The Mishcon Innovations Series: Recent Episodes
Bauer Media
Beginning a new business? Find out how some of the best business leaders started out. Each week The Mishcon Innovations Series dives into a different industry and asks our entrepreneurial leaders how they got there. With insights and inspiring conversation they reveal what worked, what went wrong, and how they fixed it. Perfect for budding entrepreneurs and steadfast businesspeople looking to access an entrepreneurial world. In association with Jazz Shapers and Mishcon de Reya.
Lydia Kellett is joined by Dr. Amber Hill, the founder and CEO of Research Grid. With a background in biomedical neuroscience and artificial intelligence, she has led clinical trials and research engagement at institutions like UCL, Harvard, and MIT. Prior to founding Research Grid, she also established a global non-profit supporting patient involvement in research.
After decades leading medical research, Dr. Hill experienced firsthand how repetitive, manual admin tasks slowed progress and delayed patient access to treatment. Recognising that the brightest minds in medicine were being bogged down by back-office inefficiencies, she set out to change it. An expert in both clinical research and AI, she began building a solution. In 2020, she founded Research Grid to automate the clinical trial back office and eliminate all manual admin, from patient sourcing to trial management.
As CEO, Dr. Hill is responsible for product vision, strategic partnerships, and team leadership. Her leadership is characterised by technical expertise, deep empathy for patients, and a mission-driven approach to innovation in healthcare. She continues to drive forward her vision to make clinical trials admin-free and bring modern infrastructure to medical research worldwide.
Peter Crane is the co-founder and CEO of Entelo Bio, a gene sequencing company combining cutting edge chemistry with machine learning to unlock transformative therapies for patients with chronic diseases. With a career spanning lab automation, biomanufacturing and cancer proteomics (and as an invester in hard science Start-ups), it was his frustration with existing genomic methods that drove Peter and his 3 academic co-founders to spin Entelo Bio out of Oxford University in 2023. Hungry to look at biology in a new way, their isoform sequencing platform aims to reduce the error rate and cost of long read single cell sequencing.
Ethan Fraenkel is the co-founder and CEO of Prograd, a fast-growing UK fintech platform empowering Gen Z to earn side income and improve their financial future. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Ethan moved to Tel Aviv at the age of 18, where he was first immersed in the world of tech and startups. At 20, he relocated to London, where he studied Law and Politics at Queen Mary University of London, before going on to complete a Master’s in Computer Science at University College London (UCL). This unique blend of legal, political, and technical expertise laid the foundation for his entrepreneurial journey. He spent three years at Cutover, a London and New York-based tech startup, where he gained hands-on experience being a software and cloud engineer in a high-growth environment. Ethan later co-founded Prograd to solve a problem he witnessed firsthand: helping young people earn more, gain financial independence, and build a stronger financial foundation. Today, Prograd serves over 1 millions users, driven by Ethan’s mission to close the opportunity gap for the next generation.
Bianca is the founder and CEO of Whering, the fashion app that allows you to digitise your wardrobe, see and style what you own. She is on a mission to upend the ‘buy, use, dispose’ model and use AI to help us make the most of the clothes we already own. Since Jan 2022, Bianca has grown Whering’s user base to over 8m users, raised >£4m and has been featured in Vogue, Harper’s, Forbes etc. She is fluent in five European languages and holds a first class Bachelor’s degree in History and Politics from SOAS & LSE as well as a Master’s degree in Management (Merit) from Imperial College Business School. Bianca spent the first 4.5 years of her career in Banking, first at Barclays Investment Management and then in Goldman Sachs’ consumer division in London. She is a board member of Imperial College’s Alumni Advisory board, the London Chapter President for Unite2030 and an UNLEASH 2019 & 2020 Global Talent. She is also a frequent TV, podcast and radio guest, recently appearing on Dragon’s Den, BBC radio etc. She’s been awarded the Women in the City award and Drapers30u30 and shortlisted for Tech innovator of the year (Drapers) and the Great British Entrepreneur awards.
Max Munford is the Founder and CEO at OSSTEC, the MedTech company on a mission to transform orthopaedic surgery through cutting-edge 3D printing technology. His role focuses on company vision, strategy and growing OSSTEC's team. Max has a passion for learning, growing the bounds of technology and for delivering impact across MedTech. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London, developing biomimetic 3D printing for use in orthopaedics. His work building OSSTEC earned him a place on the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2025 and his research has won awards across the field including places on some of Europe's best venture accelerator programs and executive education programs at Harvard Business School.
