Paul Thwaite

CEO, NatWest Group

Paul was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of NatWest Group in July 2023. Prior to becoming Group Chief Executive, he was Chief Executive of the bank’s Commercial & Institutional business, bringing together the teams that support NatWest’s business customers, ranging from entrepreneurs and start-ups through to multi-nationals and financial institutions. He has over 30 years’ experience in financial services having held senior roles within Wholesale, Corporate, International, Risk and Retail Banking, across the UK, Europe and US.

Jenny Edwards

Head of Venture Banking, NatWest

Jenny Edwards is the Head of Venture Banking at NatWest, responsible for leading the bank’s strategy to accelerate support for the UK’s most innovative and fast‑scaling businesses. With over a decade of experience at J.P. Morgan, Jenny brings deep expertise in building and scaling sector‑focused banking propositions, particularly across healthcare, life sciences, and technology.

Joining NatWest after successfully developing and leading J.P. Morgan’s healthcare and life sciences business across the Western United States, Jenny supported clients ranging from early‑stage start-ups to IPO‑ready companies, providing comprehensive cash management and funding solutions tailored to their growth trajectories.

At NatWest, Jenny plays a central role in advancing the bank’s commitment to the UK’s Innovation Economy, a strategic focus area comprising sectors such as fintech, life sciences, and other technology‑driven fields. She leads a future‑focused team dedicated to supporting businesses that have raised institutional investment, offering tailored banking solutions for companies and venture capital firms while strengthening NatWest’s ecosystem-wide support.

Jenny works closely with NatWest’s Accelerators, Open Innovation teams, and Coutts to ensure entrepreneurs and high-growth firms receive fully integrated support throughout their journey, from ideation and investment to scaling and exit planning.

Nicky Goulimis

CEO, Tunic Pay

Nicky Goulimis is the co-founder and CEO of Tunic Pay (scam prevention in payments) and previously of Nova Credit (underwriting the thin file population). Tunic Pay works with banks in the UK (including Lloyds, NatWest, Chase) to break the spell of scams and accelerate the processing of genuine payments, and has been recognised as a leading AI solution across the industry.

As cofounder of these organizations, Nicky has built partnerships with & products for banks including HSBC, American Express, and Chase, and raised over $170M from investors including General Catalyst, Flourish Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Y Combinator and many more. She is most proud of serving millions of end consumers.

Nicky is from Greece originally and grew up in the U.K. She holds a BA from Cambridge (1st Class) and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was awarded the Miller Social Change Leadership Award.

Dr. John Baker

CEO, IMU Biosciences

Dr. John Baker is Chief Executive Officer of IMU Biosciences, where he is leading the company’s mission to harness AI-driven immune profiling to unlock breakthroughs in precision medicine. Before joining IMU in 2024, John spent eight years at Abcam as part of the Executive Team, guiding the company through rapid global expansion and its $5.7B acquisition by Danaher. Trained as a veterinarian at Cambridge and holding a DPhil in Clinical Medicine from Oxford, he has published on innate immunity and brings deep scientific and leadership experience from roles at Bain & Company and as a Non-Executive Director in biotech.

Elena Moneta

Balderton Capitol

Elena is a Principal on Balderton’s Growth team, which she joined in early 2024. She started her career in venture capital 8 years ago and has since invested across stages from Seed to Growth. She covers a broad range of sectors, with recent investments spanning deep tech, healthcare, and cybersecurity.

In addition to her investing experience, Elena brings operational expertise from her time as Head of Growth at former portfolio company Peppy Health. She began her career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in London, where she worked on 20+ IPOs and large-scale capital markets transactions, shaping her analytical and data-driven approach.

Elena holds a Master’s in Management from ESCP Europe and an MBA from INSEAD. She speaks Italian, English, German, and French.

Shamillah Bankiya

Dawn Capital

Shamillah is a Partner at Dawn Capital, where she leads the firm’s investments in AI, infrastructure and automation, and has become a go-to name across the European AI ecosystem. With a razor-sharp eye for early-stage opportunities and deep conviction in founders solving complex technical problems, she’s led some of Dawn’s most exciting investments, including Blackwall, an AI security leader; Runware, an AI inference platform; Qogita, Europe’s largest B2B marketplace; Fonoa, the AI-native tax solution for global businesses; Lokalise, the AI-powered localisation platform; and Ably, the real-time developer infrastructure pioneer.

Shamillah’s investment lens is simple: find the frontier, then back the founders bold enough to tackle it. Whether it’s AI-native infrastructure, high-scale developer platforms, or complex marketplace models, she brings relentless curiosity, operator empathy and a thesis-driven approach to every boardroom and founder conversation.

Shamillah joined Dawn in 2020 from the SoftBank Vision Fund, where she helped launch the London office and focused on software and healthcare investments, serving on two boards including Roivant, which IPO-ed for $7b on the NASDAQ. Earlier in her career, she built data products for Fortune 500 companies at Bain & Company, and also founded a labour-matching startup in the B2B space.

A Yale graduate (Economics, Mathematics & African Studies, Honours), Shamillah was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and Business Insider’s 34 Rising Stars of European Tech. As a Partner at Dawn, Shamillah is one of the youngest women to reach that title in venture capital.

Seb Johnson

Founder, Scaling Europe

Seb is the Founder of Scaling Europe – a new media organisation focused on European Tech. His content is generating over 10m impressions a month, and he has a series of newsletters read by over 40k people a week.

He hosts a regular podcast where he interviews Europe’s leading founders and investors including Matt Miller, Harry Stebbings, Anton Osika, Mati Staniszewski, Martin Mignot.

His content generated 50m impressions last year and we was recently named as “One of the 14 people in European Tech that mattered in 2025” as well as one of “The 12 people to watch in 2026” by Sifted.