Stephanie Heller
Before co-founding Bootstrap Europe to support ground-breaking tech businesses, Stéphanie’s career includes founding, building and sitting on the board of several successful technology and financial companies in Zurich and London, such as the award winning fintech start-up Fractal Labs. Stéphanie takes her experiences as a founder and parlays that into guidance and direction to Bootstrap Europe’s portfolio founders in a pragmatic and compassionate way.
Bootstrap Europe’s philosophy of providing debt financing for growth companies was nurtured between 2008 and 2012, when Stephanie, the managing partner for Bootstrap Europe was responsible for the private equity assets of Cape Capital AG - a Zurich-based multi-asset manager and family office, investing in a whole spectrum of companies, from start-ups to mature businesses.
Driven by the belief that more capital should be directed to entrepreneurs and innovation, Stephanie founded The Real Economy Effect (TREE) in 2012 to help family offices manage their private equity investments. TREE managed a portfolio of c. $350M in more than 30 growth equity and technology investments.
Stephanie initially built her financial foundation and expertise in the London based M&A team of Deutsche Bank, where she specialised in the Industrials Sector. She also worked in Paris for French investment bank Calyon, within the Credit Risk Ratings team. Stephanie is fluent in French, English and German, and is a graduate of HEC Business School in Paris where she majored in Finance and took executive business law classes at Universität St Gallen Management School.
Fatou Diagne
Fatou was a founding partner of The Real Economy Effect (TREE) in 2012 where she was actively involved in managing private equity portfolios on behalf of family offices and multi-asset managers.
Fatou started her career as an investment banker at Citigroup in their London and Johannesburg offices, where she spent over five years advising European and emerging markets clients on cross border M&A, high yield debt and equity financing and leveraged buyouts.
Her experience includes time spent as a strategic advisory to the CEO of SFR, France's second largest mobile operator, as well as stint at Standard and Poor's in London in the African sovereign credit ratings team. Fatou was part of the founding team that set up the African Risk Capacity, a $100M sovereign risk insurance facility against drought in 25 countries.
In recent years, Fatou has also been featured on Forbes top 100 Women in Tech in France.
Fatou draws on her experiences in finance and as an entrepreneur when sharing her ideas and guidance with Bootstrap Europe’s portfolio of founders in the hope that they shake up the industries they are in.
Fatou is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Wolof, and graduated from the HEC Business School in Paris where she majored in Finance and holds a BSc in Economics and Finance from the University of Calgary.
Humphrey Nokes
Humphrey Nokes was the founder of ETV Capital - pioneers in Growth Debt asset classes in Europe in the late 1990s. Humphrey has raised and invested well over €300 million in more than 200 transactions in 120 VC-backed technology, biotechnology and healthcare companies across Europe.
Earlier in his career, he co-founded Quartz Capital Partners, where he completed numerous capital raising rounds (both both public and private equity) for technology and life science companies in the UK, France, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, and the US.
Prior to that, Humphrey was employed in the Capital Markets Group at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc in London on the Bond arbitrage desk.
Previously Humphrey was a Member of the Board of Brainpower NV which was subject of an IPO on the Deutsche Borse - subsequently sold to Bloomberg.
He was also a non-executive Director of SearchSpace PLC which was sold to Warburg Pincus.
Humphrey has sourced and advised on three University spinouts as well as completed over 20 IPOs on various European stock markets. He is a Director of Cygna Negra Ltd a specialist IP database company, and was a member of the U.K. Government Department of Trade and Industry Mission to report on high technology start-ups in the US, Israel, Taiwan, and Malaysia. He served as a member of the advisory board of Kernel Capital, an Irish Based VC.
Humphrey is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Ecole Europeenne des Affaires Paris and London Business School.
Eliott Saba
Eliott’s dedication to supporting scale-ups started in Uganda where he completely revamped the financial operations of a medical procurement distribution company.
Eliott’s entrepreneurial spirit continued to grow during his time as Vice President at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) where he was one of the UK’s longest standing members on the Venture Debt team. Eliott also co-established the first European fintech-focused team at the bank where he won ‘EMEA deal of the year’, acted as a judge on several fintech-focused competitions and grew his clientele three-fold during his time at the innovative bank.
