Rachael Corson
(Afrocenchix)
Born in London, Rachael overcame severe dyspraxia & childhood adversity to get into Law school at the University of Birmingham, where she met Joycelyn. When Joycelyn shared an oil blend which helped Rachael with her eczema, Rachael encouraged her to start a business to help other people like her. When Joycelyn initially said no, Rachael offered to help! Using her love of chemistry and some money from part time jobs to pay for first raw materials too.
Joycelyn Mate
(Afrocenchix)
Born and raised in Hackney to immigrant parents, Joycelyn started mixing natural oils to grow back bald patches. Joycelyn studied Sociology at the University of Birmingham and met Rachael (the other Black girl in halls) and began doing her hair, and shared some oils to help Rachael with her eczema. After some convincing. they combined forces to build Afrocenchix, and Joycelyn lives in East London with her accountant husband.
Christian Facey
(AudioMob)
Christian (Forbes 30 Under 30 2021) is the CEO and co-founder of AudioMob, the world’s first non-intrusive gaming advertising solution that allows game developers to monetize their audience via audio advertising. AudioMob, a VC backed company who recently closed $2m in funding, is tackling an $18bn dollar opportunity. Before founding AudioMob in Q1 2020 Christian worked at two of the best companies in the world. He was a strategist at Google managing up to $100m in advertising spend, and at Facebook, a marketing science partner, using cutting edge solutions to measure the true value of advertising.
Wilfred Obeng
(AudioMob)
Wilfrid is CTO and co-founder at AudioMob. Creating and developing technical solutions has always come naturally to him. At the age of six he could be found with his brothers adapting and customising thier only computer; a Dell Dimension L500r. Although young, he knew his love of computers was not temporary, and this led him to study Computer Science at the University of Sussex. He gained a number of roles at leading organisations, including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bloomberg and Teach First. After graduating he was headhunted by Google to be a Programmatic Account Strategist, then promoted to become a Customer Solutions Engineer.
Favour Mandanji Nyikosa
(Augmize)
Favour has been practising machine learning and software engineering for the last 10 years. He read for a PhD in machine learning at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He worked on probabilistic and interpretable ML models with applications in financial markets and deep learning. Favour is a distinguished research prize winner from Imperial College London's Advanced Computing programme and started his career as a software engineer working on big data problems in Zambia.
Nicholas Kelly
(Axela Innovations)
Nicholas' healtchare journey started from childhood having spent 11 months in hospital folling a car accident, he also experienced a motorbike accident in his early 20s. After nearly 1 year spent in hospital and numerous major operations, Nicholas refelcted on growing up and watching his mother work her way through the ranks of the healthcare system from porter, to nurse, and ultimately owner of a care company. Setting up his first care agency allowed him to take learnings from other industries and bring them across. The team set out to create a system that everyone said couldn’t be built, there has now been a real shift to people owning their own data and wanting to be a part of their care. cAir:ID is product that is one place for all health and social care information to be held on a person, allowing them to control how that data is interacted with. cAir:ID allows for proactive care, by monitoring and support the changing needs of a person, something v ery unique at the moment.
Deborah Choi
(Bosque)
Deborah Choi came up with the idea for horticure in 2018 when trying to fill her flat with beautiful plants — and, very importantly, keep them alive. After spending a few weekends searching across several plant stores for specific plants, lugging soil and heavy pots on trains and in taxis, setting the plants up in her home and then (like many busy people) traveling and (like many beginners) over- and under-watering . . . the indoor jungle quickly became the indoor plant cemetery. She believed there could be a better way for busy people and ‘beginners’ alike to become successful plant parents. The initial concept was simple: bridging plant owners with qualified and friendly horticulturists to support across any issue affecting their plants, with the aid of technology.
Tomide Adesanmi
(Circuit Mind)
Tomide was an electronic systems engineer developing high integrity augmented reality display systems for jet fighter pilots at BAE Systems. He has always loved solving complex hardware problems and wanted to build a hardware startup. Unfortunately, many investors believe that hardware is hard, which led Tomide to (with Basilio) make developing hardware easy. This was the origin story of Circuit Mind.
