Who we are

Prof. Francois Lacour-Gayet is a retired Professor of Cardiac Surgery.
He graduated from Paris University and trained in Paris University Hospitals. After working 17 years in Paris, he moved overseas and  practised as chief of Academic Departments of paediatric cardiac surgery in Hamburg, Denver, New York, London and Sultanate of Oman. While in Denver, Colorado, his department was ranking #4 on 150 US paediatric cardiac surgery centers. Some of his main surgical interests are: neonatal cardiac surgery, complex cardiac repair, evaluation of quality of care, and humanitarian programs. Francois was previously Council Member at the European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS) and founder of ECHSA. He has published a book on ‘Surgery of Conotruncal Anomalies’ in 2016 and his publication list includes 212 peer-reviewed articles. He is committed to support Charity Programs in developing countries.

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Helene is a highly experienced luxury retail consultant.
She brings a wealth of experience, having spent the last 25 years working in the luxury industry initially as a Flagship Store Manager (multi-sites) for Chaumet, Vertu, Goyard; and subsequently as Country manager for Delvaux and Valextra in charge of both retail and wholesale accounts. Helene has also worked as a consultant delivering high profile assignments in areas such as competitive intelligence of key competitors and their best practice, customer service assessment, visual merchandising strategy and implementation, and management development for Chanel and Buccellati. Leading global luxury organisations have utilised Helene for spearheading launches, identifying new opportunities for product development, refining and implementing business strategies. Essential to her brief was the implementation of multiple store openings in London and nurturing and developing relationships with partners such as Harrods, Selfridges and DSML.

Layina is an experienced consultant in Cosmetics and Industrial Operations.

She brings 15 years of experience in Luxury and Consumer Cosmetics industries. She worked for nine years at L’Oréal in Paris as an Innovation Sourcing Leader in charge of developing new solutions for Skincare, Make up, Fragrances and Electronic Devices markets. She managed multi-brand portfolios and developed partnerships with the most innovative suppliers worldwide. She subsequently joined Orveda, a high-end skincare startup in London, as COO, with a focus on product development, business growth and operations. In particular, she was key in designing and developing the B2B distribution across Europe and USA, and the B2C worldwide activity via E-commerce.

More recently, Layina has been working as a strategy and operations consultant on Entrepreneurial programs. She managed a pre-incubator program for startups, an innovative Intrapreneurship program for public administration and is currently contributing to a global research on the "Entrepreneurial Mindset". She also assisted institutional clients in developing their operational strategies.

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Antoine Mallard is Senior Advisor to promising start-ups regarding their overall strategy (which may include fundraising).

In parallel, Antoine is the VP of Portfolio Management at Causality Link, a US fintech in sentiment 2.0, where he develops alert systems for fundamental managers and quantamental strategies for systematic funds.

Antoine also teaches Private Equity, Venture Capital, Growth & Impact Investing, M&A and Hedge Fund Strategies at a few leading European business schools, including Cambridge University.

Antoine co-founded AiVEN Partners, an impact & deep tech fund investing in early-stage Artificial Intelligence companies. He was the CIO of D’Alembert Capital, a London-based hedge fund, and before that Antoine was managing Concordia Advisors’ Event-Driven Fund, in which MAN Group, the world’s largest publicly-listed hedge fund, invested. Before that, he was Head of Research at Systeia Capital Management (then the largest Paris-based multi-strategy hedge fund and a subsidiary of Credit Agricole/Amundi, the largest French bank).

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Matthieu brings 360 degrees view with 25 years of experience in the telecommunication and energy industries with a focus in international growth strategy and investment. Matthieu has worked for Orange in charge of international business development and M&A operations in numerous geographies. More recently he worked for a family holding company where he settled and lead the department in charge of direct and indirect investments. In this position he built a dealflow and invested in renewable energy and energy transition. He has been part of investment committees for PE funds and various boards.
He graduated in civil engineering and finance and holds an executive MBA from HEC Paris.

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Manuel is the President of Mañana Films, launched in 2022. He is also the Founder of Capa Sport within the NEWEN group Producer and the Director of more than 40 films and documentary series including:- PSG ô ville lumière, 4x52 for Amazon, budget: €2.5M - Building the Legend, 90' on Roland Garros, budget: €600K, sold in 16 countries- Legend Live On, portraits of Olympic legends for the IOC platform, budget: €1.2M- Two 90' for Canal +: Play in 2012, €2M budget, sold in 25 countries and Coach in 2016, €650K budget, sold in 11 countries. Manuel co-presented the discovery programme "Les Nouveaux explorateurs" on Canal +, 28x52' from 2007 to 2015. He also supported Paris 2024 during the last year of the bid. A graduate of ESSEC and Sciences Po, Manuel comes from a large rugby family and was himself a top- level sportsman.