Mastering the Pivot: How Founders Reinvented Their Path

Osman Ramadan is co-founder of CodeWords, an AI platform that lets businesses create working agents simply by describing the job they need done. He leads the development of Cody, the AI assistant that builds those agents, connects them to a company’s existing tools, and deploys them to handle real operational work. He focuses on making AI dependable enough for everyday business use, with the safeguards and human oversight needed to keep it on track.

Before CodeWords, Osman worked at Microsoft on SwiftKey and Office 365 and helped run an internal machine learning and language technology community. He studied at the University of Cambridge, where his published research explored privacy-preserving AI and conversational systems. He has spoken at Slush, ACL, and AI Tinkerers.

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Prof. Erika Brodnock, MBE, LLD is an award-winning serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, and angel investor. She is a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at King's College London and an Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter. Erika holds an MBA from the University of Surrey and is a PhD in Behavioural Science at the LSE. Erika is co-founder and CEO of Kinhub, a patent-pending B2B SaaS generative AI platform that improves employee productivity and managerial capabilities through convenient, personalised, evidence-based coaching. Erika also founded Karisma Kidz, Extend Ventures (acquired by Diversity VC), and The Black Funding Network. She is Chair of the External Advisory Board for the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Brain Health, where she provides strategic leadership uniting academia, industry, and clinicians to accelerate the development and evaluation of health technologies in brain health. She serves on the Advisory Board for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, Westminister Adult Education Service, and on the Investment Committee for Resonance Community Development Fund. Erika is the author of Diversity Beyond Gender papers that catalysed over £2.5bn in investment to diverse founders. She is also the co-author of The TRANSPARENT Framework and Better Venture – Improving Diversity, Innovation, and Profitability in Venture Capital and Startups.

Robel Efrem is a Swedish technology entrepreneur, investor and speaker with more than a decade of experience building and scaling technology companies.

He is the co-founder and CEO of Challengermode, a global esports platform used by millions of players, and the founder of Pixel Systems, an AI company developing technology to verify whether digital content has been generated or manipulated by artificial intelligence.

Over his career, Robel has raised more than SEK 400 million from international investors including Alibaba Group, built companies serving global markets, and worked at the intersection of technology, AI, gaming and entrepreneurship.

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Lucia leads Portfolio and Product at BACKED, partnering closely with early-stage founders to get them to Series A. She also builds founder-facing products and BACKED’s internal AI data infrastructure. An angel investor, she co-founded LUMUS Investment Collective, Europe’s largest community of female angel investors, now 600 strong. Before BACKED, she led research and product at startups in San Francisco and London, two of which were acquired. She loves playing tennis and long reading sprints.

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