2025 Judges
Alec is Managing Partner at Primary Capital and has nearly 20 years of private equity experience. He sits on the Investment Committee and leads investment activity and value creation across the portfolio.”
Chris joined Phoenix in 2017 and has over 15 years of private equity experience. He sits on the Investment Committee and focuses his investment activity on all things data, digital and technology.
Claire Burden leads Consulting practice and specialises in corporate growth and performance improvement, strategy advisory, working capital and cash flow, value creation and cost reduction.
Experience
Claire built upon Big Four audit, restructuring and advisory experience with ten years in industry, successfully leading transformation programmes and supporting both high growth and working capital constrained businesses. With a breadth of Board level and hands-on experience and a proven track record for operational and strategic delivery, Claire works intelligently and creatively to drive both short term performance improvement and real change over the medium to long-term.
This industry experience provides Claire with commercial acumen and a deep understanding of the challenges businesses face, and importantly, how to alleviate them. Claire has worked across business sizes and sectors with specialisms in energy and renewables, professional services, manufacturing, technology and not-for-profits.
With over eighteen years’ hands-on recruitment experience at senior level and a BAME background, Cynthia is ideally placed to identify diverse talent as well as understanding the barriers that make an authentic recruitment process impossible to achieve using traditional recruitment processes. She has worked within and recruited for some of the best known corporate, public, private and third sector organisations for Senior Executive positions up to Board Level. Cynthia has sat on executive recruitment panels as an independent advisor to help facilitate an unbiased recruitment process. She has vast experience of recruiting for senior level appointments within Charitable organisations.
Cynthia strives to create a positive impact from diversity and inclusion initiatives and has personally written articles for the Voice Newspaper and LGBT History Month and Black History Month on the topic.
BAME Recruitment is a Brand Partner of Women in the City, working with them to empower the next generation of female leaders across all sectors of employment. In addition, Cynthia is on the judging panel of the Future Leaders Award Symposium, a movement that identifies and highlights the careers of women who work in the City, a cause that is very dear to her heart. Cynthia is also a Judge for the prestigious Recruitment Awards.
Cynthia is a mentor to young adults and 11-18 year-olds via the Stephen Lawrence Trust Mentorship Programme. She is a public speaker committed to improving equal opportunities for people from all walks of life by encouraging and motivating the next generation of leaders. Cynthia is determined not to allow perceived obstacles stand in their way.
A fellow of St Georges College Leadership Fellowship in Windsor, Cynthia is also Chair of the Board for Pop Up, a social enterprise that focuses on creating a society where reading, writing and storytelling are widely valued, enjoyed, practiced and celebrated. They work in collaboration with educational, literary and cultural organisations to enable children, empower teachers, and engage families from all walks of life to read more widely, write more creatively, and develop visual storytelling skills.
Awards: - Inclusive Companies Awards – ‘Highly Commended’ recipient – Consultancy of the Year 2019
- International Divas of Colour Awards – Winner - Influencer of the Year 2018
- Rising Stars Top 100 (We Are the City Awards/Sunday Times) - Winner – Entrepreneur 2017
- ZIWA Awards – Winner - Professional Woman of the Year 2016
- National Diversity Awards –Nominee – Entrepreneur 2017
- European Diversity Awards – Finalist – Diversity Champion 2017
- Precious Women Awards – Finalist – New Start Up Business 2016
David is a Senior Investment Director with over 20 years’ experience in venture, seed and scale-up investing.
David has a demonstrable track record of investing in a range of sectors including software, media and consumer technologies, marketplaces, SaaS and business services. David has extensive Board experience helping the founders he has backed to achieve their goals. David was previously Investor Director at Edge Investments and ElderstreetInvestments.
Prior to working in venture capital, David worked for ten years in corporate finance and strategy consulting at Deloitte and KPMG.
Dr. Hudd has been central to many important technology developments over the last 30 years in the field of digital and inkjet printing, reflecting over 250 patents to his name and recognised for many commercial industry successes. His career to date has spanned over four decades in developing new disruptive technologies, including over thirty years in commercialising industrial inkjet technology. Dr.Hudd was a key inventor of the fundamental pioneering uv cure inkjet patents that today underpin a number of the current important industrial inkjet applications. In 1996, Dr. Hudd founded Xennia Technology as an inkjet consultancy firm that went on under his leadership to become the world leading industrial inkjet integrator with uniquely recognised capabilities from chemistry through software to engineering. Dr. Hudd sold Xennia to Royal TenCate in 2008. In 2014, Dr. Hudd founded Alchemie Technology with the goal of transforming the environmental footprint of the textile industry.
Eleanor is the Chief Executive Officer at Luminance. Previously a Director at leading cyber-AI company Darktrace, she founded and grew the company’s operations in Africa before serving as Global Head of the Darktrace Industrial Division. A seasoned leader in scaling high-growth technology businesses, Eleanor has driven Luminance’s global expansion and led the company’s $75 million Series C funding round in 2025. She was named in Management Today’s ‘35 Women under 35’, the Financial Times’ ‘Ones To Watch’ list, and serves on Luminance’s Board of Directors.
