Where Innovation Flows

Naomi Timperley is an innovation and growth specialist who supports founders, universities and organisations to turn ideas into companies and companies into scale-ups. She is Co-Founder of Tech North Advocates and has designed and delivered award-winning entrepreneurship programmes, mentoring hundreds of early-stage founders. Naomi’s work focuses on helping businesses start and grow through experimentation, partnerships and smart use of networks, often before they are ready for investment. In 2025, she was named Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech.

Colm Long is Managing Director of Clairmar Consulting Ltd, a management consultancy business focused on helping venture backed startups to scale. He previously held the roles of VP, Global Operations at Facebook and VP, Online Sales and Operations at Google. He also holds a Non-Executive Director role on Facebook Payments International Ltd where he is Chairman of the Board. In addition, Colm holds the role of Independent Non Executive Director on the board of Cpl Resources plc. Colm is an angel investor and is also a member of Accel’s Starter Programme in Europe.

Martin Moran is a seasoned technology leader, board chair, and non-executive director with a career spanning senior operational and governance roles across the UK, Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific. He currently chairs the boards of OptikAI, Outthink, DurhamLane, Xiatech, Elite Dynamics and Cronofy, alongside advisory roles with Climateview, Martech, Stage Two Capital and One Peak. His board experience stretches internationally, with past roles at Netigate, Scrive, HappyOrNot, Cxense, Spryker and NHST. Martin has guided five companies through successful exits, including Gamespark’s sale to Amazon, Cxense’s sale to Piano, and Re:Infer’s trade sale to UiPath. He has led acquisitions, supported multiple funding rounds from seed through Series B, and worked closely with VCs and PE firms as a limited partner with One Peak Partners and Stage Two Capital. On the operational side, Martin founded Salesforce’s international business in 2000, growing it to over $250m ARR, and built its Alliances and Channels function to $135m. He has held CEO, CRO and GM/MD roles across CRM, AI-enabled technology, HRMS, PaaS and SaaS businesses, including as interim CEO of Orgvue.

Maria McMenamin is an expert adviser in go-to-market strategy, a founder, and an angel investor, with a particular focus on supporting and investing in female founders. Maria is a strategic adviser to a number of high-growth European start-ups. She founded Tech Operators, bringing together senior operators and founders to advise and invest in Irish start-ups, and collaborates with VCs on investing in and scaling their portfolios. Member of the 20Sales investing €100k cheques in early stage founders. Maria was global revenue lead at Berlin-based start-up Pitch, where she built the revenue function. Before Pitch, she was the first sales hire in Stripe’s Dublin operation, where she built the sales function, led account management, and built out business development. Prior to Stripe, she spent over five and a half years in a number of roles at Salesforce. In 2000, she founded Ireland’s first art fair. The business scaled to five annual fairs, tens of thousands of visitors, and a thriving online presence, before she sold it to the RDS in 2009. Maria holds a degree in Business and Law from UCD and a Master’s in Leadership and Management from Smurfit Business School.

Ross Sylvester is the co-founder and CEO of Adrata, the best AI for sales. Starting over a decade ago, Ross began his career at Funderbolt, the leading student fundraising platform for universities, where he rose through the ranks and eventually became CEO. He led the company to become a leader in the space, which resulted in its acquisition by CampusLogic in 2019. That year, he joined the meteoric rocketship that was CampusLogic, helping grow the company to over $48M in ARR, which led to its acquisition by Blackstone, Vista, and Ellucian in 2022. Ross stayed on, scaling to lead over $500M in business and roll out the best SIS for medium-sized colleges around the world. Ross left Ellucian in 2025 to pursue building Adrata. He resides in San Francisco.

Prateek Pagey is the R&D Director at AVEVA, where he leads the Digital Twin and Data Harmonization capabilities for CONNECT, AVEVA’s industrial intelligence platform. He leads globally distributed teams of architects and engineers developing technologies that create trusted digital representations of physical assets, enabling organizations to connect, contextualize, and derive insights from industrial data at scale. With deep expertise in industrial software, cloud platforms, digital twins, and data architecture, Prateek is passionate about helping industries accelerate their digital transformation. His work focuses on building scalable platform capabilities that bridge operational and information technologies, empowering customers to improve operational performance, asset reliability, and sustainability. At AVEVA, a global leader in industrial software founded in Cambridge, Prateek is driving innovation that enables industrial enterprises to unlock the full value of their data and shape the future of connected, intelligent operations. He is a frequent advocate for engineering excellence, platform innovation, and the role of digital twins in creating more resilient and sustainable industries.