Tarek Fadel

Founder and Chief Executive Officer FADEL (FADEL Partners, Inc.)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Tarek Fadel founded FADEL in 2003 and still runs it. The company sells cloud software for two adjacent and unglamorous problems that large brand owners cannot avoid: proving that a piece of creative content is still licensed for the use being made of it, and calculating what is owed to whoever owns the underlying right. Its customers are the organisations for whom getting this wrong is expensive — Disney, Marvel, Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Pearson, Hasbro, P&G, Bandai Namco. The product line runs from Brand Vision, which applies AI to tracking content use, through the IPM Suite for rights and royalty management, to LicenSee for midmarket licensees and PictureDesk for content syndication. Headquartered in the Chrysler Building in New York with offices in Los Angeles, London and Paris and operations in France, Lebanon and India, FADEL Partners, Inc. is quoted on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market under the ticker FADL and employs around 137 people.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of FADEL Partners, Inc. since 2003, and a member of its board.
• Led the company’s IPO on London’s AIM growth market, raising roughly £8.0 million at 144 pence a share, about 6.7% above the £7.5 million targeted.
• Holds a US technology patent, “Method and Apparatus for e-Commerce Integration Architecture and Process”.
• Director at Oracle Corporation before founding FADEL, including as Director of Product Management across several Oracle CRM releases and running a consulting practice covering large ERP and e-commerce implementations.
• Worked at Cambridge Technology Group from 1995 to 1997 on the deployment of enterprise application server products.
• More than 27 years building, selling and implementing enterprise software applications, by the company’s own reckoning.

Professional Journey

Fadel studied computer science at the Lebanese American University and then at the City University of New York, where he took a BS in computer science. He entered the enterprise software industry in the mid-1990s at Cambridge Technology Group, between 1995 and 1997, working on the deployment of enterprise application server products — the middleware layer that was then the hard part of getting business applications to work across an organisation.

He moved to Oracle, where he spent the years leading up to 2003 and rose to director level. Two strands of that work matter for what came next. He ran a consulting practice responsible for large ERP and e-commerce implementations, which is where the commercial and contractual complexity of enterprise deals becomes visible, and he served as Director of Product Management for several releases of Oracle’s CRM products, which is where the discipline of turning that complexity into shipped software is learned. In the same period he was granted a patent for an e-commerce integration architecture. He also took an Executive MBA at Columbia Business School.

FADEL was founded in 2003. The insight was that rights and royalties were being managed by large media, publishing and consumer-brand companies in spreadsheets and bespoke systems, despite the fact that a mistake meant either paying money that was not owed or using content that was not licensed. The company built IPM Suite for the licensor-and-licensee side of that problem, and later extended into brand compliance with Brand Vision, which addresses the marketing-side question of whether a given asset may still be used in a given campaign. By 2019 it was named the market leader for rights and royalties management in the Infrastructure Software for Global Digital Publishing Report.

The company listed on AIM, raising about £8.0 million at 144 pence a share, more than it had set out to raise. That transition brought a board around him: Simon Wilson as non-executive chairman, Sally Tilleray as senior independent non-executive director, Joe Gruttadauria as non-executive director and Mark Plotkin, previously chief accounting officer at Marvel Entertainment, as CFO and board secretary.

Public markets have been unkind since. As of 18 September 2026 the shares traded at 24 pence against the 144-pence placing price, valuing the company at roughly £4.85 million, on FY2025 revenue of $12.62 million — down about 3% year on year. Fadel remains founder, chief executive and a director.

Education

Lebanese American University

Computer Science

City University of New York

BS, Computer Science

Columbia Business School

Executive MBA