Marie Asse
(Clustdoc)
Marie is a passionate entrepreneur at heart. Born in Africa and raised in Europe, she worked in the banking industry before joining PayPal for 5 exciting years where she met with Karim. After having bootstrapped many startup ideas, she co-founded Clustdoc - a single place where global organizations can centralize and remotely run client-facing onboarding workflows.
Tai Alegbe
(Contingent)
Tai started his career in derivatives. Tai has circa 10 years of global experience in the enterprise financial risk and data space. Tai has led teams, functions and set the sales strategy to sell millions of pounds of product in this market, working as North American Director in New York at Arachnys, a QED backed Series B startup and European Commercial lead in London at a DTCC company, a Fortune 500, £2B revenue company, and various other companies in the Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) space. Tai has deep domain expertise, strong product sense and unique market insights in the enterprise risk space. Tai also has strong client relationships globally. This commercial experience and know-how positions Contingent to infiltrate the market, globally, at a rapid pace, with a strong pipeline and revenue strategy. Tai is a Law graduate, who also holds a Masters degree in Management and International Business from the University of London. Tai holds a number of domain-specific professional technology, risk and compliance qualifications, Financial Technology certification from Oxford University, Said Business School, a Regulatory Risk & Compliance certification from the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment and a CAMS certification from the Association of Certified Anti‑Money Laundering Professionals. Tai is an experienced entrepreneur having built and sold his first company at 21 and built a second, at 25..
Nnamdi Emelifeonwu
(Definely)
Nnamdi started his career as a solicitor at Magic Circle law firm Freshfields where he spent 4.5 years as a Finance lawyer and was selected in the inaugural EMpower Ethnic Minority Future Leaders List in 2017. At Freshfields, he met his cofounder, who was one of the few registered blind lawyers practicing as a solicitor in the City of London. Together, they set out to discover a way to increase the accessibility of legal documents to those with visual impairments and realised their innovation had a much broader use case for anyone reading legal contracts, not just the visually impaired. Starting a business with a blind/disabled co-founder has naturally brought many challenges in addition to the usual ones faced by most founders eg building and selling a product, growing a team and raising capital, but by staying focused on our mission, we have been able to overcome many of the obstacles that we have faced.
Danielle Lawrence
(Freyda)
I’m Danielle Lawrence, the founder & CEO of Freyda.io and I’m on a mission to help digitise the asset management industry. I do it by helping teams to automate data processing from complex, unstructured documents because we are shifting to a data-driven economy, and it’s no longer acceptable for critical information to remain trapped in documents.
Bruno Mendes Da Silva
(Heex Technologies)
Bruno Mendes Da Silva (CEO) is a serial entrepreneur and previously founded a mobility company called Greenlux Car, Arnaud de La Fortelle (CTO) is the robotics lab director of Mines ParisTech and has been working in autonomous driving for the past 15 years, while Etienne Boutan (CFO) is a former private banker and has also spent some time as a VC.
Kenny Alegbe
(HomeHero)
Losing my job propelled me into setting up my own thing. I was progressing in merchant finance and everything was on track professionally. Then early in the financial crisis, I was told it was possible I would be made redundant. That moment took away the agency over my future that I thought I had. I realised that your identity - often bundled up with your job - can be undermined in a heartbeat, if you allow it to be. This shock to the system prompted me to look more deeply into philosophy (stoicism) in a bid to get some grounding that could make me unshakeable in business. I really think a big part of having the courage to create HomeHero, and deal with the daily challenges, are adopting this stoic philosophy early on. What I set out to do with HomeHero was solve a problem I personally experience in the home, the admin and mental burden associated with moving in and maintaining a home.
Sait Cham
(Hutch)
One of the key moments of my career is building a business in which I'd say I didn't have 'founder market fit'. The business failed and it was a sharp but necessary awakening that reminded me of the advantages of operating within your wheelhouse. My wheelhouse is 'logistics problem solving' and Hutch comfortably lives within that. This experience is what allowed me to take a 40sqft storage container and shipping 15 orders a day to large warehouse shipping 20000 orders+.
