Funded & Fearless: London 2026
Verity Baldry
Founder | Cheerful Orange
Verity is the founder of Cheerful Orange, an advisory practice that works with early-stage founders and CEOs on strategy, governance, and the difficult decisions that come with building something new. She actively invests through Angel Academe with a deliberate focus on female-founded businesses, backing founders where she believes her money and her expertise can both make a difference.
Before founding Cheerful Orange, Verity spent the best part of twenty years at Blenheim Chalcot, one of the UK's leading venture builders, working across a portfolio of companies including founding teams at Fospha, and Salary Finance, and scaleup growth at Agilisys. That experience shapes how she thinks about backing founders today.
Verity is Chair of Zonova Technologies, an early-stage medtech company working on antimicrobial solutions, and a trustee-in-waiting at The Money Charity. She brings a practitioner's perspective to funding conversations: what it actually feels like to be in the room with a founder, and what investors are really looking for when they say yes.
Danielle Davis
Deputy Director | First Enterprise
Danielle Davis is Deputy Director at First Enterprise, where she leads the operational delivery, performance and compliance of business finance programmes. Her work focuses on making sure funding is delivered effectively in practice, with strong customer outcomes and clear accountability across teams.
She works closely with funders, partners and regulators, while staying close to the detail of delivery, from complaints and performance management through to risk, pipeline and programme design. A core part of her work is improving access to finance for female founders and ethnic minority business owners, ensuring that funding works for those often underserved by traditional lenders, not just in theory but in reality.
Emmie Faust
Founder & CEO | Female Founders Rise
Emmie Faust is the founder of Female Founders Rise, a community supporting 11,000 UK female founders. She is an exited entrepreneur, a micro angel investor in 30+ female-led businesses and a Dragons' Den winner.
Female Founders Rise exists to enable financial freedom for women through entrepreneurship, with 4 key pillars: community, funding support, business fundamentals and raising awareness of female founders.
Emmie is also the founder of The Rise Report of Female Entrepreneurship - data, stories and insights from over 2000 female entrepreneurs
Sarah Friar
Co-Founder | Ladies Who Launch
CFO | OpenAI
Sarah Friar is the Chief Financial Officer of OpenAI. Before joining OpenAI, Sarah served as Chief Executive Officer of Nextdoor from 2018 to 2024, and as Chief Financial Officer of Block (formerly Square) between 2012 and 2018. Before her tenure at Block, Sarah served as SVP of Finance & Strategy at Salesforce, she held executive roles at Goldman Sachs and started her career at McKinsey in London and South Africa.
Sarah currently sits on the board of directors of Walmart and Consensys, as well as on the advisory boards of HOPE Global, the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University. She previously served as a director of Nextdoor, Slack and New Relic.
Sarah grew up in Northern Ireland and earned her MEng in Metallurgy, Economics, and Management from the University of Oxford and her MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she graduated as an Arjay Miller scholar. She also holds an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II for services to entrepreneurship.
Emma Jones
UK Small Business Commissioner
Founder | Enterprise Nation
Emma Jones was appointed Small Business Commissioner by the UK Department of Business and Trade in June 2025.
Following a degree in Law and Japanese, Emma joined international accounting firm Arthur Andersen, where she worked in their London, Leeds and Manchester offices. She set up the firm’s Inward Investment practice that attracted overseas companies to locate in the UK.
In 2000, bitten by the dot.com bug, Emma left the firm to start her first business, Techlocate. After 15 months, the company was successfully sold to Tenon plc when Emma was 27. The experience of starting, growing and selling a business from a home base gave Emma the idea for Enterprise Nation which was launched in 2005 to support the flourishing number of start-ups and SMEs.
Enterprise Nation expanded to become an active small business membership community, reaching more than 800,000 businesses each year with its powerful digital business support platform. Whilst leading Enterprise Nation, Emma presented a positive campaigning voice to government and the media on behalf of partners and members.
In 2011, Emma co-founded enterprise campaign, StartUp Britain, that she ran until 2014.
Emma served as SME Representative for Crown Commercial Service for 2 years from July 2016, working to encourage more small businesses to sell to the public sector and its major suppliers.
In June 2012 Emma was awarded an MBE for Services to Enterprise. Emma was awarded the rank Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2021.
Martha Lane Fox
Entrepreneur, Crossbench Peer and
Digital Leader
Martha Lane Fox is an entrepreneur, crossbench peer and digital leader whose career spans technology, business, public policy and social impact. She is Chair of the Mayor of London’s Taskforce on AI and Jobs; a non-executive director of Chanel, Multiverse and British Airways; an adviser to the Lakestar Resilience Fund; and a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is also a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
Martha co-founded lastminute.com, one of Europe’s pioneering e-commerce businesses, as well as Lucky Voice, and played a founding role in the Government Digital Service, which built GOV.UK and helped transform digital public services. She recently served as President of the British Chambers of Commerce and Chancellor of the Open University, championing skills, innovation and inclusive growth across the UK.
