Inaugurated in 2013, the Small Cap Awards is an annual event celebrating and rewarding the finest in the sub-£350m market cap quoted company sector.
The Awards celebrates those professionals and companies that work within the AIM and Aquis communities and is attended by listed companies, institutions, fund managers, brokers and advisors.
The 2026 Awards will be held on Thursday 11th June 2026 at Merchant Taylors Hall in London.
The nominees for Analyst of the Year are as follows:
Damindu Jayaweera – Peel Hunt
Damindu Jayaweera is Head of Technology Research at Peel Hunt. He brings 30+ years across the technology landscape as an entrepreneur, board director and equity research analyst, helping connect the right equity capital with the right technology businesses. He has covered high growth UK and European listed technology companies for nearly 20 years, including a decade at Jefferies in Paris and London, before joining Peel Hunt in 2017 to focus on growth and smaller cap names. His coverage spans software, hardware, fintech, semiconductors and tech resellers, and he has supported IPOs including Worldpay, Softcat, Boku and Raspberry Pi. Damindu serves on several technology boards, including HR SaaS company MiHCM, which he co-founded. He represented Sri Lanka in international programming competitions, holds a Physics degree from Imperial College London, and an MBA from ESLSCA. He provides technical and board-level insight, through a financial value creation framework, to global institutional investors on UK listed technology companies.
Julie Simmonds – Panmure Liberum
Julie is a Managing Director at Panmure Liberum. She has over 25 years of experience in Equity Research, covering both UK and continental European companies across a wide range of healthcare subsectors including healthcare services, biotechnology, medical devices and digital health. She joined Panmure Gordon, now Panmure Liberum, in November 2015 from Canaccord Genuity and previously spent seven years at Piper Jaffray with the No 1 Extel rated team. She is also Chair of the NIHR i4i Connect panel, awarding translational funding for early-stage medical technologies. Julie has a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Kent.
Robert Sanders – Shore Capital
Robert has worked in the City for 38 years – 17 as a fund manager, the last seven of which up to 2003 were at Smith & Williamson where he managed smaller company and technology funds. Since moving to the sell-side in 2003, he has worked as a smaller companies analyst/head of growth companies research at Arbuthnot/Westhouse/Stockdale Securities and Shore Capital from April 2019, following its takeover of Stockdale Securities.
Robert likes to get to know management teams well and fully understand the financial drivers of a company so he can communicate the investment case in a clear and concise fashion to new and existing investors. He has covered companies in many sectors and particularly likes those ones that have the potential to deliver strong secular growth through a disruptive technology and/or product. As always, the management of expectations is almost as important as the management of the company. The monthly research note “Share & share alike” analyses economic, political and stock market trends with a view to supporting the investment case for UK Small Caps.
Having graduated with an upper second-class honours degree in Economics and Economic History from the University of Leicester in 1987, Robert qualified in 1989 with first time passes in what is now the CFA UK.
Outside of work, Robert is married with three children which help to keep him young at heart. He has a life-long passion for sport and football, in particular, which he played up until the first lockdown. He supports Liverpool FC and has enjoyed the highs and lows that goes with being a football fan, at least there have been quite a few highs associated with Liverpool in recent years.
Harold Evans CFA – Singer Capital Markets
Senior Research Analyst Harold Evans is a Technology specialist, with over a decade of experience analysing high-growth Software, Services and Semiconductor businesses. He has built a strong reputation for differentiated research and stock picking, having identified several major outperformers and is known for combining rigorous financial analysis with strategic thinking. Harold has played a key role in multiple IPOs and fundraising transactions for growth companies. Before becoming a sell-side analyst, Harold became a qualified accountant at PwC. Outside of work, Harold is a keen cyclist, having cycled 20,000km through South and Central America at 21 years old and since, has competed (and won) various ‘ultra’ distance cycle events.
Kimberley Carstens – Cavendish
Kimberley Carstens joined Cavendish – then finnCap – in January 2021, having completed a series of summer internships with the technology research team dating back to 2017. That long apprenticeship says something about her: she chose this firm, this sector and this craft deliberately, and has built her career with the same methodical approach she brings to her work. Recently promoted to Associate Director, she is one of youngest research analysts to reach that level.
Kimberley provides research coverage within the largest AIM Technology franchise in the City, and her portfolio reflects this. Her direct coverage of AIM listed technology companies include Filtronic, SRT Marine Systems, Skillcast, Pebble Beach Systems, Shearwater and Cordel, with further sector exposure as she supports her colleagues across more than 35 technology corporate clients. Subsector exposure span aerospace and defence communications technologies to AI-driven infrastructure, maritime and civil defence analytics, to cyber security, martech, broadcast technology and financial data infrastructure. These are specialist businesses with complex technology stacks and niche end markets, whose investors rely on their analyst to do the interpretive work that gets to the heart of what these companies are building and where they are going.
What sets her apart is the work she has done beyond the research note. Alongside her contributions to organising Tech Demos for corporate clients, and connecting likeminded stakeholders across her network, Kimberley is the architect of Cavendish’s Technology Sector Hub – a purpose-built investor resource that consolidates research, company information and sector insight in one accessible place. For investors in small-cap technology, navigating a fragmented information landscape is a genuine friction point.
Kimberley graduated with a BA in Economics from the University of Durham in 2020 and continues her exams and professional development experience as an ICAEW ACA candidate. In a market where the quality of analyst coverage directly affects smaller companies’ ability to access capital and engage investors, her contribution is felt well beyond the pages of an individual research note.
Hayley Palmer – Canaccord Genuity
Hayley is an Equity Research Director at Canaccord Genuity. Now in her ninth year in the industry, including the last five years at Canaccord, Hayley has built expertise across the small-cap TMT sector, specialising in software, hardware, media, and health tech sub-sectors, producing both company-specific research and wider thematic industry analysis. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Exeter and a master’s degree from King’s College London. Outside of work, Hayley is a qualified ski and snowboard instructor, enjoys kitesurfing, and is studying towards the ACA qualification.