President's Fellow; Managing Director of CMS Ventures; Deputy Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire
Hanadi is passionate about entrepreneurship and innovation. She supports early-stage businesses across a range of sectors with a focus on HealthTech and Deep-Tech. She has a particular interest in TechBio and Data-driven startups. Her ability to act as a technology translator and to align vision and strategy with operational constraints are key to her high success rate. Hanadi’s experience in developing innovation clusters is globally recognised. She has helped set up entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Middle East, Russia and China. Her work to support entrepreneurs earned her recognition as one of the Maserati100 in 2016, and as top 20 Asians Tech Pioneers in 2020.
In 2012, Hanadi was the inspiration and driving force behind the creation of Accelerate Cambridge, which enhanced the Cambridge Judge Business School’s contribution to the Cambridge entrepreneurial cluster by providing help, nurture, and support to innovators and entrepreneurs in the cluster. Through her work at Accelerate Cambridge, Hanadi has supported the creation and scale-up of over 180 early-stage ventures, building a portfolio of an estimated collective value of £1.5bn and over £300m of risk capital raised.
In early 2016 Hanadi was appointed Executive Director of the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge. Her work in Cambridge is already enabling a unique platform for entrepreneurship research on the underpinning factors of entrepreneurial success from both the entrepreneur's and the early investor's perspectives.
Since January 2019, Hanadi has centred her work around the investment needs of early-stage ventures and more specifically, the funding gap in the UK for ambitious life-sciences and biotech businesses. This led to the creation of CMS Ventures, and Hanadi’s appointment as its managing director. CMS Ventures is an early-stage investor based in Cambridge investing in Biotech & Life Sciences start-ups in the UK with a focus on the 4Ds (Drugs, Devices, Diagnostics, and Digital) and privileged access to international markets, in particular China.
Hanadi serves as a Deputy Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire. In addition, Hanadi is an independent external member of the Innovate UK Innovation Loans Credit Committee, sits on the LIF steering committee at the Royal Academy of Engineering, and is a President Fellow at Murray Edwards College.
Hanadi is currently working on the launch of a UK-based HealthTech early-stage fund, focusing on scaling the work of ambitious founders wanting to positively impact the world.
Born in Lebanon and raised in France, she is fluent in English, French and Arabic while speaking another four languages. Currently living in Cambridge with her four children, you can catch Hanadi walking her two eccentric dogs or sculling, coxing or rowing on the river.