Gemma joined All Seas Capital in 2020, initially as a Managing Director, and is now a Partner and Head of Investor Relations.
Before joining All Seas, Gemma spent nearly a decade at MML Capital Partners, where she initially served as a member of the investment team before taking on responsibility for fundraising and investor relations. She began her career at BDO and later moved to PwC in corporate finance. Gemma is a graduate of the University of Leicester.
Previously, Ms. Kong was an independent advisor to private equity firms and large corporates. Ms. Kong was formerly the Managing Partner at Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s advisory and consulting services. Prior to that, Ms. Kong was an Associate Director at EY’s transaction advisory services and an Executive Advisor at KPMG’s deal advisory team. Ms. Kong is a trustee of the Rosetrees Trust, a charitable foundation that has supported cutting-edge medical research for over 30 years. She also serves on the Risk & Audit Committee of The Biochemical Society, a global community founded in 1911, representing the breadth of the molecular biosciences. Ms. Kong earned her B.Sc. in Business Information Technology and M.Com. in International Business from the University of New South Wales. She is also a qualified accountant (ACCA).
International scale-up and growth leader with a passion for creating safe spaces and developing future leaders. Currently pursuing an MBA at Warwick Business School on a scholarship from the 30% Club for inspiring women in business. Kate has experience in leading M&A across industries, in particular in start up and growth stage businesses, building high performance leadership teams. She has won over 30 awards, including HR most influential and Mogul top 100 CHRO's.
In her spare time, she provides consulting services through the Agile HR community and has supported high profile businesses including Netflix, GSK, BMW and more.
Lizzie partners with LDC portfolio company management teams to deliver operational improvement, integration and carve out projects.
Lizzie has over twenty years’ experience supporting a wide range of companies deliver their strategic priorities with a focus on synergies, integration and carve outs. She has extensive experience in delivering complex change programmes, managing risks and enhancing value whilst working collaboratively with management teams to focus not just on the financial and delivery aspects of any change programme but also the softer skills side including employee engagement and culture.
Lizzie joined LDC from Cortus Advisory, where she established a mid-market integration and separation advisory practice. Prior to this, Lizzie was at KPMG where she was a Partner in their Deal Execution Strategy team.
Lizzie holds a BA in Modern Languages from Durham University and an MBA from the Alliance Manchester Business School.
Max is the Director of Strategy at Monzo where he has played a pivotal role in its growth from under 500,000 customers to the UK's leading neobank with 12 million+ customers over the last 7 years. Key contributions include spearheading international expansion strategy, strategic partnerships, and launching Monzo's Wealth division. At Monzo, he also has served as Head of Investor Relations and Chief of Staff to the CEO. He is also a Venture Scout Partner at Andrena Ventures and previously founded a B2B fintech startup as well as worked in M&A at J.P. Morgan.
Prash works across LDC’s national portfolio partnering with management teams to deliver data strategies and analytics use-cases that generate insights, commercial value, and operational efficiencies.
He joined LDC from Condor Flugdienst, a private equity backed airline, where he was interim Data Director. Prior to this he worked in data focused leadership roles across privately owned and private equity backed businesses, after a consulting career at Newton Europe. He has experience defining and delivering value creation plans across sectors including Business Services, Industrials, Technology, Healthcare & Retail.
Prash has a Masters degree in Physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Nuclear Waste Disposal from the University of Cambridge.
Outside of work he can be found enjoying the Welsh coastline, subjecting his wife to his cooking, and wheezing at the gym.
Rachel Stockey is Head of Entrepreneurial Skills at the Entrepreneurship Institute at King’s College London where she’s responsible for helping staff, students, and alumni to develop entrepreneurial skills and mindsets. Rachel also oversees the support for early-stage ventures to help new founders go from idea to first customers. Outside of King’s Rachel is the Founder of The Disruptive Realm, a training and coaching company focused on supporting the humans behind startups and upskilling the start up ecosystem around Founder Wellbeing and Mental Health.
Terry leads the Entrepreneur Sector for S&W and his passion centres around working with privately owned entrepreneurial and family businesses.
Terry specialises in working with owners and senior stakeholders of privately run businesses, helping them to structure their businesses and/or personal wealth, protect their assets, undertake next generation planning, incentivise their staff and work alongside them in all aspect of their business and personal growth journey.
Terrys experience centres around providing holistic support to private clients and their business interests. Terry has over 20 years' experience supporting business owners and key stakeholders through all stages of their business's life cycle, whether it be starting up, scaling, retention and recruitment of talent via the use of tax efficient employee incentives, through to strategic acquisitions and subsequent exits events.
Toby Tallon provides tax advice to around 40 families in respect of their personal affairs, trusts and businesses. His focus is helping business-owning families with success and succession and heads S&W’s private tax entrepreneurs and private business team. This includes entrepreneurs seeking to grow and successfully sell their businesses, often to reinvest into the next venture, and families planning to improve and pass on the family business to the next generation. Toby is a chartered tax adviser and chartered accountant with over 20 years’ experience.