Keano Chang
(iknowa)
Technology adoption is influenced by its nature to be complementary or disruptive to an industry. At iknowa, we chose to work with our market to create a platform built upon trust, transparency and safety. Put simply, our users want a solution that provides opportunity, while eliminating the current risks associated," said Keano Chang, President and COO of iknowa, who cut his teeth as a cognitive specialist and transformation strategy consultant, for IBM. “iknowa is the only company that is dedicated to addressing the concerns related to quality, reliability, and the miscommunication associated with building and renovation projects head-on, while simplifying the otherwise convoluted building and renovation industry.
Cynthia Wandia
(Kwara)
Born in Kenya, encountered inefficiencies in power generation and financial services first hand, but also incredible innovation growing up with M-Pesa - the world's first mobile money service. Her first startup involved BD across 15 countries in Africa, and having lived and worked across multiple emerging and developed economies, formed a theory of change focused on the similarities between markets and the ability for tech to enable people and communities to be financially independent.
Michael Musandu
(Lalaland)
Michael Musandu grew up in Zimbabwe and South Africa before heading to the Netherlands to study computer science as an undergrad and then Artificial Intelligence in graduate school. While shopping for clothes online Musandu had the experience, as many do, of never seeing someone like himself in the smiling fashion scenarios that were presented on his phone and laptop. For Musandu, it was yet another example of the lack of diversity and inclusion in the world he saw around him. His response? He would build the "people" he never had a chance to see. So, like any good technologist, and in his case, a technologist with a focus on machine learning, Michael went about finding a way to create the world he rarely saw - one which reflected himself. The result is a company, Amsterdam-based Lalaland, which generates hyper-personalised ethnically and body-size inclusive models.
Nancy de Fays
(LINE)
Quentin and I started off a little garage in Belgium back in 2016. We wanted to build something useful for creators and came up with our first product, LINEDOCK. We had nothing but a DIY and no idea whether this would take off or not. We launched a crowdfunding campaign to validate the product-market fit, were blown away by it. We had no experience in hardware but we know we wanted to build Apple-quality products with a special signature : sustainable and beautifully designed products that were bringing a real value in the daily life of content creators. We decided to go to China for a month or two. We stayed two years. That's how we learned the hard way pretty much every thing around product ideation, design, engineering, manufacturing and retail. We ran out of cash many times and bootstrapping was our everyday bread. Looking back at it we did many mistakes. And we still do. But what a journey. Today we have a steady and selling product on the market, we're growing the team to 30 people and we have two new products in the making. What makes us special is our resilience, our obsession to build excellent products with no compromise on experience, environment or quality.
Elizabeth Nyeko
(ModularityGrid)
I founded Modularity Grid to create digital tools that can give energy providers, the ability to deliver high quality energy that is affordable and clean, to low income communities. Before that, I co-founded Mandulis Energy, an energy provider funded by the United Nations Capital Development Fund and Total among others, that operates renewable energy infrastructure for low income communities. So, I have a deep understanding of the day to day challenges faced by energy providers serving such communities. I have also worked in research at Imperial College London, and Oxford University where I also studied.
Charles Sekwalor
(Movemeback)
Movemeback's founders left corporate roles in Consulting & Banking in 2013 to fulfil a shared purpose of driving change in the world using their networks, learnings and strengths in business. After launching, growing and investing in multiple startups they turned their attention to the Africa market - driven by a belief there was no better place where commercial work would translate to meaningful impact for people's lives. Within a number of weeks they were on a plane to Africa's major markets with a view to relocate and begin building. On their journey, the scale of the Africa's opportunities was validated; however it also became clear that opportunities were opaque, and difficult to find and navigate (80% of Movemeback's community cite ""finding the right opportunity"" as the greatest hurdle to an impactful career in Africa). Equally, in-demand talent was found to be dispersed overseas (with as much as 50% of tertiary skilled living outside of their home country) and difficult to identify, with organisations struggling to find the right talent and skills to meaningfully scale. So they set about trying to solve the challenge of connecting hidden opportunities with hidden talent. The team have accomplished many firsts in the market, and have been instrumental in the growth of hundreds of thousands of people and organisations in Africa. They now turn their attention to scale and becoming the first major social professional platform built out of the needs of the Africa market."
