Founders & Funders

Brendan Baker is a Partner at Ridge Ventures. Brendan led Ridge’s recent investment in Loop Returns.  In past years, he has worked with early stage venture funds like Ridge, Wing and Hone Capital as well as companies and accelerators like Passport, Shift, Batch, AngelPad, Techstars and more.  Previously, Brendan was a Director at Greylock, founding a program to build data and software systems to find and evaluate new investments.  Brendan was the second employee at AngelList, overseeing 8000 pitches and helping more than 300 startups raise funding.  Brendan holds a BASc in Materials Engineering from University of British Columbia, MPhil from University of Cambridge, and an MBA from University of Oxford. 

Faisal founded Pi Labs Ltd in 2015, after leading the first round of investments in PropTech start-ups Hubble and Trussle as an individual investor. He has since taken on a leadership role in the PropTech space as Chairman of the Pi Labs Ltd board and Pi Labs Investment Committee. Together, Faisal and his team have built a portfolio of 45 PropTech companies across UK and Europe, making Pi Labs one of the most active global investors in PropTech start-ups. Faisal is also the founder of Spire Ventures, a personal investment vehicle with a focus on investment in traditional property companies.  His traditional property investments include POD Management, Beaumont Bailey, Quoinstone IM, and 90 North, a real estate investment manager which has managed $2bn of real estate assets across Europe and the USA. In 2009 he received a MBA from Saïd Business School. 

Jeff is a former SBS MBA, and Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Seedrs. Seedrs is Europe’s largest equity crowdfunding platform and was launched by Jeff Lynn and Carlos Silva in 2012, out of their MBA. The platform allows investors from a variety of backgrounds to invest with ease into innovative startups and other growth-focused businesses. From as little as £10 investors can own shares in, and become part of, the ‘next big thing’, whilst receiving the same world-class shareholder protections as professional investors. The platform helps companies to reduce the administrative burden of raising capital, leaving entrepreneurs to do what they do best – running and scaling their businesses for success. Their ethos is ‘equity crowdfunding done properly’ and to give every Seedrs investor access to high-risk high-return assets, together with the tools to build a diverse, growth-focussed investment portfolio. Seedrs has seen over a 1000 deals and recorded close to £900m raised.

Mary McKenna is an Irish technology entrepreneur and angel investor.  She co-founded online learning company Learning Pool in 2006 and sold the business in 2014 so that she could return to working with earlier stage startups and scaleups. In the last 5 years Mary has worked extensively with especially first time and female entrepreneurs and she has angel invested in 8 early stage tech startups to date, 4 have female founding teams. She is one of the Entrepreneurs in Residence at the University of Oxford, a member of the NI MATRIX panel, an advisor to several governments, an EU Horizon 2020 innovation judge, a trustee of a small number of charities and social enterprises and the first ever entrepreneur in residence at St Mary’s College, an all-girls secondary school in the working class Creggan area of Derry, Northern Ireland.  As part of her work she sees literally hundreds of investment pitches every year. Mary was awarded an MBE by Her Majesty the Queen in the 2014 New Year’s Honours for services to digital technology, innovation and learning. 

Rabia is Managing Director of Discovery Sciences at Sensyne Health. Sensyne Health is a healthcare technology company that creates value from accelerating the discovery and development of new medicines and improving patient care through the analysis of real-world evidence from large databases of anonymised patient data in collaboration with NHS Trusts.

Rabia has a PhD in Genetics. She joined Meta as a VP Commercial Partnerships. Meta is an artificial intelligence company using NLP to uncover knowledge within the biomedical literature and has since been acquired by Chan Zuckerberg BioHub. Following Meta, she went on to a post-doctoral fellowship at the Francis Crick Institute under Dr. Frickel. She then returned to working at the intersection of Biology and Technology and joined BenevolentAI, an AI-enabled drug discovery company, as a scientist and established a number of pre-clinical drug-discovery programmes. She worked closely with the BenevolentAI product team to define product vision based on drug-discovery needs and rose to the role of Associate Director Strategy and Planning working closely with Prof. Jackie Hunter.