Lydia Kellett is joined by Lindsay Edwards, CTO and Head of Platform at Relation Therapeutics. Previously, Lindsay was VP and Head of AI for Respiratory and Immunology at AstraZeneca. Originally a specialist in systems biology, he joined GlaxoSmithKline in 2014 from the Physiology faculty at King’s College London. He started GSK’s first Data Science group, was Head of Respiratory Data Sciences, Global Head of Respiratory Digital, Data and Analytics, and then VP and Head of AI/ML for the UK and Europe before becoming VP of AI/ML Engineering. He holds a DPhil in Physiology from Oxford, is a scientific advisor to the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Centre at MIT, and has published more than 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Lydia Kellett is joined by Paul Beastall the CEO of HutanBio, a technology company on a mission to decouple long distance transportation from fossil fuels, with HBx, their zero carbon biofuel. After a decade of research and development, running the biggest screening of marine algae in history, Dr John Archer, Dr Noor Azlin Mokhtar and Suhaiza Jamhor founded HutanBio in 2019, aiming to harness the power of a 2-billion-year-old ancient organism (a new-to-science marine microalgae). Hutanbio are (as Paul says) a smart agriculture business, but rather than growing food, they're growing fuel. And fuel that can work with existing infrastructure to provide immediate carbon savings for the marine, aviation and heavy land transport sectors.
Lydia Kellett is joined by Robert Elding, the founder and CEO of MyStoryboarder, an AI-powered platform aiming to revolutionise visual storytelling for businesses, creatives, and marketers. With over 20 years’ experience founding and scaling innovative technology businesses across AI, and digital, Robert was often asked to create storyboards to visualise product development ideas. Sketching storyboards by hand was time-consuming and the advent of generative AI led Robert to explore if storyboards could be created in a faster, automated way. MyStoryboarder was launched in 2023, enabling you to turn ideas into visuals in minutes —without any design skills. Already trusted by major companies such as Google, IBM, and BP, Robert is currently developing the business in the AdTech space with the backing of Amazon AWS.
Tariq Rauf is the founder and CEO of Qatalog. An architect by training and mentored under renowned architect, Charles Correa. He worked on prestigious global projects, from Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon, Ismaili Centre in Toronto, Mahindra Research Valley in Chennai and the masterplan for the city of Goa. The experience was transformative, but his first passion was always software - beginning coding at the age of 6 and starting a software consultancy aged 16. In 2011, Tariq returned to his tech roots, eventually working with startups, scale-ups, and large tech companies, such as Wise and Amazon. Throughout these experiences he saw how disjointed work had become and built a deep desire to architect an entirely new category of software that made knowledge accessible, in a single, seamlessly connected platform. In 2019, he left Amazon to found Qatalog.
Oli Cook is the Co-Founder and CEO of ekko, a climate fintech on a mission to make positive planetary impact through financial transactions. A visionary leader in the financial services space with over 15 years of experience, Oli truly believes that the time for financial institutions to take action towards their sustainability goals is now, working with a variety of impact providers such as Tusk, Prevented Ocean Plastic, and Conservation International to do this. Oli co-founded ekko on the belief that finance can be a force for good, and ekko provides the tools to allow this belief to become a reality - building the bridge between economic and ecological well-being.
Christopher Kahler is the co-founder and CEO of Kinnu, a gamified learning app, designed to increase the rate of knowledge acquisition. Having sold his second business 'Qriously' (which used mobile apps to measure location-based public sentiment ) Chris and co-founder Abraham Müller were drawn again to their fascination with learning. Researching the science and stunned by the inefficiencies of current learning practices, they launched Kinnu in 2021, with 3rd co-founder Hanna Celina, aiming to create a next-generation learning experience combining cognitive science, neuroscience and deep gamification.
Lydia Kellett is joined by Charles Brecque, Founder and CEO of Legislate, the legal tech company creating machine readable contracts. Working in business development for an AI startup, Charles found too much of his time was spent processing contracts or waiting for lawyers to provide input. When these delays resulted in lost deals or lost opportunities he sought a solution to allow the business user to create and process contracts without getting the lawyers involved. Charles founded Legislate in April 2020, bringing structure to the unstructured data in contracts and making them machine readable using large language models and knowledge graphs.
