Emerging Managers and First Time Fundraising Forums

Alex Fink

Principal and Venture Partner, Fink Family Office

Alex Fink is Principal at the Fink Family Office, where he is responsible for deploying and managing early-stage venture investments and managers, with a focus on UK pre-seed and seed companies across fintech, deeptech and life sciences.

He is also Senior Partner and Investment Committee member at Empirical Ventures, a UK deep science fund backing entrepreneurial scientists through EIS and SEIS investments and is currently helping raise their first £50m institutional fund.

Having spent a decade in the City, including as Head of Interest Rate Futures and Options at Marex Spectron, Alexander brings financial markets experience alongside a decade working with startups. He supports founders across multiple portfolio boards and is actively involved in the UK family office and venture capital ecosystem.

Amardeep Parmar

Co-Founder, Bae HQ & Bae HQ Ventures

Amardeep Parmar is the Founding Partner of Bae HQ Ventures and Cofounder of Bae HQ. He's cobuilt the UK's startup ecosystem for Asian-heritage founders over the last 4 years, and stacking the venture arm on top. Bae HQ has had 16,000+ event and talk attendees, £20m+ raised by impact alumni and released 340+ podcasts. Amardeep is the author of Startups for Outsiders and his writing has tens of millions of views across LinkedIn and Medium.

Beverley Gower-Jones MBE

Managing Partner, Clean Growth Fund

Beverley Gower-Jones OBE is Founder and Managing Partner of Clean Growth Investment Management, a venture capital fund manager investing in the UK’s most promising early-stage climatetech companies. CGIM manages two funds with combined AUM of £182.5m.

She is also CEO of Carbon Limiting Technologies, a climatetech consultancy, and was previously a founder and Vice President of Shell Technology Ventures. With over 40 years’ experience in the international energy sector, Beverley specialises in accelerating innovation to market and scaling companies. Awarded an OBE in 2023 for services to Net Zero innovation, she is Non Executive Director at Great British Energy.

Burhan Pisavadi

Partner, PT Ventures

Burhan Pisavadi leads PT1's presence, investing in pre-seed and seed startups upgrading the physical world: technologies transforming energy, infrastructure, construction and more. He's spent 4 years at PT1: investing in 12 companies, designing the fund model and portfolio allocation strategy for two funds, and building PT1's proprietary operating system, SIA.

Prior to PT1, Burhan was an early employee and founder at two startups. Burhan trained as a theoretical physicist before abandoning academia for the world of startups. 
 

Chris Elphick

Head of Venture Capital, UK Private Capital

Chris Elphick is Head of Venture Capital at UK Private Capital. He leads on all policy areas related to venture capital and works closely with UK Private Capital members to promote the role the industry plays in the UK economy by supporting entrepreneurs and businesses.

Chris is a member of the Independent Advisory Board for the Government’s Digital Growth Grant (delivered by Barclays Eagle Labs) and is an adviser to the APPG for Entrepreneurship.

Denise Typl

Senior Membership Manager, UK Private Capital

Denise Typl is UK Private Capital’s Senior Manager for Industry Development. She has over a decade’s experience building relationships, facilitating dialogue, and delivering commercial goals within industry bodies, trade associations and events.

Prior to joining UK Private Capital in 2021, she held commercial roles at Informa PLC, and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Denise is a Hungarian-German dual citizen and holds a BA in International Relations from the Corvinus University of Budapest.
 

Dr. Ayman Elhalwagy

Co-Founder & CEO, RootCause.ai

Dr. Ayman Elhalwagy is Co-Founder and CEO of RootCause.ai, the simulation engine for enterprise decisions. RootCause gives executives a staging environment to test decisions before committing, powered by a proprietary algorithm that discovers causal links in data 1,000x faster than existing methods.

Global 2000 companies in telecom, manufacturing and food use it to forecast demand, plan supply chains and model the impact of tariffs. Ayman previously co-founded an AI consultancy, and his award-winning research produced deep learning algorithms that cut computational needs by 90% and were deployed at NASA and across multiple enterprises.
 

