Female Founders Day: Peer Power

Babita Devi is an experienced coach and mentor with over 30 years of expertise in driving growth across various business domains, such as business development, strategic marketing, and commercialisation. Her extensive interaction with numerous business owners and founders is the foundation of her program, The Alignment Accelerator. This program is based on the idea that personal and business growth are interconnected, leading to inevitable success when they align.

Early in her career, Babita excelled in Enterprise Resource Planning, constructing pipelines for average sales of £1 million through well-defined strategies with measurable outcomes. She quickly progressed into management in her early 20s and went on to join the world’s largest optics company. There, she played a pivotal role in European Marketing, focusing on brand strategy, communications development, and implementation planning. Babita believes that effective marketing acts as the driving force behind all business areas.

Founding bStrategic in Australia in 2003, Babita’s focus on strategic marketing led to her transition into a Coach and Mentor role. Returning to the UK in 2006, she continued supporting large corporates and early-stage ventures across various sectors, including games, party, licensing, gaming, health and med tech, software, and education. Her tech venture in 2015 contributed to shaping The Alignment Accelerator, which helps founders understand the relationship between personal growth and business success.

Babita collaborates with multiple organisations as a Coach and Mentor, including Barclays Eagle Labs, Raising Starts, and Oxford Innovation Space. Alongside her business efforts, she has shared insights through lectures on entrepreneurial marketing for MBA and Business Studies students. Babita mentors the Masters in Entrepreneurship students at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, advises early-stage companies in Edtech and Games, and serves as an Advisor to a Venture Capital fund.

She’s also a Non-Executive Director for the Global Entrepreneurs Network UK, connecting entrepreneurs from 200 countries.

Babita’s enthusiasm lies in connecting people, fostering strategic partnerships, and cultivating networks of innovators, thinkers, and change-makers.

Ann is Head of Practice at the Entrepreneurship Centre working across the Accelerate, Ignite, Venture Creation and Envision programmes. Prior to joining the Centre, she was Enterprise Programme Director at the Scottish Institute for Enterprise, working across all Scottish Universities and Colleges to kickstart and support entrepreneurship and innovation.

Her areas of interest include helping new founders develop a purpose led venture, identifying, and working with company values and prototyping and iterating into your value proposition. She is also a certified Design Futurist and Foresight Practitioner with expertise in helping ventures design and operate resilient, sustainable, and innovative business models.

Diana is a data science leader focused on empowering organisations to unlock business impact and value by leveraging data, analytics and models to deliver insights and drive decision-making. Diana is passionate about building teams across data disciplines and skill sets, and believes in investing in teams’ learning and development through coaching and mentoring.

Diana’s experience spans multiple industries, including tech (Deliveroo and Monzo), banking (Goldman Sachs and Barclays) and insurance (AIG and Aviva), multiple geographies (North America, Europe and Latin America) as well as the private sector, public sector (The World Bank), consulting (The Boston Consulting Group) and academia. Diana also holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics. She has lived in Argentina, the US and the UK and has working experience in the US and the UK.

Mainda grew up in East Africa before moving to England. She is an International Law and Business graduate with over 15 years of product management and marketing experience in multinational companies and startups covering various industries including publishing and education; professional services, shopping television, retail, travel, and the public sector. Currently, she is working in a computer vision and 3D tech company focused on the fashion industry.

Mainda is passionate about working with entrepreneurs, makers and young people to help build successful ventures. Using her skills and expertise in commercial, technology and intellectual property management, she has been supporting students and entrepreneurs through programmes at Cambridge Judge Business School. The former The Queen’s Young Leaders Programme and other community engagement initiatives covering girls’ education, trade, bio-innovation and food security in Africa.

Emily joined Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) and Cambridge University Health Partners as the Business Engagement and Clinical Innovation Lead in April 2022.

Emily’s role is to translate research and innovation into the NHS. Prior to this, Emily worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge in organic chemistry and machine learning. She previously obtained a Master’s from the University of York and a PhD from the University of Leeds. Emily has also held a European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) fellowship and conducted research into rare forms of cancer at pharmaceutical charity LifeArc.

Bingbing is a multi-faceted Entrepreneur, Business executive, Investor and Mentor. She Managed >£20b and led mergers & acquisitions of hundreds of millions £s in the Energy industry. Led ambitious growth agenda of Renewables businesses as CFO.

Built a multi-million £ property business funded by investors. Holds non-executive board directorship of an early year education start-up with scale-up plan to £100mln valuation within 5 years.

Makes space for quality time with her husband and two boys. She confesses, “it was not always like this. In 2015, I went through a personal low driven by the challenges of motherhood and work commitment as senior executive in a large corporate. That pushed me to build my own high-yield real estate business and achieved personal & professional break-through from a successful albeit single-dimensioned career to an inspired and yet multi-faceted life, with a sharp purpose on climate.” She is now on a mission to help start-ups that seek to build profitable scalable businesses while benefiting our planet. Executive Experiences Highlight. Highest profit in one transaction of >£400mln.

Extensive network in the New Energies industry among technical and commercial leaders Real Estate Start-up. Founded property business that creates high-end co- living accommodations filling a gap in Cambridgeshire.

Return on Equity > 25% with revenue growth of >20% year on year 5 years in a row Mentorship Success.

Hosted educational seminars to >1000s of attendees on scaling while sustaining profitability. Mentored entrepreneurs who built own profitable business via acquisitions within 9-12 months.

Farnaz is currently a consultant at Deloitte’s London office and prior to that was a consultant based in McKinsey’s Istanbul office.

Farnaz specializes in Life Sciences with 11 years of combined research and consulting experience. Farnaz has management consulting experience leading corporate and business unit strategy, digital transformation, big data strategy, operating model transformation, organizational model redesign, capability design, productivity improvement, business process re-engineering, and business case development for clients. Farnaz primarily focuses on clients in the Healthcare Life sciences space, namely the pharmaceutical sector.

Farnaz also has experience serving clients in other industries including: medical device, retail, financial services, consumer packaged goods, nonprofit and the international public sector. Her strong soft skills and work experience at a global level has enabled her to engage with teams and clients at all levels.

Farnaz is an active volunteer at United Nations developing partnership and communications strategy for the community hospital construction and operations. She also initiated and currently leads the Next Generation Women in Leadership at Deloitte with the mission of empowering females in becoming future leaders and reducing existing gender gap.