Accelerate Cambridge mentors

Robyn Baker is a strategy, operations and transformation leader in pharmaceuticals and global public health. She specialises in strategy development, impact and outcome measurements, and how you place your idea in the broader health economy. Robyn has spent eight years at Astellas, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, in transformation, regional corporate planning and medical operations. She has spent 10 years in Accenture Life Sciences in New York and London specialising in commercialisation strategy, target product profile development and operational excellence. She was the founding member of the strategy and operations team at the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), a spin-off of the World Health Organization devoted to lowering the price of HIV medicines in low- and middle-income countries. At the MPP, Robyn led a $26M grant proposal from UNITAID to fund four years of operations. Robyn in a candidate for an EMBA degree at Cambridge Judge Business School. She resides in Cambridge.

Senior operations and strategy leader with nearly two decades of experience in the global medical technology sector, including leadership roles at Smith & Nephew, ConvaTec, and DePuy Synthes. Experienced in driving operational scale-up, new product introductions, and cross-functional transformation across global manufacturing and supply chain networks. Currently leading upstream operations strategy for a ~$600M global orthopaedics portfolio, aligning commercial growth plans with manufacturing, supply chain, and capital investment strategies across sites in North America, Europe, and Asia. Proven track record of delivering complex transformation initiatives, including portfolio optimisation, network strategy development, and integrated long- range planning. Deep expertise in building robust business cases, evaluating make-vs-buy decisions, and supporting mergers and acquisitions through operational due diligence and value creation planning; led major operational programs including regulatory-driven product transitions, manufacturing performance improvement, and the establishment of project governance frameworks across global operations. Began career in R&D engineering, leading the design and development of orthopaedic implants and surgical instruments supporting global product launches. Prior experience also includes managing high-visibility field actions, working and leading teams across R&D, Regulatory and Quality.

Phil Clements, CFA, CAIA, FDP, is the CPO of Goodfolio, an enterprise AI platform designed for the applied AI era. Phil is also CEO of Finspector (a Goodfolio company), the AI-powered compliance tool that enables financial services firms to manage, review, and approve financial promotions with speed, precision, and confidence. As CEO, Phil is responsible for defining and executing the firm’s strategic direction and senior client relationships. Prior to founding Finspector, Phil held senior roles at Bloomberg Index Services, where he managed client relationships across the UK, Ireland, and Switzerland, and served as the firm’s first EMEA Asset Owner Team member. He also worked as an Associate Director at Record Financial Group in New York and London, an alternative asset management firm, where he was responsible for a range of investment solutions including global macro strategies, alternative credit, and FX risk management. Phil holds the CFA, CAIA, and FDP charters. He is a board adviser to the Collaborative Women in Investment Management (WIM) Alliance, serves as a chapter executive for CAIA UK, and sits on the Steering Committee of CFA Society UK. He earned an MPhys from the University of Manchester and a PGCE from Birmingham City University.

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.

Martin is an accomplished Design & Innovation Strategist with a wealth of experience creating commercially successful product and service solutions for world-leading healthcare and consumer brands, bringing value and differentiation to clients and users.

Passionate about realising the potential of innovation through combining Design Thinking and cutting-edge technology, translating complex social, technical, economic, and environmental problems into simple, actionable solutions.

Strongly believes in the role of creativity and collaboration in problem-solving, offering novel insights into how to innovate, where to focus, and what new strategies, products, processes, and systems to develop.

Thrives in multidisciplinary teams, leveraging diverse perspectives and skills, with extensive experience providing leadership and strategy at senior levels within organisations.

Term Sheets: Chris will provide an overview of the key elements of a typical fundraising term sheet.

Chris is a partner and head of the emerging companies’ team at Mishcon de Reya. He has over a decade of experience advising early stage and fast growth businesses, particularly in the technology sector.

Chris practices both as a corporate lawyer and commercial and IP specialist and splits his time between offices in the golden triangle of UK innovation; Cambridge (where he lives), London, and Oxford. Mishcon de Reya’s market-leading technology practice advises on over 150 fundraising transactions every year, acting for both growth companies and angel, venture capital and corporate investors.

I am a Senior Product Leader with over 9 years of experience building and scaling SaaS, AI, cybersecurity, and data-driven platforms across organisations such as TeamViewer, Arete IR, and FactSet. Currently, I lead product initiatives in Digital Employee Experience (DEX), focusing on data platforms, observability, and AI-driven automation to improve enterprise performance and reliability. My work has consistently delivered measurable impact, including improving platform accuracy, increasing feature adoption, and driving operational efficiencies across complex systems. My experience spans the full product lifecycle—from early-stage ideation and MVP development to scaling enterprise-grade products. I have worked extensively in complex and regulated environments, focusing on workflow optimisation, system design, and translating ambiguous business challenges into structured, customer-centric solutions. Alongside my product leadership role, I am passionate about mentoring and developing talent, and I enjoy helping individuals build clarity in their thinking, strengthen execution skills, and grow into confident product leaders.

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.

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.

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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 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.

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Dr Sarah Mardle is a seasoned leader with extensive experience in healthcare, from scaling start-ups to executive roles in multinational organisations.

After many decades in the industry, she founded Alma Business Consulting to empower entrepreneurs through tailored consultancy and coaching, combining strategic insight with hands-on expertise.

A certified coach and dedicated mentor, Sarah contributes to the University of Cambridge’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, supporting programmes like Cambridge Judge Business School’s Ignite and Accelerate. Her passion for fostering resilience and leadership in entrepreneurship is grounded in a career marked by innovation and sustainable growth.

Andrew is a chartered accountant with extensive experience of accountancy, audit, and advisory services, from over 25 years of working at national accountancy firms. Since 2025, Andrew is a partner at a regional accountancy practice based in Cambridge.