Oyin Solebo
(Movemeback)
Movemeback's founders left corporate roles in Consulting & Banking in 2013 to fulfil a shared purpose of driving change in the world using their networks, learnings and strengths in business. After launching, growing and investing in multiple startups they turned their attention to the Africa market - driven by a belief there was no better place where commercial work would translate to meaningful impact for people's lives. Within a number of weeks they were on a plane to Africa's major markets with a view to relocate and begin building. On their journey, the scale of the Africa's opportunities was validated; however it also became clear that opportunities were opaque, and difficult to find and navigate (80% of Movemeback's community cite ""finding the right opportunity"" as the greatest hurdle to an impactful career in Africa). Equally, in-demand talent was found to be dispersed overseas (with as much as 50% of tertiary skilled living outside of their home country) and difficult to identify, with organisations struggling to find the right talent and skills to meaningfully scale. So they set about trying to solve the challenge of connecting hidden opportunities with hidden talent. The team have accomplished many firsts in the market, and have been instrumental in the growth of hundreds of thousands of people and organisations in Africa. They now turn their attention to scale and becoming the first major social professional platform built out of the needs of the Africa market."
Erika Brodnock
(Kami)
Erika is a leading industry voice in parental wellness, mum of 5 children, an MBA, and a PhD in Psychological Behavioural Science at LSE. As the founder of Karisma Kidz Ltd, she created a digital gaming platform teaching children emotional intelligence. It was preloaded to 15m devices and scaled to 8 million users. She has been Sky News’ Parenting Expert for 6 years, appearing on 100+ news segments.
Tolulope Ogunsina
(Playbrush)
Tolu met Paul (co-founder) at University and became CTO at the foundation in 2015, when he joined from Amazon. Since then he has developed the full technology stack and consequently revolutionised toothbrushes and smart oral care. He is responsible for 5 patent families and millions of lines of source code, which are the basis of Playbrush's strong tech position. He is further a master of ecosystem strategy and has integrated our smart toothbrush data with ecommerce subscriptions as well as the first parametric dental insurance.
Ben Camara
(Remote Coach)
My name is Ben, and I am a serial entrepreneur. I started my first business at 15 whilst growing up in Devon (Southern England) and although my father, a West African immigrant who came to Europe at 18 on a boat and a mother from London who grew up working class instilled work ethic and a hard attitude of 'Do more than you need to', the moving onto what I call the 'table of business opportunity' and was something attitude alone could not teach. I went to a comprehensive high school here, and did not go further into higher Education - I left home at 16 to pursue a career as a professional footballer, of which I did until injury at 7 years later. After retiring from football I joined the fitness industry and 18 months later in 2009, I started and bootstrapped the No1 Fitness chain of gyms. On minimal investment, I built the brand and the business to multiple locations in just over three years, in central London. I was fortunate enough to win the prestigious award of Mens Personal Trainer of the year and have looked after the fitness of the likes of Madonna, Kate Moss, and numerous faces from tv, film and sport. Alongside the gyms I launched an education platform globally which has now educated over 500 trainers from all corners of the globe, and launched a corporate wellness program which is focussed on sharing the knowledge personal trainers have to employees who struggle with wellness.
Richard Robinson
(Robin AI)
I became a lawyer because my Uncle was in a band called Music Youth and, at age 13, he wrote a song called 'Pass the Dutchie'. The song was a global hit, but when I was studying at university, he explained that he'd been involved in a long and protracted court battle over the royalties. I couldn't believe someone had to spend millions of pounds just to prove they were right. A became a lawyer to master the law, but I couldn't shake the feeling that access to world-class legal advice was just too expensive. I wanted to build a company that used technology to significantly reduce the cost of legal services so that anyone could access world-class legal knowledge.
