PORTFOLIO SUPPORT
Mentors & Advisors
We recognise the nuanced opportunities and challenges that will arise for our portfolio companies as they scale, so we're building a network of accomplished mentors and advisors able to provide tailored assistance.
People & Teams
Roxana is an experienced global leader, with a laser focus on talent development and company performance. She has spent more than 20 years in HR, in FMCG, Pharma and Edtech. Roxana is currently Chief People Officer at Commercetools, a company focused on the future of commerce, that raised $140M from Accel and Insight Partners in 2021. Prior to this, Roxana spent several successful years as Chief People Officer at Labster, an innovative Edtech company with a global footprint (HQ in Denmark with a larger majority of enterprise customers in the US). Labster has raised >$150M. She scaled Labster from 120 employees to 450 employees in 12 months.
Roxana is an expert in building company culture, forming best practice playbooks, managing sustainable team growth during and following raises and scaling international teams.
Jessica has spent more than 15 years as a recruiter and HRD. She has been Chief People Officer at 3 different organisations, building teams from the ground up, forming the team architecture, designing hiring processes and forming the cultural backbone of the organisations. This work includes helping to scale Ornikar, a Brighteye portfolio company that raised >$170M. Jessica is currently Partner and Chief People Officer at Bloomays People, an organisation founded to support People teams to operate more effectively across all areas of the function.
Jessica is an expert in sourcing and enticing tech talent, building international teams and scaling the People function of businesses.
International expansion
Erika is Head of Expansion at On Deck, leading their expansion efforts and supporting their global community of Fellows. Prior to that, Erika was founding team member and director at the European accelerator The Family, where she joined as first employee back in 2013, then grew the company with the founders for 7 years. At The Family, she got to play a key role in building the French tech ecosystem. One of her main missions was to grow their international network of investors, founders and advisors (US & Europe). Erika has been working with early stage founders for nearly a decade, and her specialties include fundraising, education, and community building.
Marketing
Sophia is a start-up to scale-up mentor who’s highly experienced in working with fast growth SaaS/AI ventures, ensuring value creation through developing + executing growth strategy/investment readiness/series A fundraising/mentor (£5-20M). She works with ambitious high growth leadership teams and brands where innovation is at the core. She’s also spent years in the marketing engine room designing and building marketing tech stacks to genuinely improve customer journeys and optimise marketing funnels and conversion rates driving CLV. Further, she’s built teams and supporting ecosystems of growth hackers, digital marketers and data scientists who forensically mapped data captures, as well as implemented new CRMs and analytics tools to enable true data centric capabilities not just for marketing, but cross functionally by providing data points, analytics and insight for leaders in sales, product, client success, finance, HR, IT etc. Her true passion is to deploy her commercial knowledge - customer insight coupled with market trends and analysis helping commercial leaders to sell more and assist product architects to build new innovative products and concepts with a purpose - to make difference to consumers, businesses and ultimately our society.
Learning product design
Kirsten is the former Chief Learning Officer at Busuu, where she worked for 7 years as part of the Senior Leadership Team. Busuu was acquired by Chegg for $436 million in 2022. Overall she has spent 22 years working across the edtech industry, including for startups such as EduMe and Busuu to large global businesses such as Pearson. She has spent many years consulting with various education businesses wishing to expand their digital offerings, including the University of Law, the BBC and EtonX. Her specialism is language learning and she holds an MSc in Applied Linguistics from Oxford University and has written several textbooks on language learning for Harper Collins.
Advisory areas:
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Launching and growing B2C subscription-based mobile apps
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Language learning
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The application of AI and machine learning to Edtech apps
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Content and pedagogy
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Finding product-market-fit in Edtech