Engineer turned General Partner.

I grew up in Ukraine in the 1990s, when the only reliable strategy was to invent your own way forward. At ten I was selling eggs and watermelons at the farmers' market. At fourteen I was designing and sewing a fashion collection for my classmates — not as a hobby, but because tailor-made clothes were what we could afford, and what I could sell. My mother, Larysa, worked three or four jobs to provide for me and my younger sister. Those years were hard, but they built the character I rely on now: resourceful, restless, unwilling to wait for permission.

I trained as an oil and gas engineer. I worked across global EPC projects from Sakhalin to oil sands in Canada. When I could not find a job in the UK sector, I did what the market stall had taught me — I created one. I founded a subcontracting company servicing oil rigs on multi-billion-dollar projects: Maersk, Shell, Wood Group, TAQA Energy, KazMunayGas in Kazakhstan, Italian manufacturing partners and Norwegian operators. Before that, I served as Business Development Director at Business Contract Institute, working remotely while raising my first child. That period taught me how to run complex operations, win trust across cultures, and keep going when the structure around you is uncertain. Alongside that work I was Educational Chair for the International Society of Automation in Abu Dhabi in 2015, helping shape future of work strategy accross MENA, UK, EU & Russia.

In Kazakhstan I met an Italian analytical chemist and together we founded Wastekan, a deeptech venture cleaning water of nano- and micro-plastics and exploring waste recycling. