Judges

Alpesh B Patel OBE, Dealmaker in Department for Business and Trade, Barrister turned hedge fund manager, Former Visiting Fellow in Business, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, Financial Times author and former: Bloomberg TV presenter, CNBC Co-host, BBC Business commentator and Financial Times columnist. Founder, Campaignforamillion.com to teach a million people worldwide how to invest better to add an extra million into their pensions over their lifetimes.

Deirdre Mc Gettrick is the founder of the UK's #1 furniture search and comparison platform ufurnish.com. Bringing together 1m+ products from 100+ furniture retailers all on one website. ufurnish.com saves time, money and eliminates the fear of missing out on undiscovered items. Clicking out, the consumer buys directly from the retailer.

Award-winning entrepreneur and bestselling author of WIN!, Donna O’Toole is the founder of August Recognition - a top global awards agency. Named one of the world’s Top 25 Customer Experience Influencers, Donna has helped hundreds of businesses, brands, teams and leaders across the world to create high-impact commercial and cultural results by achieving valuable recognition for their achievements.

Dora is an advisor and executive coach to CEOs working with some of the fastest-growing tech startups & scaleups in Europe. She brings scalable, practical, and tried-and-tested tools and approaches to help CEOs drive better performance. Previously, she spent over a decade in Silicon Valley and London in leadership roles at Google, YouTube, and SoftBank, where she helped to scale the operations and the team from 4 people to 200+. She is also a qualified leadership coach (HBS) and transformational coach (Animas), a certified facilitator of EverythingDisc and 5Behaviors, and a former co-founder of a psychometric startup. Dora is on the Advisory Board of a few startups, on the judging panel of Go:Tech and Scale-up Awards and one of the mentors of the scaleup program ‘Future Fifty’ by Founders Forum / Tech Nation.

As a Founder, Director and CIPD qualified consultant, Richard supports leadership teams to create winning transformational strategies, trains managers to get the best performance from their teams and develop the capabilities of sales teams to accelerate their performance and results. He runs an in-house top team accelerator for scale ups called Dragonfly Academy, a listed programme with the Scale Up Institute to elevate leadership, team and business development capabilities for sustainable growth. More recently, Richard has been appointed Scale Up Ambassador for the Institute of Directors and is the Founder of Tech West England Advocates, supporting West England Scale Ups and the regional eco-system.

Tamara founded Social Element in 2002 and has grown the agency to become a 300+ people strong and award-winning business that helps some of the world’s biggest brands including OREO, Visa, Smirnoff, Nissan and Dr Pepper thrive on social media. Tamara is also co-founder of Polpeo, a crisis company that creates realistic and immersive crisis simulations that prepare teams to communicate successfully in a crisis. She is a Fellow of The Marketing Society, a previous Drum’s CEO of the year and also recognised in Campaign Magazine’s 40 over 40 and Campaign’s Inspirational Women CEO of the Year in 2024. Tamara is the co-host of The Genuine Humans podcast, a board member of Media Pride and is regularly featured in the Outstanding Top 100 Global LGBTQ+ Executives list.