Alessandro is the Managing Partner at Wilbe. He us former corporate solicitor turned venture operator turned early-stage investor. In 2014 Alessandro left his law firm to set up Wilbe, initially in the shape of a legal and strategy advisory firm for early stage innovative companies. Having helped over 40 frontier tech companies and with operational support in strong demand, in 2017 he came up with a sweat-for-equity model, offering his work to selected high-growth technology ventures in exchange for pure equity leading to the founding of Wilbe Ventures. In 2019 alongside a stellar team of industry experts he founded Wilbe Science aimed at helping and investing in researchers from leading academic hubs with a focus on healthcare, sustainability and security.

Liliane is a healthtech investment principal at Oxford Sciences Innovation, a £600m venture firm focused on developing and scaling spinouts based on research from the Mathematical, Physical, Life Sciences and Medical Divisions at the University of Oxford.

Liliane completed her DPhil in Human Genetics (Canadian Rhodes Scholar, St John’s College 2009) at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of Oxford. Since, Liliane has worked across global health diplomacy, innovation policy and genetics research on national and international levels. Liliane previously served as Deputy Head of the UK Foreign Commonwealth Office/NHS joint unit, driving partnerships in medical workforce, digital health and life sciences between the United Kingdom, Latin America, South Africa and South East Asia. Before then, she was a Policy Fellow at the Institute for Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, advising on adoption of health system innovations in low and middle income countries, with a particular focus on Myanmar. At the World Health Organization, Liliane worked on indigenous and refugee health initiatives in Brazil, Paraguay and the Middle East and coordinated global technical guidance for the use of digital health in diabetes, hypertension and smoking cessation. 

Liliane is an associate member of the Schmidt Science Fellows Academic Council and established and currently runs the Rhodes Scholarships for Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

Carolyn is the co-founder of Brill Power, a battery intelligence start-up that uses electronics to improve performance and reduce battery waste. Her role as the Head of Finance and Operations and member of the Board of Directors involves her in all aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. She is a licenced engineer in Canada with a bachelor degree and a research masters degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto. Carolyn completed an MBA at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School in 2014-15 where she met her engineering DPhil co-founders. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she worked in engineering, transportation economics, and infrastructure finance in Canada and the UK. 

Mina is the Founder and CEO of Panacea Stars. Panacea Stars supports companies with mentorship at their early stages of development; whether it be pre-seed, seed or post-seed. The core expertise and interest lies within the fields of life sciences, biotech and healthcare, as well as materials, food, sustainability and AI. Mina founded Panacea during his DPhil in Oncology at the University of Oxford. He has been deeply embedded over the past 5 years at the interface between R&D and commercialisation, where he has cut his technology translation and investment teething through working with 150+ startups. He was listed on Europe’s Forbes 30 under 30 as a life sciences and healthcare leader for the year 2017. He sits on boards of several international organisations, acts as an Innovation Strategy advisor for a number of international bodies, and has recently helped address the UK’s House of Lords Life Sciences Industrial Strategy. He has a PhD in Oncology from the University of Oxford and obtained a Masters in Drug Discovery from University College London. 

Melanie is a Post-doctoral Researcher that looks at the evolution of social behaviours in bacteria. Jessica is a Doctoral Candidate in Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics

Tom is the Managing Director of the Oxford Seed Fund and is one of our own current MBAs (2019-2020). He has extensive startup, technology and consulting experience. Prior to commencing the MBA, Tom supported Prolific’s successful application to YCombinator and established the Growth team there. He started his career as a consultant at PwC and Grant Thornton in Australia, before spending a year running an environmental-tourism social enterprise in Nicaragua. Upon returning to Melbourne, Tom joined food-waste startup Yume as the first employee. He developed the initial version of the marketplace and managed an oversubscribed $2.6m capital raise before transitioning into the Head of Product role. He graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Information Systems and is passionate about the role business has to play in a more environmentally sustainable future.