Ismail Jeilani
(Scoodle)
He joined Google's marketing team after graduating from King's College London. While funding his degree, Ismail built Satifs which helped raise over £900,000 for charity and interest-free student loans. He ranked as one of the ‘top 100 coolest people in tech’ by Business Insider and the top 100 minorities in tech by the Financial Times.
Ivan Beckley
(Suvera)
Suvera began with myself (CEO) and Will (COO) training to become doctors. While at Medical school we studied how to treat patients but also become viscerally exposed to all the problems that the healthcare system were unable to solve. Alongside our studies we become obsessed with these systemic problems and interned at over 6 startups between us trying to solve these problems with technology. Will last worked at Havas Group on the redesign cancer treatment health campaigns and I was last at DeepMind on the healthcare trying to productise DeepMind's AI algorithms. Eventually, with our dual discipline in healthcare and technology we thought we could build something ourselves. And so we co-founded Suvera with Diana (CTO) and Ryzard (CDO) with the intention of tackling the most pressing issues for the system with the most complete solution we could create. Tapping into the best of technology and design. In truth, Suvera stems simply from our original desire to become doctors and care for patients. The goal of Suvera is to allow us to do so at scale
Chantelle Bell
(Syrona Health)
Anya and Chantelle met during their masters at the University of Cambridge. We connected on our shared experiences with chronic gynaecological health conditions and we set about making a change. We've faced many challenges being two women from black and asian backgrounds operating in a space for women and people with uteruses.
Jack-Hermann NTOKO
(TradeIn)
Born in France and raised within Cameroonian traditions, Jack-Hermann Ntoko is an expert in trade credit insurance & business operations management, and certified most recently in 2019 from the prestigious Stanford University in Entrepreneurship & innovation. He climbed the ranks over the thirteen years he spent at Euler Hermes from client portfolio manager up to group lead business change partner, overseeing business process deployment at group level, new products development and leading a team over three countries. A serial entrepreneur, Jack founded a number of fintech businesses including a finance sourcing company for African startups before co-founding TradeIn.
Jean-Cedric BEKALE
(TradeIn)
Born and raised in Gabon, Jean-Cedric has led an impressive career as International sales manager and Business Strategist in his 17 years working in various industries, most notably in the Automaker and Insurance space. In 2018, he identified a point of inflexion in the Trade Credit Insurance market and decided to create his startup TradeIn to protect small and medium businesses from bankruptcy due to lack of customer payment.
Clifford Ondara
(Vanilla Steel)
About four years ago, I moved to Berlin. I had already six years of management consulting behind me, and I wanted something new. My ideal scenario was to meet the perfect co-founder and come up with a great idea to start a company but I had not yet found a problem that I wanted to solve. Around the same time a friend of mine had just launched a startup in the manufacturing tech area and was looking for a senior team member to help build up Sales and Operations. I jumped at the chance to take on operational responsibility while learning the ropes in early stage venture building. After a great 2.5 years, I decided it was time to move on. I met my co-founders when we were recruited by a large steel company to advise on digital distribution models for the steel industry. We worked together for 10 months and together developed a passion for solving challenges in the steel distribution value chain through innovation. We therefore decided to continue our journey and after a short ideation period, we launched Vanilla Steel in June 2020 with a focus on the excess steel market in Europe.
Anthea Stephenson
(Wild Radish)
James Bhardwaj
(Wild Radish)
Stephanie Nenta
(Xtramile)
Stéphanie Nenta (COO) grew in Cameroon surrounded by a family of business owners which sparked her interest in entrepreneurship. Following a 10 year tenure in finance, she decided to follow her dreams and launched Xtramile with Xavier Ragage, her ex-coworker at JPM (CEO), which initially came as a response to the recruitment process of banks and large corporations which are still obsolete and rely on a "post and pray approach".