Clarisse Beurrier

Co-Founder & CSO, Cellcraft

Clarisse Beurrier is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cellcraft, a B2B company in Cambridge with an AI-biosensor platform that brings meat production into the digital age. By integrating cells, media, bioreactors, and automation, Cellcraft’s technology makes cultivated meat scalable, cost-effective, and differentiated. Cellcraft is building the future of responsible meat production while making sure no one is left behind in the race to reinvent meat, and it gives governments and industry partners a way to strengthen food security through localised, on-demand production. Cellcraft is now raising its Series A to establish pilot scale and deliver on its commercial partnerships. Clarisse holds a MPhil in Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Biological Sciences and Management from Imperial College London. She is also one of the lead authors of the world’s first textbook on cultivated meat.

Nix Hall

Co-Founder & CTO, New Wave Biotech

Nix Hall is the Co-Founder and CTO of New Wave Biotech. As CTO, she leads the technical strategy behind New Wave Biotech’s AI-powered simulation platform for downstream processing (DSP), innovating the software to enable biomanufacturers to scale more efficiently. Prior to New Wave Biotech, Nix spent around 10 years working on data engineering in a variety of startups and scale-ups, including as Tech Lead and first software hire at LabGenius, where she established the company’s data infrastructure, and shaped its early technical strategy.

Divya Vijay Pratheek

Vice President, Product + Marketing, Ribbon Bio

Divya Vijay Pratheek has over a decade of experience shaping product strategy and commercialisation in the biotech sector across Germany and the UK having launched multiple product portfolios across different applications. She has held roles at QIAGEN, Congenica, Automata, and currently Ribbon Bio, where she focuses on enabling synthetic DNA technologies to reach their full impact. With a foundation in microbiology and communication sciences, Divya is passionate about bridging technical innovation with market adoption

Christina Rode

Founder & CEO, Hulk Bio

Christina Rode is the Founder and CEO of Hulk Bio, a pioneering company producing authentic human milk bioactives through cell-based technology. Hulk Bio’s platform enables infant nutrition companies to access essential components of human milk at scale, helping to close the nutritional gap between formula and breastfeeding. With proof-of-concept achieved and strong early interest from major food companies, Christina is now leading Hulk Bio through the next stage of growth: scaling production, expanding its product portfolio, and building global partnerships.

Before founding Hulk Bio, Christina led cell innovation R&D at Roslin Technologies and conducted her PhD and postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, where she advanced our understanding of early fate decisions in stem cell. She brings a multidisciplinary approach to early-life nutrition, elevated by her unique perspective as both a scientist and a mother.

Gavin Thomas

Co-founder & CSO, MORF-Bio

Gavin Thomas is a Prof of Microbiology at the University of York, UK, and is a co-founder of MORF-Bio, which was initiated from a large UKRI funded multi-omics project, DETOX, aiming to understand bacterial stress responses. Driven by a desire to make complex data accessible to lab-based scientists, he drove the development of new tools to enable easy web-based visualisation and analysis of complex data. Realising that there was a real need for intuitive tools to simplify bioinformatics, the DETOX team evolved into MORF-Bio, a spin-out from the University of York. MORF aims to make the analysis of genomes and other types of data accessible and shareable for experimental scientists to get more from their data. Prof. Thomas has published over 100 papers on bacterial genetics, genomics, physiology, biochemistry, structural biology and multi-omics applied to understanding bacterial function in health, disease and biotechnology. His work has been cited over 10,000 times.