Shirin Dehghan, Chief Executive Officer of Arieso Ltd and President of Arieso Inc

Shirin Dehghan founded Arieso in 2002 with the vision of enabling self-optimizing networks. Shirin graduated from the University of Southampton with a MEng degree in Electronics in 1992 and commenced her career with a start up mobile communications firm, where she developed radio propagation products. She became the manager of the consultancy division of the business and led projects involving major operators and manufacturers. She then became research engineer at Vodafone Group Plc and was responsible for the development of WCDMA simulation and business modelling. She was part of Vodafone UK’s UMTS auction team, where she acted as technical expert on systems and technology issues, providing technical liaison to the UK board. Shirin is the author of several technical publications and has been a speaker in numerous technical conferences. She is a member of the IET and a Chartered Engineer.

Harry Fitzgibbons, Top Technology

Harry was a director of Hambros Bank from 1972 to 1983 with responsibility for United States corporate finance and for Hambros' portfolio of international unquoted investments. He was instrumental in establishing Boston Hambro Capital Company and Hambro International Venture Fund, both of which were venture investors in the United States. He left Hambros for two years to set up the London subsidiary of L.F.Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin, an American investment bank before returning in 1986. Harry was educated at Harvard College and Trinity College, Oxford and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. After briefly practising law in New York, he served as an officer with the United States Special Forces and with the Department of State, Washington DC. Before joining Hambros in 1972, he was an international banker for four years with Lehman Brothers in New York.

Dr Michael Flanagan, Chief Technology Officer

Michael Flanagan joined Arieso at the beginning of 2007 as CTO, responsible for advancing the company’s unique vision for a new generation of optimisation technologies and bringing that vision to life for Arieso’s global customers. An internationally recognised expert in network optimisation, Michael spent 12 years at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in New Jersey. At Bell Labs, he worked on many aspects of wireless communications systems, ranging from channel element design to network design and optimisation, and gained considerable international experience, including in the US, China, India, the UK and New Zealand. Michael received a BEng in Electrical Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1990, and MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1995 respectively. While a National Science Foundation Fellow at Caltech he worked part-time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Deep Space Network projects including the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Maisy Ng, Add Partners

Maisy Ng co-founded Add Partners with more than 10 years’ technology and venture capital experience that spans Asian, American and European markets. Maisy was most recently a Senior Manager at Vertex Management, the Singapore-based multinational private equity firm. Maisy was part of the pioneering team that established Vertex’s European operations and headed their European office in London. During the prior eight years, Maisy worked in the semiconductor industry, where she was a chip designer in Silicon Valley and Singapore before moving into Product Marketing. Maisy is named as a co-inventor in six US technology patents. Maisy is Singaporean. She holds a BASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto; an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology; and an MSc in Management of Technology from the National University of Singapore. Maisy also serves on the Board of Directors of SurfKitchen and Navio.

Mike Pinches, Chairman

Mike Pinches has over 35 years experience in mobile communications with GEC-Marconi, Racal and Vodafone. As Technical Director, in 1983, he was one of the founders of Vodafone, and was Managing Director - Networks within Vodafone UK when he retired early in 2002. He reported to the Chief Operating Officer and was responsible for Vodafone UK IT and network technology design, operations and maintenance functions, comprising some 2,700 people.

Richard Marsh, Oxford Capital Partners

Richard is an investment manager at venture capital fund Oxford Capital Partners. Richard has over 10 years experience of building technology companies both as an investor an operational manager. He founded and built the software company Datanomic Ltd. He holds an MA and PhD in Engineering, and Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, where his area of technical specialisation was in information semantics and data modeling. Richard is a Chartered Engineer and holds an MBA from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was a Sainsbury Management Fellow.