Irene Graham OBE

Irene Graham is the CEO and a board director of the ScaleUp Institute. A former senior banker at Standard Chartered Bank where she held both European and global managing director roles, she set up, ran and scaled several of the bank’s key client and product businesses across its corporate and institutional bank and led several global M&A activities.

Before joining the ScaleUp Institute she was Managing Director at the British Bankers Association. She led a host of strategic work across the industry from the regulatory and business perspectives, including leading the Business Finance Taskforce set up by the CEOs of the UK banks which resulted in the creation of the BGF, the Enterprise Research Centre, the SME Finance Monitor, and Mentorsme as well as being responsible for new export and business policy initiatives including the Small Business Act, expanded UKEF products and Open Banking which Irene advised Government and industry upon.

She is a Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde University and holds a variety of non executive director and advisory roles across the creative, business and finance communities.

Margaret Rice-Jones

Margaret has more than 20 years of board-level experience at public and private software and technology companies. She is currently senior independent director at De La Rue plc, chair at scaleup Origami Energy, and non-executive director at Holiday Extras Investment and Calnex Solutions Plc. Previously she was senior independent director at Xaar plc and chaired private companies Skyscanner and Confused.com until they were sold for £1.4bn and £509m respectively.

Umerah Akram

Umerah Akram is Head of Private Markets at the London Stock Exchange, helping grow the Group’s offering for private companies in collaboration with strategic partner Floww.

Umerah has held various roles at LSEG since 2005, focusing on how the market framework remains attractive for existing and potential companies and investors in the Group’s markets and products. From 2013 onwards, she was part of the founding team of ELITE – an LSEG initiative focused on developing a community of private companies from across the globe and helped it develop into a community of 2000+ private companies, advisers, corporates and investors.

Umerah is passionate about how the capital markets can make an impact on the innovation and the economy. In addition to her board role at the Institute, she is Deputy Chair of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Shott Scaleup Accelerator.

Nicola Jopling

Nicola is Head of Growth Strategy, GroupM

Nicola has over 20 years’ experience in the advertising industry, having gained extensive expertise in cross-media strategic brand communications planning.

Throughout her career, Nicola has led the communication planning for some of our best known global brands, and was awarded a Cannes Lion in 2013 for her creativity. Nicola strives to deliver tangible progress and business growth for clients via imaginative thinking and problem-solving.

As Head of Growth Strategy at GroupM, Nicola’s most recent focus has been on integrating social responsibility and inclusion into day-to-day outputs, demonstrating the inter-dependent relationship between commercial success and social good. Recent activities include conceiving and incubating GroupM’s Inclusive Marketplace in the U.K., acting as GroupM lead on a major WPP project to understand the cross-sector experiences of minority ethnic consumers, and being a founder build team member for an innovative programmatic solution which helps small businesses move into omnichannel planning, now being scaled by GroupM cross-market.

Nicola has completed the Oxford Executive Strategy Programme at Said Business School, where she led her cohort, has an honours degree in French & Management Studies from Leeds University, and is a member of British Mensa.

Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne

Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne is a chef and entrepreneur. After completing her degree in Physiology at Queen Mary’s, University of London, she went on to train at Leith’s School of Food and Wine, before honing her skills at Conran’s Bibendum Restaurant. Lucinda’s entrepreneurial breakthrough moment came when one of her sons was diagnosed as gluten intolerant and she discovered there was no tasty gluten free bread available. She resolved to develop this badly needed product herself. On the back of this ground breaking innovation, she founded Genius Foods in 2008 and launched her bread nationwide a year later. Since the first listing of Genius bread, Lucinda has overseen the creation of Britain’s leading “free-from” bakery brand, revolutionising the industry and normalising the lives of millions of people who have to or choose to live on a gluten free diet. Genius now exports to Europe, Australia, and North America from its bakery in West Lothian.

Lucinda is a Non-Executive Director of both the National Skills Academy of Food and Drink and of the ScaleUp Institute. She was also recently nominated as one of the Maserati Top 100 Innovators and named in the top 100 Women to Watch in the annual Cranfield University Female FTSE Board Report 2018.

Cate Poulson

Cate joined BGF in 2012 to set up the Talent Network. Her role today is to oversee a national team, dedicated to continuously building and developing BGF’s external network of Board Directors; and plugging this network into a wide range of opportunities to partner with BGF to support our current and future investee companies. This spans, ensuring that the widest community of business leaders know which companies to connect with BGF, introducing a range of Non-Executive leadership to our investee company Boards, supporting our CEOs with the development of their leadership teams, and ensuring our businesses are well positioned to network and influence across the business community.

Before BGF Cate was with 3i Group plc, where she was part of the Business Leaders Network team, developing and managing the firm’s relationships with senior executives and non-executives across a range of sectors and geographies.

Sahar Hashemi OBE

A former lawyer, Sahar Hashemi founded Coffee Republic, the UK’s first US style coffee bar chain with her brother and built it into one of the UK’s most recognised high street brands with 110 bars and a turnover of £30m.

She left the day-to-day management of Coffee Republic in 2001 and published a bestselling book, Anyone Can Do It, Building Coffee Republic from our kitchen table, which has been translated into 6 languages and is 2nd-highest selling book on entrepreneurship after Richard Branson.

In 2005 she founded Skinny Candy, a brand of sugar free sweets which was sold to confectionery conglomerate Glisten PLC in 2007.

In June 2012 Sahar was awarded an OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity.

She is currently co- chair of the Government Scale Up Taskforce and is actively involved in the roll-out of Change Please, a social enterprise that trains and hires homeless people to run coffee carts. She is finishing her third book, “Start Up Forever, 10 ways to behave like a start up when you’re not a start up” based on her experiences of working with large organisations.

Dr. Thomas Hellmann

Dr. Thomas Hellmann is the DP World Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Saïd School of Business, University of Oxford. He holds a BA from the London School of Economics and a PhD from Stanford University, where he wrote his thesis under Prof. Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel in Economics, 2001). He previously was faculty at Stanford GSB and UBC Sauder. He also held visiting positions at Harvard Business School, Wharton, the Hoover Institution, INSEAD, and the University of New South Wales. He has taught numerous undergraduate, MBA, doctoral, and executive courses in the areas of entrepreneurship, finance, and strategic management. His research focuses on entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurship, innovation, and public policy. His academic writings have been published in many leading economics, finance, and management journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, and Management Science. He has been an advisor  consultant to a variety of clients, including the World Economic Forum, Barclays Bank, the Government of British Columbia, and numerous start-up companies. He wrote many case studies on entrepreneurial companies and venture financing. His textbook on Entrepreneurial Finance came out in 2020. He is the founder of the NBER Entrepreneurship Research Boot Camp. He is the Academic Director of SBS Entrepreneurship Centre, and Site Lead of the Creative Destruction Lab at Oxford.