Eliott’s experience living in seven countries has shaped his personnel ethos - to immerse himself into every project and give it his all. Through this experience he is able to empathise with Bootstrap Europe’s portfolio of founders and guide them to further financial success.
Denise Trumpfheller
Denise joined Bootstrap following a successful career at Citi where she was a Director in its Debt Capital Markets Origination team in London advising on and executing European and Yankee bond issuances for large European corporate clients. These have included some jumbo financings (Heineken's acquisition of Asia Pacific Breweries, ZF Friedrichshafen's acquisition of TRW) as well as some of the first corporate Green Bonds in Europe (Unilever, Alliander) and hybrid bonds (VW, KPN). Prior to this, Denise was advising global industrial companies in Citi's London M&A team working on a number of high profile transactions, including VW's merger with Porsche.
Denise is a qualified Chartered Accountant having worked at Ernst & Young's audit and transaction advisory practices, serving large global insurers, such as Lloyds of London, Aviva, Resolution and Allianz.
Denise’s broad financial experience and insight into processes and operations across a wide variety of companies has influenced her love for building an organisation from the ground-up.
Denise holds degrees from the University of York and London School of Economics, with a stint at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico City.
Benjamin Faulkner
Benjamin is a Chartered Accountant and previously worked in Ernst & Young’s Transaction Advisory team.
Prior to Bootstrap, he has had five years experience advising European Mid-Market Private Equity investors in both a pre-deal and post-deal capacity.
He primarily worked with clients focused on the UK SME space such as ECI Partners, August Equity and Inflexion. Before joining Bootstrap, Benjamin undertook a secondment to growth investor Mayfair Equity where he was supporting their largest portfolio company YO! Group.
He now applies his commercial diligence, investment appraisal, structuring and execution skill set to growth debt investments. Benjamin also manages business growth and performance monitoring.
Kristine Erwin
Kristine Erwin joined the Bootstrap Europe Investment team from Norgine Ventures, a European healthcare venture debt fund backed by Norgine Pharma. She was responsible for origination through to execution on deals across digital health, specialty pharma, diagnostics and medtech. Kristine led or co-led the execution of 85% of Norgine Venture’s deals during her time there, including the fund’s largest debt facility of €10m. In addition to her investment activity, Kristine managed four portfolio companies and held Board Observer seats with Nuubo and Advalight for several years, developing strong relationships with management and Directors. Kristine led negotiations for several successful debt facility restructurings as well as the acquisition of Collagen Solutions, previously an AIM-listed company, by a US acquirer.
Previously, Kristine was in the Lazard Healthcare M&A team in New York providing strategic and financial advice to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare services companies. Kristine also brings experience in pharmaceutical royalty monetization, having researched and executed intellectual property investments as part of the investment team at Royalty Pharma, a $30bn pharmaceutical royalties fund.
Kristine has authored several white papers on the European pharmaceutical industry and disease-specific deep dives as well as spoken on panels at founder events and healthcare innovation programmes. She holds a BSc Hons in Cell Biology from the University of St. Andrews and her academic research on replication proteins in Trypanosoma parasites was reviewed for publication in Parasites and Vectors and later used as the basis for drug development research. She is also passionate about mentoring young talent and in 2019 co-founded an initiative for networking and coaching junior professionals.
Victoria Gray
Victoria brings a wealth of entrepreneurial experience to Bootstrap, having spent the past eight years working in the nucleus of Clean-Tech Start-Ups. She has had direct involvement in the operational, strategic and fundraising challenges encountered by many fast-growing/scaling Start-Ups. Prior to this, Victoria spent a decade working within asset management in London and overseas, initially with Capital International where her focus was in supporting and managing European institutional investor and consultant relationships. Following this, Victoria joined Goldman Sachs where she continued to run the fund administration for a successful private equity fund and supported the fund’s transition into a government approved superannuation scheme. In addition to this, Victoria managed the stringent on-boarding process for overseas HNW investors into Goldman’s UK domiciled products and acted as the ongoing conduit between investor and fund. With this diverse experience, Victoria utilises her unique skill set to support Bootstrap’s operations.