Dr. Milette Gillow

The Tech Bros

Dr. Milette Gillow is Founding GP at The Tech Bros: the world's first all-female, all technical accelerator. She is a former VC, most recently a Talent Investor at Entrepreneur First, and university lecturer in pure mathematics.

She is also a professional opera singer, trained at the Royal Academy of Music, an EWOR Venture Scout, and a Governor of Oxford High School GDST, and was named one of Sifted's 100 most influential women in tech in Europe 2026.
 

Ed Bardos

Partner & COO, Volution

Ed Bardos is a Partner of Volution, straddling COO and investment roles, with 25+ years’ experience in corporate law, investment management and business founder roles. Volution invests in UK and European B2B FinTech, SaaS and AI scale-ups harnessing transformative new technologies to redefine productivity in the workplace and the capital markets.

Esther Richardot Reynal de Saint-Michel

Founding Managing Partner, THENA Capital

Esther Richardot Reynal de Saint-Michel is the Founding Managing Partner of THENA Capital, a £45m UK-based MedTech venture capital fund focused on digital healthcare solutions and medical devices.

Eyal Malinger

Managing Partner, Resurge Growth Partners

Eyal Malinger is co-founder and partner at Resurge Growth Partners, a London-based investment manager focused on the growing opportunity between venture capital and private equity. As thousands of strong, venture-backed businesses mature beyond the venture model, Resurge partners with them to unlock their next phase of growth.

Eyal has spent over a decade backing ambitious growth companies, previously leading investments at Beringea, where he built a reputation for finding value others overlooked. He began his career at McKinsey and Oaktree Capital. Eyal holds a BA in Computer Science from Raichman University and and an MBA from Harvard Business School

Farid Haque

Venture Partner, AQVC

Awaiting speaker's biography.

Fergus Dunn

Co-Founder, LP Grid

Fergus Dunn is co-founder of LP Grid, the intelligence platform delivering high-trust data and rich context on Limited Partners across venture, growth and private equity. LP Grid maps more than 28,000 LPs, from family offices and HNWIs to pensions and funds of funds.

Before LP Grid, Fergus invested from the single family office of Jeremy Middleton, co-founder of HomeServe. He also set up QVentures pre-seed fund, and before that, worked at the British Business Bank. Fergus also sits on the advisory council for Isio's family office division; Isio advises pension funds on >£300bn of assets.

Francesco Perticarari

General Partner , Silicon Roundabout Ventures

Francesco Perticarari is a computer scientist who built the largest European deeptech meetup and ended up investing as an angel in the sector. Some of his angel portfolio companies are now clocking £40m+ in revenue, but in deeptech that’s still early days.

In 2023 he launched his deeptech soloGP fund in the UK and has since been writing first cheques in pre-seed and some seed rounds. His funds have been backed by the likes of Molten Ventures, Multiple Capital, P101, and exited founders and operators including 1 Nasdaq listed & 3 unicorn companies.

His mission is to build Europe’s first community-driven and truly pan-European VC firm built by technical folks exclusively for deeptech pre-seed and seed founders.
 

Francis Thomas

Public Affairs Manager, UK Private Capital

Francis Thomas leads the public affairs team at UK Private Capital, driving political and parliamentary engagement for private equity, venture capital, and direct lending private credit.

Across a decade in politics, policy, and communications, he previously established and led the policy and public affairs function at HC-One, the UK's largest social care provider. His career also includes charity policy influencing, co-founding an infrastructure think tank, and working in parliament and local government.

Gilma Da Gama

Senior Venture Capital Executive, UK Private Capital

Gilma Da Gama is a Senior Venture Capital Executive at UK Private Capital. She works across the venture capital ecosystem, supporting UK Private Capital’s engagement with investors, founders, government, and industry stakeholders. Her work spans emerging managers, corporate venture capital and university spinouts, alongside initiatives focused on strengthening the environment for investment, innovation and growth in the UK.

