From Lab to Exit: building breakthrough companies from your research
The Alan Turing Institute hosted a seminar titled ‘From Lab to Exit: building breakthrough companies from your research’ on 30th August 2018 in London. The world has woken up to the breakthrough potential of companies built on deep research and technology foundations. Investors have moved on from the “mobile app du jour” and are now partnering with researchers with “the right stuff” to build companies with real impact.
Hosted by Dr Adrian Weller, Programme Director for Artificial Intelligence, and Turing Fellow at the Institute, startup founders Thomas Stone of AI Seed, Guillaume Bouchard of Bloomsbury AI (Facebook); Ed Challis of re:Infer; Jenny Griffiths of Snap Tech and Katerina Spranger of Oxford Heartbeat joined moderator Azeem Azhar of Kindred Capital in sharing their individual journeys from research to being a startup founder and beyond. The investors perspective came from Leila Zegna of Kindred Capital.
About the speakers
Adrian Weller
Dr Adrian Weller is Programme Director for Artificial Intelligence at The Alan Turing Institute. Adrian is also a senior researcher in the Machine Learning Group at the University of Cambridge, advised by Prof Zoubin Ghahramani. He received a PhD in computer science (machine learning) at Columbia University, advised by Prof Tony Jebara. He is an active angel investor and advisor, and previously held senior roles in investing and trading at Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers and Citadel. Most of his academic research relates to graphical models but he is also very interested in other areas including: finance, anything on intelligence (natural or artificial), deep learning, reinforcement learning, evolution, Bayesian methods, time series analysis, ethics, music and methods for big data.
Leila Zegna
Leila cofounded Kindred Capital in March 2015. Kindred is an early stage venture capital fund based in London that practices equitable venture.
Prior to setting up Kindred, Leila helped start, advise, and grow startups since leaving Bain & Company back in 2007. She has worked with start-ups across 3 continents – Argentina (through the Endeavor network), the UK, and across both coasts of the United States.
After earning her MBA from Harvard Business School, Leila moved to Silicon Valley to work in the beating heart of the tech ecosystem. Leila is passionate about supporting women leaders, and specifically finding ways to enable women to work on their own terms – she followed that passion to Plum District (a Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst backed daily deals company focusing on the mom space) and joined as the General Manager.
Leila left Plum District to join the founding team GenapSys, a groundbreaking genomics startup based in Menlo Park. As the sole business hire for the first 2+ years, Leila was responsible for building the business and operating plans, creating and refining the financial model, and leading the fundraising efforts, successfully raising $50M in venture capital from top investors in seed, Series A, and Series B rounds of financing. The team grew from just a small few to over 50 people under Leila’s leadership.
Leila has angel investments in 18 early stage companies in both Silicon Valley and the UK, where she now resides. She is an active advisor to several others, and always looking for new ways to engage with and support great founders.
Jenny Griffiths
Jenny is the founder and CEO of Snap Fashion, and a software engineer turned entrepreneur. She started Snap Fashion in 2009, after graduating from with a Masters of Engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of Bristol.
She specialises in Computer Vision, C++, and turning ideas and reactions into products. Her main goal is to change product discovery, and monetise the Internet in more creative and less invasive ways.
Jenny was awarded an MBE for Services to Innovation in the Digital Fashion Industry, was the British Council’s Creative Entrepreneur of the Year in 2014, and speaks at events on fashion technology and entrepreneurship.
Katerina Spranger
Dr Katerina Spranger is the founder of Oxford Heartbeat (www.oxfordheartbeat.com) – a start-up company that develops medical device software to make planning for surgeries simpler, faster and more accurate. Katerina is an Enterprise Fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering and holds DPhil in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford. She was named “Young Innovator of the Year 2013” at the Falling Walls Berlin – International Conference on Future Breakthrough in Science and Society.
Her company successfully attracted funding from the Innovate UK, NIHR, SBRI, EIT Health, etc., and received numerous awards for their innovative technology, including the NHS Innovation Award 2017 from HEE and WIRED “Best Healthcare Startup of 2018″.
Guillaume Bouchard
Guillaume Bouchard is the co-founder and CEO of Bloomsbury AI since 2015. Previously, he was a researcher in machine learning and natural language processing for 15 years: 3 years at INRIA, 11 years at Xerox Research and 1 year at UCL.
About The Alan Turing Institute
The Institute is named in honour of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering and computing is considered to have laid the foundations for modern-day data science and artificial intelligence. The Institute’s goals are to undertake world-class research in data science and artificial intelligence, apply its research to real-world problems, driving economic impact and societal good, lead the training of a new generation of scientists, and shape the public conversation around data.
For further information visit https://www.turing.ac.uk/
