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.

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.

Cate Poulson

Liz Warburton

Liz heads up the Marketing & Communications team at BGF. She is responsible for raising awareness of BGF’s investments and activities among new and existing audiences, as well as providing guidance to investee companies on their PR and marketing programmes. Liz began her career at global PR agency Fleishman-Hillard, an Omnicom Group company, working with blue-chip and small and mid-sized clients in the manufacturing, technology, business services, financial and travel and tourism sectors. She joined BGF from boutique financial services agency Greentarget, where she specialised in banking, financial market infrastructure and fintech for privately owned and listed companies.

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.

Marcus Stuttard

Marcus Stuttard is Head of AIM and has responsibility for Primary Markets in the UK across both AIM and the Main Market. He is responsible for the management and development of AIM, London Stock Exchange’s international growth market for small and medium sized enterprises.

Mark Sykes

Mark is responsible for the Ambitious Entrepreneurial sector, helping companies manage the day to day requirements of doing business, and which also delivers focused advisory to help businesses realise their goals whether that is raising finance, developing a business plan or expanding globally. Mark’s team offers a full suite of business services to support clients, including cloud accounting, funding solutions, payroll, financial reporting and outsourcing.

Mark also advises in many areas of financial support including operational and financial strategy and forecasting.  He works with businesses from early stage through to global growth, and supports a range of sectors including technology, retail and manufacturing. Mark has worked previously as the FD for a division of a global IT giant, and works closely with other international firms to deliver business services across the globe.

Specialties: Technology and Entrepreneurial businesses, Manufacturing, Retail, Global growth, Business planning, Funding.

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.

Simon Bumfrey

Simon Bumfrey is a head of HSBC Innovation Banking relationship management business in Europe. He is responsible for all client facing teams focused on fast growth technology and life sciences businesses, from early-stage, venture capital–backed companies, through to those that are publicly listed and private equity–owned.

He has 35 years multi-bank experience with the last 24 years focused solely on the technology, media and telecommunication sector, witnessing first hand the innovation revolution and the impact of disruptive business models. Before joining SVB in 2017, he led innovation focused teams at Barclays Bank, Bank of Ireland and Lloyds Banking Group building out their technology franchise. While at Barclays, he expanded his expertise into global markets by managing credit risk for clients in Africa, the Caribbean and Middle East.  Simon works out of London and frequently spends time with clients and partners across the UK and Europe expanding our support for the innovation economy.He sits on the SVB UK Management Committee and is Executive Sponsor of the Gender Employee Resource Group. He is also on the Advisory Boards of The Scale Up Institute and The Gender Index and has held the Chartered Institute of Bankers qualification since 1993.

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.