Over his career, Andrew has worked alongside a wide range of businesses, from founder led ventures to multi-national groups, across a variety of sectors, most notably life sciences and technology. Over recent years, his focus has increasingly been on those early-stage businesses which seek Angel and Institutional funding, supporting them with their growth plans and compliance requirements, often in preparation for significant Series A investment rounds and audit readiness.

Charles Nixon has 40 years experience in marketing and growing companies. He has successfully navigated through 3 major recessions and 2 tech booms. And has worked in textiles; telecommunications; software; data processing; financial services and education, working for Courtaulds, IWS, Accenture , Mercury communications, Extel and Societe General. His specialism is marketing and strategy; encompassing market research ( founding one of the UK’s first computerised marketing intelligence systems), market planning; marcomms; new product launches; branding and strategy.

He co-founded a consultancy and Fintech startup in the 1980s and then founded Cambridge Marketing College in 1991, growing it to a dominant position in its sector before retiring in 2016 to run a publishing venture and establish his foundation.

He is an author of numerous articles and textbooks on marketing. He is a visiting lecturer in marketing and innovation. He is also vice chair of trustees for the Cromwell Museum. Charles has a degree in Modern History and Economics from Manchester University and an MBA from Warwick Business School. He is on the Advisory Panel of Harvard Business Review, a Fellow of the Royal Society of arts, an advisor for Astia and a Chartered marketer. In 2017 he was voted one of the most influential businessmen in Cambridge.

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Pav is a highly respected patent attorney with over 25 years’ experience. He is a Partner based in Venner Shipley’s Cambridge office and is the firm’s former Managing Partner.

Pav specialises in high tech fields covering electronics, communications and software including AI and machine learning, and quantum technologies.

He played a central role in Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) G1/19 (Pedestrian Simulation) which is the most authoritative case on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions at the EPO, and for which he won the Managing IP award for European Impact Case of the Year in 2022.

Pav advises universities, start-ups and multinational corporations on IP and IP strategy.

He regularly speaks on IP in the UK and around the world and is a contributor to the TenU USIT Guide for Software 2024. He has been recognised as a leading individual by the Legal 500, Managing IP, IAM Patent 1000, IAM Strategy 300, and JUVE UK Patent.

I’m Chief Product Officer at Waggel, one of the UK’s fastest growing pet insurtechs, where I lead product, technology, and delivery across a digital, customer-focused insurance business supporting over 200,000 customers. I’ve spent my career helping companies move from early ideas to scalable and sustainable products. At Waggel, I’ve supported the transition from start-up to scale-up, helping triple policy count, scale to over £1m in monthly premiums, and build products that balance commercial performance with genuinely better customer outcomes. My experience spans working across multiple regulated environments where I built and scaled systems by creating operating models that enable teams to move quickly without losing structure, or losing sight of whats important. I regularly work across product, engineering, data, operations, and finance to align priorities and make pragmatic trade offs. As a mentor, I’m particularly interested in supporting founders with: Navigating regulatory complexity ‘Work design’, shaping early systems and workflows Taking ideas from concept to MVP Prioritisation and decision making (when everything feels important) Building product thinking into teams and ways of working I care deeply about using technology in ways that genuinely improve customer experience without losing the human touch, particularly in complex or lower trust industries. Alongside my role, I founded Dead Product Society, a community of 2,500+ product people across the UK, and I’m currently completing an Executive MBA at Cambridge.

I have over 25 years of experience working in the deeptech industry and academia with high technology companies and in company cluster development. I hold Dr.Sc. in information systems science in computer games development. I started my real entrepreneurial journey setting up a sports software company back in 1999 innovating sports technology with sports industry partners (wearables with e.g. heart rate variability and training effect, wristop GPS for various sports) and smart phone applications which I exited successfully. Since then, I have been part of several startups and now running 3 companies (video games edutech, educational content production, ‘other stuff’). My current big project is running a video games related educational program for people between 18-25 with almost 100.000 participants in over 140 countries. I also maintain a great network of connections and have raised money and evaluated hundreds of SME grant applications for European Commission startup programs- Eureka for instance- and I am an adviser at Cambridge University Centre for Science and Policy.

Chris is an internationally recognised Company Director and Business Coach with a sustained record of achievement in global pharma, biotech, healthcare technology and management consultancy.

He was UK Sales and Marketing Director at AstraZeneca during a 20-year career and from 2002-2018 provided commercialization expertise and management consultancy to global pharma as Company Director at Oxford PharmaGenesis, an internationally renowned consultancy which was recognised by the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2015 and again in 2019.

Chris has practical hands-on experience in growing and shaping businesses of all sizes and at all stages — new or early ventures, SMEs or Big Pharma — and supporting them in realising commercial opportunities for scalable growth to achieve peak commercial success and maximum shareholder value.

He is currently providing private bespoke management coaching exclusively with CEOs and C-Suite Directors. He is also Mentor and Coach to Life Sciences Ventures at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and The Crick Institute London.

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Bálint Tóásó is a senior governance, legal and compliance executive with 20 years of cross-border experience advising boards and executive leadership in complex, high-stakes environments. A former KPMG Partner and board member, he built and led KPMG Law Hungary from inception to a 30+ team and co-led KPMG Law’s Global Data, Digital & Technology working group, scaling it to 100+ professionals across 30 jurisdictions. He has led sensitive escalations, investigations and disputes, and delivered risk-managed transformation, including firm-wide governance and global rollout of AI-enabled legal tools. Currently a Cambridge EMBA candidate, he is focusing on the intersection of technology, trust and decision-making, with particular interest in information integrity and misinformation, and in executive roles that combine strategic execution with responsible innovation.