Lydia Kellett is joined by Eshita Kabra-Davies, founder of peer to peer fashion rental app, By Rotation. Having witnessed the effects of textile waste while on honeymoon in Rajasthan, Eshita had an idea for how to bring about change. She launched By Rotation as a side project while working in finance. Her aim: to build a conscious, inclusive community that democratises fashion and doesn’t harm the planet. By Rotation is now the largest fashion rental platforming in the UK with over 400,000 active users, and they’ve expanded to the US with further global ambitions for the ‘shared wardrobe’.
Live from Cambridge, Lydia Kellett explores the Quantum Industry with Rebecca Simmons COO of Riverlane, the company aiming to unlock Quantum computing's full potential. Trained as an epidemiologist,studying patterns of health and illness in large groups of people with a focus on diabetes prevention, Rebecca's 10 years in the field took her to a senior role at the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit. But drawn to lead and motivate teams on a larger scale, Rebecca left academia to become Chief of Staff at Cambridge University's Vice Chancellor's Office and then co-founded This Institute, a £42m healthcare research institute at the University of Cambridge, building a team of 35 people in just one year. Riverlane was founded in 2016 by Steve Brierley with Rebecca joining in 2019. Now with offices in Cambridge, Boston and San Francisco, their secret weapon is Deltaflow.OS, an operating system for error corrected quantum computing.
Lydia Kellett talks to Richard Chambers, Founder of Get A Drip, the first UK high street Vitamin Drip and Booster Shot provider. Richard was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes on his 18th birthday. Three years later he was rushed into intensive care and his condition subsequently caused him to spend years in and out of hospital. Desperate to feel healthy and stable, Richard was inspired by his rejuvenating IV drip treatment. He decided these drips should be accessible to the general public, not just in hospitals or to the super wealthy. Get A Drip was launched in October 2017 and has since administered over 100,000 services in the UK and abroad.
We explore the HealthTech and FemTech industries, with host Lydia Kellett in conversation with Elena Rueda and Paulina Cecula, Co Founders of Dama Health, advancing the field of personalised and precision medicine with a focus on contraception fit. Passionate about the women's health space and the possibilities of precision medicine, Elena and Paulina were drawn to tackle the trial and error process of contraception prescription. 80% of women experience contraception side effects that decrease their quality of life and women try an average of four different methods before finding the right fit (if at all!). Elena and Paulina founded Dama Health in 2021 aiming to revolutionise the sector by using pharmacogenetic research, a genetic test and an automated matching system to find a personalised contraception system for everyone.
Taymoor Atighetchi, CEO & Founder at Papier, joins Natasha to talk about his fantastic customer-driven business in Papier. Founded in 2015, he has revolutionised the stationary market and shares his insights from school, university, and beyond. Plus, what his love of entrepreneurship has taught him.
Flora Davidson joins Natasha Knight. Flora is the Co-founder and Head of Product at SupplyCompass, a product development and production management workflow tool for fashion brands and manufacturers around the world. She is single-handedly reshaping the fashion supply chain
This week we're exploring the Manufacturing and Retail industries with CEO and Founder of The Cambridge Satchel Company, Julie Deane OBE. Julie graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 and took up work as a chartered accountant before setting up CSC in 2007. The company is now a handmade-in-Britain worldwide phenomenon employing more than 130 people and selling to over 100 countries. Deane is committed to preserving British manufacturing - a luxury rarely afforded by start-up businesses. We’ll be diving into Julie’s decision to start CSC, the perspective her children have given her and the tips she’d love to share for anyone looking to get started in retail and manufacturing.
Each week The Innovations Series dives into a different industry to ask our entrepreneurial leaders why they chose their sector and how they got there. Follow hopefully insightful and inspiring conversation, perfect for budding entrepreneurs and enterprising businesspeople looking to access an entrepreneurial world. In association with Jazz Shapers and Mishcon de Reya.
This week we're exploring the Wellness and Retail industries with CEO and Founder of WUKA, Ruby Raut. Ruby is disrupting the feminine hygiene market with UK designed eco-friendly period underwear that completely replaces tampons and pads. We’ll be diving into Ruby’s childhood in Nepal, her lifelong fascination with science and the steps she took to succeed with WUKA.
Each week The Innovations Series dives into a different industry to ask our entrepreneurial leaders why they chose their sector and how they got there. Follow hopefully insightful and inspiring conversation, perfect for budding entrepreneurs and enterprising businesspeople looking to access an entrepreneurial world. In association with Jazz Shapers and Mishcon de Reya.