A firm built around a single question.

Doyle Blackfriars began with an email. In 2023, our founder, Maria Elena Martyak, received a note from a startup she had followed for some time. After several years of work, the company had failed to reach product-market fit, and was shutting down its operations.

She had spent fifteen years inside that world. The email was less a surprise than a provocation — a reminder of how little of what decides a company's fate is ever properly understood, let alone acted upon.

The firm was founded in London later that year, and made operational in March 2024, as a multi-scope enterprise. Its purpose: not only to understand the levers behind startup failure and success, but to learn how to affect them, throughout the startup ecosystems of the UK, Europe and beyond.

It has grown deliberately since. A second office opened in Barcelona in August 2025, and the firm now spans four divisions — covering every participant in the startup ecosystem across the UK and Europe, with much still ahead.

Maria Elena Martyak is the founder of Doyle Blackfriars. A startup veteran of almost twenty years, she grew up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and spent the first decade of her professional life in New York City.

A classically trained ballerina before she was a businesswoman, she built her expertise at the intersection of technology and business — developing the digital and technological fluency, alongside an education across the business sectors, that would let her work at the forefront of the AI, behavioural, predictive, data, strategy and marketing disciplines, globally.

The town where our founder grew up, established by William Doyle in the British colony of Pennsylvania in 1745. A foreshadowing of where the firm would be founded.

For Blackfriars Lane, the street where our founder grew up. It's also London's theatre district — a nod to a life that began in dance and the theatre.