Henry Whorwood

Managing Director, Beauhurst

Henry Whorwood started and runs Beauhurst Insights. Beauhurst Insights produces research on the UK’s economy, with a focus on innovation, investment and growth. He has worked on briefs for clients including the British Business Bank, HM Treasury, and Innovate UK. Henry is an expert on business finance, entrepreneurship and innovation and regularly gives presentations on market trends at events around the country.

He is an advisor to The Entrepreneurs Network, sits on the EISA's Research Committee and is on the advisory board of the APPG for Entrepreneurship. He studied Classics at the University of Oxford.  

Irena Spazzapan

Managing Partner, Systemiq Capital Limited

Irena Spazzapan is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Systemiq Capital, a London based venture firm backing tech founders redefining the physical world. The firm invests at Series A +/- across the UK, EU and North America, with a focus on electrification, industrial software and applied AI.

Systemiq Capital has raised 3 funds, now managing $250m, and has backed category defining companies including Ohme, ElectronX, Basecamp Research, ArchetypeAI and Mixx Technologies. Irena spent 13 years in power trading at Goldman Sachs Commodities before moving into venture, and continues focusing on energy tech.

Jane Choi

Investment Manager, Cloudberry Ventures

Jane Choi is an Investment Manager at Cloudberry Ventures, where she leads Seed to Series A investments in AI compute, photonics and quantum hardware. She is a Board Observer at Peak Quantum, an operator in the EU Chips Act superconducting quantum pilot line, and at RootCause.ai.

She began her career as a spacecraft operations engineer at Eutelsat OneWeb, then became Devops Lead at Aquis Exchange, where she worked on hybrid and pure cloud infrastructure, and eventually led the team through a merger initiative. She holds an MEng in Spacecraft Engineering from the University of Southampton.

Katrin Wilking

Investment Manager, Cloudberry Ventures

Katrin Wilking is a Principal at Cloudberry Ventures, where she oversees the industrial infrastructure vertical, spanning energy, materials and physical AI. She brings legal, economic and venture capital expertise to her investment work, drawing on her background in M&A, capital markets and venture advisory at Taylor Wessing.

Her multidisciplinary perspective allows her to bridge regulatory, strategic and financial considerations when assessing early-stage companies. On Substack, she writes about European sovereignty and deep tech.

Malcolm Ferguson

Partner, Secondaries, Molten Ventures

Malcolm Ferguson is a Partner at Molten Ventures, where he is part of the firm's dedicated secondaries team, focused on providing liquidity to shareholders in Europe's leading privately held technology companies. Malcolm brings around two decades of experience across European venture capital and technology finance.

Before joining Molten, he spent more than ten years as an investor at Octopus Ventures, one of Europe's most established venture firms, backing companies from early stage through to scale, having begun his career in investment banking and technology advisory.

Molten Ventures is a leading venture capital firm invested in Europe's fastest growing technology companies. Its secondaries strategy builds on a twenty-year track record of backing, and successfully exiting, category defining European businesses.
 

Matt Dickman

Partner, Debevoise & Plimpton

Matt Dickman is a London-based partner in Debevoise & Plimpton’s Investment Management Group, where he advises on the formation, management and reorganisation of private investment funds.  He is also a leader in the firm’s Private Fund Transactions Group and regularly advises fund sponsors and investors on GP staking transactions, including internal reorganisations and economic and governance arrangements, as well as seed investments in emerging fund sponsors and secondary transactions.

Matt represents a broad range of international private equity and other private investment funds and their sponsors, with recent experience advising technology and venture capital funds.

Megan Phoenix

Investment Manager, British Business Bank

Megan Phoenix is an Investment Manager at the British Business Bank, working on Investor Pathways Capital, a £400 million initiative designed to support individuals from a wide range of backgrounds to launch their first venture capital funds. Megan has previously worked on the Bank’s Enterprise Capital Funds programme and, before joining the Bank, at Innovate UK.

Michael Brennan

Head of UK Operations, Infra One

Michael Brennan is the Head of UK for Infra One where his role is principally focused on leading and growing the UK and supporting emerging fund managers to get their funds up and running. With a career spanning senior regulatory, freelancing & advisory roles, Michael brings a deep expertise in financial regulation, governance and operations strategy.