Alongside her commercial and public work, Martha is a longstanding advocate for broader access to technology and opportunity. She is Patron of iamtheCODE, Day One Trauma Support and AbilityNet. In 2004, she was in a life changing car accident which left her disabled. After 2 years in hospital, she went home, but everything was forever changed.
Triin Linamagi
Founding Partner | Arãya Sie Fund
Triin is the Founding Partner of Arãya Sie Fund, an early-stage venture fund backing the next generation of women-led businesses in the UK and Europe. The fund invests at the pre-seed and seed stage across healthcare, climate, fintech, and deeptech/AI. She is also the Founder and CEO of Sie Ventures, an angel syndicate and capital platform. Sie Ventures improves access to high-quality investment opportunities for angel investors while supporting women founders through dedicated programs to help them fund and scale their ventures. Triin brings over a decade of investment experience across multiple venture capital funds. Prior to her career in VC, she spent several years as a founder and operator building technology companies, giving her a unique dual perspective as both investor and entrepreneur.
Amelia Miller
Co-Founder & CEO | ivee
Amelia Miller is the co-founder and CEO of ivee, the UK Government's primary AI upskilling partner - having trained over 100,000 people and 1,000 teams on AI fluency across organisations including Red Bull, Lucky Saint, and Hyble. ivee is backed by investors from Balderton, Dawn Capital, Microsoft AI, and Steven Bartlett.
Before founding ivee, Amelia spent time at Goldman Sachs, represented her country as an international athlete, and completed a Cambridge fellowship alongside published research on skills prediction in the labour market. She's a Forbes 30U30 honouree and currently serves on the UK Women in Tech Government Taskforce.
Lydia Miller
Co-Founder & CTO | ivee
Lydia Miller is co-founder and CTO of ivee, leading its engineering and architecture. Before ivee, she was a technology investor at Deloitte Ventures, backing early-stage software companies and learning to tell a real technical moat from a good demo. Earlier, she built predictive models in fintech, deploying machine learning systems for risk and forecasting company success.
Her focus sits at the intersection of AI and people: building systems that are useful to humans, not just technically impressive. Lydia is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree and a Dragons' Den winner.
Izzy Mintus
CEO & Founder | Euforma
Izzy is the CEO & Founder of Euforma, building the fit-intelligence layer for fashion e-commerce to cut returns, waste and lost margin caused by inconsistent sizing. AI-obsessed and originally on track for dentistry, she took the entrepreneurial route after finishing her A-levels instead- starting her first business at 17. She founded a social media agency and worked with e-commerce brands on social media growth, seeing firsthand how fit-driven returns quietly destroy profitability even when demand is strong. That insight, combined with her own frustration with online fit inconsistency, led her to build Euforma .
Siddhi Mittal
Founder & CEO | yhangry
Siddhi Mittal is the co-founder and co-CEO of yhangry, a YC-backed marketplace for private chefs. The London startup connects customers booking chefs for occasions ranging from birthdays to weekly meal prep with a roster of 600+ vetted chefs across the UK, and is now expanding into the US.
Mittal studied Computer Science with a focus on AI at Columbia University, then spent six and a half years trading at Barclays Investment Bank, where she ran a balance sheet of over $500 million in risk assets. She left finance in 2019 to start yhangry with co-founder Heinin Zhang, whom she had met on the trading floor.
yhangry has raised over $3 million from investors including Y Combinator (W22), and was selected for Google for Startups Female Founders. Mittal pitched the company on Dragons' Den and is an active voice on LinkedIn for early-stage marketplace founders.
Megan Possamai
Growth Lead, GTM Initiatives
Megan Possamai is a Growth Lead at Canva, helping individuals and teams unlock the platform's full creative and productivity power. With experience across customer education, enablement, and go-to-market strategy, she equips people to work faster, think more creatively, and deliver stronger results using Canva's tools.
Niv Subramanian
Deputy CEO | Allica Bank
Niv has spent over two decades in banking and fintech — long enough to have a strong opinion on working capital, and short enough to still find it exciting! She's currently Deputy CEO at Allica Bank, where she leads Lending and Operations, with a focus on making business banking actually work for the businesses using it. From large banks like Barclays to challenger banks like OakNorth, her career has taken her across the full lending landscape, with working capital a recurring theme throughout. She's also been on the startup side — co-founding her own venture and being CFO of a young fintech, so she also knows the thrill (and terror) of building something from scratch while managing cash as the lifeblood of businesses.
Iana Vidal
Head of UK Public Policy | Block
Iana Vidal is Head of UK Public Policy for Block. She leads the company’s engagement with government, regulators and other key stakeholders to influence policy and regulation that drives economic empowerment, and supports innovation in financial services. Iana has extensive experience across a range of policy areas, and has previously worked for trade and professional bodies, and in the not-for-profit sector.