Bindi Karia
Bindi is incredibly passionate about all things related to startups in Europe and connecting the dots between Investors, Founders, Corporates and Government. As a result, she has worked in and around technology startups for most of her career.
As a Consultant (PwC Consulting), in a Corporate (Microsoft BizSpark /Ventures), as a Startup employee (Trayport), as an Advisor (Startup Europe, Startup Weekend Europe, Tech London Advocates), as a Connector (GQ UK, the IoD and Evening Standard have all recognised this) and until recently, as their Banker (Silicon Valley Bank). Bindi joined Silicon Valley Bank as Vice President II, where she focused on building out SVB's early stage banking efforts in Europe, as well as driving the Bank's relationships with Corporate and Emerging VCs.
Bindi currently sits on the Advisory Boards of six startups, as well as Digital Advisory Board of Shop Direct plc (£1.9bn t/o business), the Advisory Boards of European Innovation Council, Startup Europe (EU), Tech London Advocates, Ambassador for Innovate Finance, and just finished a term as trustee for TechStars Startup Weekend Europe.
Bindi is a strong advocate for promoting Women in Tech, and as such, six of her Advisory Board roles are for women-founded businesses. She was born in the UK, raised in Canada, her entire family is from Kenya, but she now passionately calls London her home.
Sinikka Démaré
Sinikka brings her strategic mind to Bootstrap and wealth of experience in risk management and asset allocation as well as private assets and impact investing.
Sinikka Demaré served as a Venture Partner at Nextech Invest Ltd - a life science fund specialising in Oncology and sits on the board of Schroder Adveq, the private equity specialist.
Prior to this, Sinikka was the Managing Director at Ortec Finance, whose Swiss office she founded in 2007. During her time at Ortec, Sinikka was responsible for strategic asset allocation and investment consulting for pension funds, insurance companies and other asset and private wealth managers as well as having direct responsibility for several large institutional investors.
For 20 years before joining Ortec, she held leading positions in corporate finance, business and pensions fund management at Dow Chemical. Sinikka obtained her Master of Science in Economics from the Business School of Helsinki and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
Sinikka was twice elected by the ai-CIO magazine as one of the top 25 global consultants.
Didier Cowling
Didier Cowling joined Bootstrap Europe as Scientific Advisor in 2021. He started his career as an investment analyst, first at Nomura and then at HSBC, forming a highly rated pharma and medtech team. He then moved into industry to be Director of Business Development at Phairson Medical Ltd. In 2000, he co-founded Kuros Therapeutics AG, which was successfully sold in 2002. Subsequently, he co-founded Kuros Biosurgery AG, which worked on developing a number of drug/device combination products. In early 2016, Kuros Biosurgery merged with Cytos Biotechnology and was renamed Kuros Biosciences AG, becoming public on the Swiss Exchange. As a serial entrepreneur and board member with over 30 years of broad experience in the field, Didier brings to Bootstrap his deep knowledge of the medtech industry and hands-on start-up experience.
Matthias Ummenhofer
Under Matthias’s leadership from 2001-2014, the European Investment Fund’s technology investment business grew to over €4.7bn committed in or alongside more than 260 funds, Business Angels, and Family Offices who invested in about 3,800 technology companies.
Matthias had a key role in raising and managing major third-party investment mandates such as the €1bn ERP-EIF Dachfonds, the GBP 200m UK Future Technologies Fund (UKFTF), the €150m Dutch Venture Initiative (DVI) and the €150m European Angels Fund (EAF) for co-investments.
Prior to joining the EIF, Matthias worked at the European Investment Bank (EIB) as advisor to an Executive Board member, and executed project financing transactions in the infrastructure sector.
His experience includes his time spent in France as a consultant in the transportation and logistics sector, and founded the research unit "Logistics & Environment" at the University of Aix-Marseille II, and acting as Director for the "Environmental Application Division" of the Society of Logistics Engineers (Hyattsville, USA).