He is known for bridging regulatory rigour with entrepreneurial innovation.  

Olav Ostin

Founder & Managing Partner, TempoCap

Olav Ostin is Founder and Managing Partner of TempoCap, a pan-European primary and secondary tech investor with offices in London, Paris, and Berlin. Olav has been active in the venture capital and secondary industries for over 20 years. In 2021, he was named one of RealDeals 20 most influential people in venture capital and private equity for TempoCap’s successful exits of Depop for $1.625B to Etsy and CurrencyCloud for $925m to Visa in 2021. In 2006, Ostin co-founded TempoCap, which was part of the DFJ Network from 2012 to 2016. TempoCap has acquired 11 portfolios of assets and closed multiple single assets transactions. Olav was educated at EM Lyon, France.

Paul Dugsin

Managing Partner, Raiven Capital

Awaiting speaker's biography.

Sam Ettelaie

Chief Investment Officer, Thema

Sam Ettelaie is Co-founder of Thema, a first-ticket anchor LP backing first-time VC managers. With over a decade of experience as an institutional LP, Sam has committed more than £400 million to early-stage VC funds and served on the LPAC of 17 funds.

His experience includes over six years at the British Business Bank, alongside roles as Head of Venture for a single-family office, Senior Adviser to LPs and Venture Partner to GPs.
 

Sam Patchitt

Investment Manager, British Business Bank

Sam Patchitt is an Investment Manager at the British Business Bank, deploying £400m annually into emerging UK venture capital funds as part of the Development Equity team. His experience spans the full venture journey, from founding and scaling businesses to raising capital, advising founders, direct investing, exits, and fund investments.

Before joining the Bank, Sam built two tech start-ups before moving into venture capital, investing in pre-seed and seed businesses across Greater Manchester. Having transacted over £200m across funds, equity, debt and grant finance, Sam brings experience from both sides of the table when assessing the GPs of tomorrow. 
 

Selena Chisholm

Debevoise & Plimpton

Selena Chisholm is an English-qualified counsel in Debevoise & Plimpton’s Corporate Department and a member of the firm’s Investment Management Group. She advises sponsors and investors on a range of investment management matters, with a particular focus on representing institutional and other investors in connection with their private equity investments.

Stephanie Orde

Chief Financial Officer, Episode 1

Stephanie Orde has extensive work experience in various roles and industries. Stephanie currently holds the position of Chief Financial Officer at Episode 1 Ventures since July 2022. Prior to this, they worked at PwC for several years. Their roles at PwC included Senior Manager, Firmwide Transformation, Senior Manager, Technology Transformation, and Financial Services Data Lead in the Audit department.

Stephanie Orde completed their education at three institutions. From 1994 to 2001, they attended Guildford High School, followed by the University of Oxford from 2002 to 2005 where they obtained a degree in Economics and Management.
 

Steve Gibson

Managing Partner, 13books Capital

Steve Gibson is a partner at 13books Capital, backing Europe’s most ambitious fintech founders as they scale globally. With 16 years at the cutting edge of financial services investment, he brings the sector depth and networks to back the founders using AI to fundamentally transform the fabric of global financial services.

Tom Hopkins

Founding Partner, Commix Capital

Tom Hopkins is an experienced private asset operator with two decades in UK venture capital. Working across front, middle, and back-office functions, Tom has launched and raised multiple funds, managed countless deal completions, and overseen operations and compliance across several venture capital firms. He also co-founded a placement agent and fund administration firm.

Vivien de Tusch-Lec

General Partner, RYSE Asset Management

Vivien de Tusch-Lec is a General Partner at RYSE, a venture capital firm investing in digital healthcare companies from Seed to Series B. She works across investment sourcing, fundraising and portfolio support, combining investing experience with a background as a founder and business leader.

Previously, she led private investments at Alberg Holdings, co-founded Bubele and held senior leadership roles at Gerson Lehrman Group. She also advises Loyal VC and served on the board of Techspert. Vivien holds an MBA from INSEAD and an MA from Cambridge University.