.png)
learn more about the be bold now 2026 london
Speakers
Afua Basoah
Afua is a health strategist, investor, and advocate for inclusive innovation with 20 years of experience shaping the global healthcare ecosystem. In 2025, she cofounded Fern Capital Group, a VC firm investing in early-stage Women’s Healthtech startups across the UK, Europe, and Africa.
Previously, Afua has held senior leadership roles at RAPP, Rabin Martin, ApotheCom, and Ogilvy Healthworld. In addition, she is a recognized leader in diversity and inclusion, co-chairing Omnicom’s OPEN DisAbility UK
+ Allies, chairing the UK Board of Trustees for Mothers2Mothers, and mentoring Black entrepreneurs through Somerset House’s Black Business Residency.
Afua serves on the board of the consultancy, Skating Panda, which works at the intersection of health, gender, and climate, and has been a two-time IPA iList finalist for advancing inclusivity in healthcare communications.
She holds a DPhil in Neurosciences from Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Commerce &
Manufacturing (FRSA).
Chloë Davies
Chloë Davies is an award-winning Growth Partner, cultural strategist and entrepreneur working at the intersection of commercial growth, culture and organisational transformation. With more than 25 years of experience, she helps organisations scale sustainably by aligning commercial strategy, leadership and inclusive culture.
As Growth Partner at The Unmistakables, Chloë leads the organisation’s growth engine across marketing, partnerships and new business, driving values-led revenue and long-term client impact. She is also the Founder of It Takes A Village Collective, a global ecosystem advancing strategic talent and leadership opportunities for Black women across advertising, media, marketing and communication.
Recognised as one of LinkedIn’s Top 50 Inspirational Black Women in Marketing (2025) and named to the Campaign Magazine UK A-List for three consecutive years (2024–2026), Chloë is a member of WACL (Women in Advertising and Communications Leadership) and an ally of the Unstereotype Alliance. She also serves on the Advisory Board for Advertising Week Europe, contributing to the future of leadership, creativity and inclusive growth across the global industry.
Her work focuses on building collaborative ecosystems that shape the future of leadership, growth and organisational transformation.
_JPG.jpg)
Hazel McShane
&
Amber Probyn
HAZEL MCSHANE
Hazel is Co-Founder and Director of PEEQUAL, the UK’s first squat-and-go women’s urinal, redesigning public space for gender equity. She holds a first-class Master’s degree in Physics and Innovation and previously focused on particle physics before moving into R&D at FemTech company Elvie.
​
Obsessed with women’s time and the invisible hours lost to poor design, Hazel leads sales and commercial growth at PEEQUAL, working alongside Amber on strategy and investment as the company scales internationally.
​​​
AMBER PROBYN
Amber is Co-Founder and Director of PEEQUAL, where she leads research and development. She holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology and Innovation and previously worked at a global design consultancy with brands including IKEA and Sony.
​
Driven by a belief that better design creates more opportunities for women and girls, Amber oversees product innovation and manufacturing development, ensuring PEEQUAL is practical, scalable and rooted in real-world insight. She works alongside Hazel on strategy and investment.
Helen Lederer
Helen Lederer is a writer, actress, comedian, and presenter. Apart from TV, stage, and radio, she’s best known as Catriona, the dippy journalist in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous – although, her stay in the Big Brother house caused a different kind of notoriety. More recently she has provided the love interest for Ken Barlow in Coronation Street, an online shoe fetishist in a new Midsummer Murders for ITV as well as starring in The West End in Fawlty Towers, alongside BBC 1’s ‘The Pilgrimage’. Her novel, Losing It, was nominated for the PG Wodehouse comedy literary prize. In 2018, Helen set up the Comedy Women in Print Prize (CWIP), to celebrate and enable witty women writers and has been responsible for creating many women’s writing careers. This year’s CWIP prize includes Lesley Joseph, Ranvir Singh and Kerry Godliman to name a few powerful women Judges
Kiesse Lamour
Kiessé is the Global Head of Media and Commerce at VML, which she joined in August 2021 to build and scale the commerce media practice. In this role, she has been instrumental in embedding new capabilities and operational frameworks across regions, while driving growth for key clients.
 
Before VML, Kiessé served as Head of Industry Partnerships at Pinterest UK, where she built and led a team dedicated to helping marketers accelerate business outcomes on the platform.
 
