Be part of the revolution and help us close the gender gap in technology

Amara Okafor has over twenty years of experience in corporate governance and digital transformation. Before joining the board of Meridian Crown Bank, she was global Technology Risk partner at one of the Big Four audit firms, where she led the rollout of AI governance frameworks for financial institutions in fifteen countries across Africa and the Middle East. She sits on the boards of three companies listed on the Lagos stock exchange and on the AI regulation advisory committee of the Pan-African Union. Her mission on the board is to ensure AI is adopted in an ethical, traceable way aligned with business strategy, and that the committee understands both the risk and the opportunity. She holds a law degree from the Atlantic University of Lagos and an MBA from the Eldor business school.

Mei-Ling Chen leads the multimodal models team at Nimbus AI, where she has contributed to open-source tools used by more than two million developers worldwide. She was previously a senior engineer on the reinforcement learning team at Aether Labs in London, where she co-authored the paper that introduced the adaptive pruning algorithm used today in efficient inference. Born in Taipei and educated at the Boston Polytechnic Institute, she argues that AI must be open, reproducible and accessible: she has mentored more than one hundred and fifty women through programmes such as Women in Machine Learning and Ada League. Recognised by Frontier Tech Review as one of the innovators under thirty-five in 2024, she combines cutting-edge research with activism for diversity in the technical teams building the future.

Elena Vidal is Professor of Computer Science at the Universitat Catalana de Tecnologia and principal investigator at the Barcelona AI Research Institute. She is a fellow of the International Association for the Advancement of AI (IAAI) and was named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Ábaco Tech magazine in 2023 and 2025. She has received two best paper awards at top international conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR and ACL. Her research focuses on democratising generative AI through smaller yet equally powerful language models, scaling intelligence with more efficient algorithms, pluralistic alignment and applying AI to science and social good. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of Castilla.

As Chief AI Officer of Indus Core Systems, Priya Sharma leads the group's artificial intelligence strategy in more than forty countries, with a team of two thousand people and an annual budget of over five hundred million dollars. Before building this function from scratch, she was Chief Data Officer at Vandya Group, where she led the analytics transformation of the supply chain and cut operating costs by thirty percent with predictive models. She began her career as a particle physicist at the European Centre for Particle Research (CEIP) and moved into industry convinced that data was the new engine of large companies. Her obsession: making AI stop being a pilot project and become real value for millions of customers. She advises two climate startups and mentors the Women Who Code programme in Asia-Pacific.

Camila Ferreira founded ClarAI in 2023 with a clear purpose: to give small businesses and freelancers access to AI without needing a technical team. The platform translates a legal document or an invoice in seconds and generates actionable answers in plain language, with no jargon and no learning curve. In less than two years, ClarAI has raised two funding rounds worth eighteen million dollars and serves more than forty thousand businesses in Brazil, Portugal and the rest of Latin America. Camila, a computer engineer from the State University of São Paulo and former product manager at a Latin American unicorn, was named founder of the year at LatAm Tech Summit 2025. She firmly believes that AI done right is the greatest lever for equality there is: for every dollar of revenue, ClarAI donates one hour of free training to a woman entrepreneur.

Leila Haddad is founding partner of South Impact Ventures, the first Middle Eastern fund focused exclusively on AI startups with positive social impact and diverse founding teams. In five years, she has invested in eighteen companies with a combined valuation of more than three hundred million dollars and a success rate of seventy-two percent. Before launching her own fund, she was investment director at a venture capital firm managing six billion in London, where she backed the first Arab team to list on the New York tech stock exchange. Her thesis: financial returns and social impact are not only compatible, they reinforce each other. She co-authors the annual Capital with Purpose report, a benchmark in the sector, and sits on the investment committees of three funds in the Gulf and Southeast Asia.