Ross Williams publishes documents rebutting HubPeople claims over Venntro member database

Ross Williams, the former chief executive of Venntro Media Group, has published a long, document-referenced account of the collapse of his post-administration venture Ambervine and its partnership with HubPeople, directly answering claims about him that he says Michael O'Sullivan has been repeating at industry conferences, to former partners and on LinkedIn.

The account, published on Williams' personal site (www.reformedentrepreneur.com) on 27 July, opens with an unqualified admission. Venntro entered administration on 2 August 2024 after 21 years of trading, at a cost of jobs, partner balances and supplier payments. "That failure is mine and I'll carry it," Williams writes. What follows is a rebuttal of a separate set of claims: that HubPeople owns the member database formerly hosted on the Venntro platform, and that HubPeople was the party left out of pocket.

DII has reviewed the published account and the statements it quotes. No court or arbitrator has ruled on the substance, and DII has not independently verified the underlying documents. What follows is Williams' case as he presents it, alongside HubPeople's own published position.

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The ownership question

Ambervine bought Venntro's business and assets from the administrator on 2 August 2024. In July of that year, ahead of the administration, HubPeople had agreed a £200,000 loan facility to Ambervine at 0% interest, of which £100,000 was advanced. As security, Williams says, the parties agreed that HubPeople could continue using the database if the loan fell into default.

Williams argues that a right of use is not ownership. He points to the security document, which he says describes HubPeople as the "sole and lawful Data Processor" for the data, and to loan paperwork stating that on repayment HubPeople "will return the Data Export" and may not lend, sell or transfer it. Transferring ownership of a database, he notes, requires a signed deed of assignment. He says none was ever drafted.

On the day of termination, HubPeople published a statement on its own website asserting a "perpetual exclusive worldwide right to market and process the data of the 15 million users formerly hosted on the Venntro Platform". Williams draws attention to the wording: a right to market and process, he argues, is the kind of right held over another party's property.

The loan and the terminated repayment mechanism

O'Sullivan's public position, as Williams characterises it, is that HubPeople advanced £100,000 and was never repaid. Williams says the loan was structured to repay itself out of revenue, with a slice of monthly platform revenue deducted before Ambervine was paid, and that HubPeople's own meeting notes of 28 August 2024 list deductions already taken.

He quotes the solicitors' termination letter as stating "there is no longer a mechanism in place for repayment of the loan", and argues that HubPeople removed that mechanism itself when it ended the partnership. On the day of the letter, he says, HubPeople's own billing platform showed £59,421.03 owed to Ambervine for July and August, which was retained under a forfeiture clause.

The members

Under the partnership agreement signed on 10 and 11 July 2024, Ambervine's sites migrated onto HubPeople's platform on a 70/30 revenue split, with a 10% referral commission. Williams says August 2024, the first full month live, produced £84,887 in gross revenue on HubPeople's own reporting, with second-half sign-ups running 15% ahead of the first half.

The partnership was terminated by HubPeople's solicitors on 3 September 2024, citing a clause permitting immediate termination where a partner "is convicted of a criminal offence or act" likely to affect HubPeople's goodwill and reputation. Williams says nobody at Ambervine has been convicted or charged with anything, and that HubPeople's lawyers preferred a looser reading of the clause. It was never tested.

Within days, Williams says, members received emails telling them their accounts had "moved", and were rebranded onto HubPeople-operated sites including Divergent Dating, Embrace, Shush and Senior Love Companions, with a 30% September promotion. Ambervine's lawyers put the sum owed at between £600,000 and £1.4 million.

Statutory demand, petition, withdrawal

HubPeople issued a statutory demand for £100,000 on 14 November 2024. Williams says a copy reached Ambervine's acquiring bank, part of Shift4, within a week, and that every account was terminated with immediate effect, ending the legacy billing that was by then Ambervine's remaining income. Ambervine's lawyers wrote to Shift4 on 21 November describing the demand as "an abuse of process and a malicious and unwarranted attempt by HubPeople to disrupt our client's business".

A winding-up petition against Ambervine was presented to the High Court on 31 January 2025 and withdrawn by consent on 25 February, never advertised, with no order as to costs. Williams says no claim, arbitration or fresh demand has followed in the seventeen months since. He also says a settlement offer made in October 2024, which would have credited the full £100,000 loan, lapsed unaccepted, and that a meeting offered in December 2024 was declined.

The data protection dimension

The part of the account with the widest sector relevance concerns the roles of controller and processor. Williams says Ambervine, as data controller, formally instructed HubPeople to stop processing member data and return its copy, and that the instruction was refused. In June 2025 the matter was reported to the information commissioners in both the UK and the Isle of Man. He says the ICO treated it as a contractual dispute between two companies.

That characterisation is the point operators should note. Where a platform partnership collapses, the contractual dispute and the data protection obligation are separate questions in law, but in practice a regulator may decline to separate them. For any operator whose member records live on a partner's infrastructure, the exit terms and the data processing agreement are the only protection that survives the relationship.

Where it leaves the sector

Three issues sit underneath the personal dispute. The first is platform dependency: Ambervine's members, billing and reporting all ran through infrastructure controlled by the counterparty, which removed any leverage once the relationship soured. The second is enforcement asymmetry: Williams' own conclusion is that the side holding the cash decides whether the other side can afford a referee, and that arbitration in the Isle of Man was beyond Ambervine's means. The third is governance. O'Sullivan sits on the board of the Online Dating and Discovery Association, the sector's global trade body, and a public dispute of this kind involving a board member raises questions the association has not yet addressed publicly.

HubPeople and Michael O'Sullivan have set out their position in HubPeople's September 2024 website statement and in O'Sullivan's LinkedIn posts. DII will publish any further response in full.

Disclosure: Williams' account states that Bill Alena of High Intent Media approached him about the Venntro sites earlier this year, that no money changed hands, and that he is not a shareholder in High Intent Media Group. Dating Industry Insights is a High Intent Media brand.

Source: Ross Williams, reformedentrepreneur.com, 27 July 2026.

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