epigenetics and oral health. That’s over 500 biomarkers, tested at least twice a year, so we can see direction of travel and not just a single point in time. Then we turn it into what to actually do: what to eat, how to train, what to supplement, what to watch, with a coach, dietitian or physiologist alongside you.

The Role: Stride has grown mostly on its own revenue: £5.2M to date, 15,000+ paying customers and a 94% six-month renewal rate on our flagship membership. We’re now adding serious institutional money on top: a competitive Innovate UK grant and a multi-million-pound Innovation Loan, funding two projects at the centre of our plans. You’ll own finance at Stride a few days a week: hands-on in the detail, senior in the room, and building a function that runs well without you there every day. This isn’t a bookkeeping or advisory role. You’ll have real authority and be accountable for the outcome.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Own financial reporting for the grant and loan: quarterly claims, drawdowns, spend against profile and the evidence behind every eligible cost.
• Run the funding governance framework: what can be claimed, how costs are coded and evidenced, and who signs off.
• Keep Stride inside the loan’s financial conditions, with headroom visible well before every reporting date.
• Manage independent accountant sign-off and funder assurance, with paperwork ready before it’s asked for.
• Own the financial side of change requests, including the cost justification funders expect.
• Own monthly management accounts and a board pack that tells the story behind the numbers.
• Oversee bookkeeping, payroll inputs, supplier payments and a predictable month-end close.
• Work with external accountants on statutory accounts, tax and R&D tax credits.
• Build the controls and audit trail a funded company needs, without process for its own sake.
• Own the cash flow forecast, budget and scenario planning, and keep them live.
• Track the subscription metrics that matter: CAC, LTV, cohort retention, gross margin and recurring revenue.
• Manage working capital and existing facilities, and advise on how to fund each stage of growth.
• Support fundraising, due diligence and reporting to existing investors.
• Keep Stride compliant with EIS/SEIS and other investor scheme conditions.
• Plan the finance side of our US expansion: entity, currency and tax.
• Work closely with the CEO on decisions, and with our Chief of Staff, who owns delivery of the funded projects and the funder relationship.
• Make sure what we’ve spent always matches what we’ve delivered.
• Give straight answers on what the numbers mean, including when it’s not what we hoped.

What You’ll Bring:

• ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent, plus senior experience as a CFO, FD or head of finance.
• Experience in a fast-growing consumer, subscription or DTC business, ideally health, wellness or diagnostics.
• Comfort with compliance-heavy reporting where other people’s money is on the line.
• Strong command of forecasting, budgeting and management reporting in a small, fast-moving team.
• A track record working fractionally or as an embedded interim, and the discipline to make a few days count.
• Clear writing: you can turn a funder’s requirements or a messy ledger into something others can act on.
• Fluency with modern finance and AI tooling, used to move faster than the team size allows.

Bonus points:

• Innovate UK claims or equivalent grant and loan reporting, supporting a fundraise or acquisition, EIS/SEIS, R&D tax credits, multi-currency operations, taking a business into the US, or regulated/diagnostics experience.

Why Stride: Preventive health is where consumer health is heading, and your work helps people find out earlier, not too late. Own a function, not a ledger, and shape how it’s run from day one. Work directly with a founder who took DNAfit through an eight-figure exit to Prenetics before a Nasdaq listing, plus an advisor who scaled Peloton’s international business to $100M. Flexible days agreed around your other commitments.