Prior to Pinterest, she spent eight years at Omnicom Media Group UK in a series of leadership roles spanning programmatic, paid search, social, and brand safety. During her tenure, she established operational excellence, strengthened commercial performance, and elevated standards in brand safety, fraud prevention, and viewability. She also led strategy and planning for Programmatic and Paid Search across a vast portfolio of clients and launched Omnicom’s Programmatic Audio offering from the ground up.
 
Earlier in her career, Kiessé worked in Ireland and France with organisations including Google, Unilever, and Société Générale.
 
She holds a degree in British, American, and Afro-American Studies from Université Grenoble Alpes, as well as a Master’s in International Business from Grenoble School of Business.
 
Outside of work, Kiessé is married with two daughters (15 and 9). She enjoys African fashion, travelling, reading, cooking with her husband, spending time with her girlfriends, indulging in Nollywood on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and creating meaningful moments with her daughters.
 
A passionate advocate for women and girls, Kiessé is driven by a personal mission to see them thrive. She regularly mentors young women from diverse backgrounds, offering guidance, encouragement, and support.
Mari-Carmen Sanchez-Morris
Mari-Carmen Sanchez-Morris is a former Paediatric Intensive Care nurse turned VC-backed health-tech founder and CEO of Matresa, a clinical grade preventative maternal health platform supporting mothers from pregnancy to the first 2 years.
After a decade working in critical care at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Mari-Carmen saw first-hand the consequences of fragmented, reactive healthcare systems. That experience, combined with her own journey through motherhood led her to found Matresa, a personalised, preventative maternal health platform supporting women from preconception through postpartum and return to work.
In February 2026, Matresa raised £320,000 in pre-seed funding to tackle the UK’s growing maternal health crisis, where maternal deaths are at their highest level in over twenty years and 1 in 5 women experience serious postnatal complications . In a funding landscape where female founders received just 2.8% of total investment last year, Mari-Carmen’s raise marks a rare and significant milestone.
Matresa has already piloted successfully with one of the Big Four firms, improving overall wellbeing scores from 5.2 to 7.8 in just eight weeks, increasing productivity by 20%, and boosting energy and mood by 50% .
Mari-Carmen is a first-class Children’s Nursing graduate, founder of two health businesses, and mother of three. She speaks on maternal health innovation, women’s health equity, the business case for supporting working mothers, and building high-impact startups as a female founder
Natalie Collins
Natalie is CEO of Own My Life and creator of the DAY Programme. She is the author of Out Of Control and Abuse is a Verb and works to enable women and girls everywhere to make sense of their lives and work out how brilliant they can be.
Nicole Blyth
Nicole Blyth is the Co-Founder of Imagination Preschool, which she established six years ago to deliver a visually-led, inclusive early years curriculum for children aged 0–5, with a particular focus on those with additional needs.
​
After a 15-year career in digital advertising with organisations including itraffic, Agency.com, and Microsoft where she led a global creative technology team that launched campaigns across the US and EMEA . Nicole made a bold career change into early years education. Inspired by her son William, who was diagnosed with autism at age three and later with ADHD, she retrained, specialising in inclusive early years and SEND support,  to ensure that other families would not face the same barriers her own family encountered.
​
Nicole provides early intervention, supports families navigating the EHCP process, and consults with primary schools to make nursery environments more inclusive and accessible.
​
Nicole’s work is guided by one core belief: difference is not a limitation, it is a strength. 
​
She is passionate about challenging conformity in education and creating learning environments where all children can thrive.
_edited.jpg)
Bella Shepard
Bella is a Graduate Engineer at McLaren Formula 1 Team, where she is part of the team’s rotational
graduate programme. Through placements across competitor analysis, simulator performance,
aerodynamic performance, tyre performance, and race strategy, she has gained a broad perspective on
how engineering, data, and decision-making combine in one of the world’s most competitive sporting
environments.
She holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from University College London and previously completed
an undergraduate placement with Williams Racing. She also interned with Sekhmet Motorcycle Racing
Team during the inaugural WCR Women’s World Championship season, contributing to work exploring
barriers to female participation in motorsport and supporting a documentary examining the challenges
and opportunities for women in motorcycle racing paddocks.
Alongside her engineering work, she is an active member of Girls on Track UK, where she supports
initiatives encouraging young women to explore careers in motorsport and STEM. She is passionate
about improving representation in engineering and helping the next generation of women see
themselves in high-performance technical careers.