With great people

Venture capital is a people business and our people are our greatest strength. We are constantly working hard to ensure we maintain an inclusive and collaborative culture – which we see as critical to our success.

We have built a team with a unique set of skills and experiences that are well suited to the Cambridge ecosystem and supporting the companies we are building within it. Our team has variously created, backed and sold university spin-out businesses, in both Europe and North America, and several have a PhD from one of the Universities of Cambridge or Oxford.

The individual and collective experiences of the team helps them to understand, and empathise with, the challenges facing an entrepreneur striving to build a deeptech or life sciences business. We also have access through our wider network to some of the ecosystem’s world-leading academics and entrepreneurs.

As we continue to grow, we strive to attract and retain the best talent, with a strong focus on excellence and integrity. During the year, we were delighted to welcome Rowan Chapman (Non-executive Director), Tori Denman (Investor Relations), Dipesh Patel (Operating Partner), Damian Crowther and Mihriban Tuna (Entrepreneurs in Residence), and Neil Lawrence (Resident AI/ML Adviser).

As a team, we have a passion for science and its potential to drive change. Through our expertise and our position in one of the country’s most powerful science and technology ecosystems, we are able to identify and support the most promising entrepreneurs in knowledge-intensive businesses and help them achieve their vision.

Rowan has been appointed as a Non-executive Director and brings more than 20 years of experience as an executive business leader. Over her career, she has served on multiple corporate boards and executed numerous partnerships and investments. Rowan is a co-founder of Initiate Studios, a life sciences incubator founded in 2020, where she partners with entrepreneurs to launch new companies. Previously, she served as Head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation (NYSE: JNJ) for Western North America, Australia and New Zealand. Prior to that, Rowan led teams at General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), including as Head of Healthcare Investing at GE Ventures and Head of Precision Diagnostics at GE Healthcare. Before GE, she held operational roles in early and growth stage start-ups and was a Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures for over 11 years, gaining extensive experience as an investor and board member for a wide variety of life science technology and data-enabled companies. Rowan holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and carried out post-doctoral research at the University of California San Francisco.

Tori is our Investor Relations Manager, working across our funds under management. She has ten years of professional experience, gained in a variety of corporate finance advisory and investment management roles, and has worked for small privately owned investment managers and global public companies with Jones Lang LaSalle and Lazard. In this time she has worked in the UK, Europe and the Middle East, transacting or funding approximately £1 billion of assets. Before joining us, Tori had a career break to pursue charitable work and raise a family. Tori holds a PG Diploma in Real Estate from LSBU and an MA in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford.

Dipesh is an Operating Partner focusing on technology investments. Prior to joining CIC, Dipesh held a number of general and technical management roles at Arm over 25 years. His most recent role was CTO where he was responsible for the Research and Digital IT functions. Prior to this, Dipesh was the President of the IoT Services Group and led the creation of a new software and services business to capture the market opportunities in the Internet of Things. His broad experience covers transistor technology to chip design to cloud platforms. Dipesh has a PhD and a BSc in Electronics from Loughborough University. He also completed the Executive Programme from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Damian is Entrepreneur in Residence with the Life Sciences team. Having trained in Cambridge, then Oxford, as a clinician-scientist (PhD FRCP), Damian practiced clinical neurology in Nottingham and Cambridge before leading a basic neuroscience research group at the University of Cambridge for ten years. Since leaving academia he has gained commercial and entrepreneurial experience as a head of early drug discovery at AstraZeneca Neuroscience and co-founder of the HealthTech startup, GP Notebook.

Mihriban is Entrepreneur in Residence with the Life Sciences team. She brings 20 years of experience in biologics drug development across biotech and pharma. Prior to joining CIC, Mihriban was Chief Scientific Officer at Adaptate Biotherapeutics (acquired by Takeda Pharmaceutical Company), Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery, at F-star Therapeutics (NASDAQ: FSTX) and an early employee at Domantis (acquired by GSK). Mihriban holds a BSc in Biology from the Middle East Technical University, a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Sussex and an MBA from the University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Neil is our Resident AI/ML Adviser and is the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge. Neil has been working on machine learning models for over 20 years and recently returned to academia after three years as Director of Machine Learning at Amazon. His main interest is the interaction of machine learning with the physical world. This interest was triggered by deploying machine learning in the African context, where ‘end-to-end’ solutions are normally required. This has inspired new research directions at the interface of machine learning and systems research funded by a Senior AI Fellowship from the Alan Turing Institute. Neil is also visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield and the co-host of Talking Machines.