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.

Adam Hale

Adam is a Board Member of Tech Nation whose objective is to accelerate the growth of the UK’s digital sector, a Board Advisor to scaleups at the ScaleUp Group and an Associate of Oxford Said Business School’s Creative Destruction Lab. He is Chairman of Cardiff based DevOpsGroup, board member of Unit4, board advisor to Nottingham based e-days and holds a number of advisor roles with a range of digital tech companies. Previously, he was CEO of B2B software business Fairsail and scaled the enterprise to be a global leader of HR technology. Fairsail was acquired by the Sage Group in 2017 and is now Sage People. Adam has a Computer Science degree from the University of Bristol and is a Patron of the Prince’s Trust.

Umerah Akram

Umerah is Head of ELITE UK, London Stock Exchange Group’s platform and market for private companies, focused on scaling the business in partnership with networks and entities across the globe that are equally passionate about helping growing businesses achieve their potential.

Throughout Umerah’s 15 years at LSEG, she has focused on how the Group supports SMEs in the UK and from around the world as an asset class – from a market framework, fiscal and regulatory environment and product offering perspective. Previously, Umerah worked at Deloitte and Arthur Andersen.

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.

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.

Thomas Hoegh

Investor and entrepreneur, Thomas is the founder of Arts Alliance, Arts Alliance Media and the Met Film School. He oversees a portfolio of high-growth businesses in the creative sectors, and directs films and theatre under the name Torstein Blixfjord. Thomas sits on the boards of Kenshoo, the Met Film School, Kebony, and Plan-UK. He is a visiting professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology and from 2013 has served as a trustee of the Wim Wenders Foundation.

Charlotte Keenan

Charlotte is Head of Corporate Engagement, EMEA at Goldman Sachs. She oversees the 10,000 Small Businesses programme in the UK as well as the Office of Corporate Engagement which leads the firm’s impact investing and philanthropic work.

Previously, Charlotte was the Chief Executive of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation where she was integral in devising, building and developing all the Foundation’s global programmes as well as leading the strategic vision of the Foundation. She also serves on the Board of the Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience.

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.

Dr Andy Richards CBE

Andy is an entrepreneur and investor with an established track record in founding and scaling up innovative Life-science, Biotechnology and Digital Health companies in the UK. He is currently Chairman of Congenica, Abcodia, Closed Loop Medicine, Arecor and the Babraham Research Campus and is a Director of Ieso Digital Health, Owlstone Medical, and Cancer Research Technology (the commercial board of CR-UK). He is an advisor to several investment funds including Cambridge Innovation Capital and the UCL Technology Fund, is Chair of the CRUK Seed Fund and is a director of the Scale-Up Institute.

Andy is a Cambridge Graduate with a PhD in Chemistry and an early career spanning positions with ICI (now AstraZeneca) and PA Technology.  He was a founder and executive director of Chiroscience plc until its merger with Celltech in 1999 and since that time he has founded, invested in and helped to scale more than 25 innovative ventures including companies such as Vectura, Arakis, Cambridge Biotechnology Ltd and Geneservice.  Andy is also a founder member of the Cambridge Angels.

Andy is passionate about science and the translation of science to do good for society.  The Life-sciences and Healthcare sectors provide the perfect arena for translating science into technology that can help people around the world.  He received a CBE for services to the life-sciences in 2015.

Jon Steinberg

Jon is Public Policy Manager, EMEA at Google where he works on economic issues across Europe, demonstrating the economic impact of the Internet and building support for entrepreneurs and scale-ups across the region. He serves on a number of advisory boards including the Camden Business Board and the Knowledge Quarter. Before moving to London, Jon served as Deputy Communications Director for US Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and on political campaigns including John Kerry’s 2004 run for US President and Hillary Clinton’s first campaign for US Senate.