Dr. Annette Leonhard-MacDonald, ​CEO 

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Annette holds a MA in Economics & American Studies as well as a MSc and PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh specialising in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.  

She gained experience in research commercialization while working for Informatics Ventures at the University of Edinburgh. During the last year of her PhD Annette co-founded her first B2B high-tech startup Social Artisan Ltd. developing an award winning Big Data SaaS solution for real-time media analysis. 

After selling her first company, Annette co-founded Leonhard-MacDonald Ventures specializing in AI-powered business intelligence & automation solutions for automatic report generation, knowledge discovery and data-based prediction using the latest big data technologies coupled with cutting-edge deep learning algorithms.

In 2014 Annette founded Inspiring Female Founders, the foundation for her new initiative Diversity Natives, to build a strong network of mentors and role models for female entrepreneurs in the startup and technology sector. She is also the Lead for Google Women Techmakers Munich driving innovation and promoting women developers, designers and technology entrepreneurs as well as a mentor and coach at Google Launchpad, BioM, UnternehmerTUM and Fraunhofer Venture. ​

Dr. Donald Leonhard-MacDonald, CTO

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Donald holds a BSc & PhD in Computer Science from the University of Paisley specializing in Machine Learning and Remote Sensing. 

As a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Paisley, Donald taught a range of topics such as 3D graphics, machine learning, networking and principles of software development.  

Donald has extensive academic experience in classification, visualisation algorithms and natural language processing. He worked as a research scientist at the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University and the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee as one of the initial members of the high-profile Open Microscopy Environment bioinformatics project OMERO, which was awarded "Innovator of the Year 2011" by the British Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. 

Donald also spent many years working in industry as a senior software engineer and project leader for Motorola, Anderson Strathclyde, Praxis International as well as a contractor for the Ministry of Defence.

As co-founder and CTO of two high-tech startups Donald has been developing award winning software analysing real-time data with the latest machine learning and natural language processing techniques. ​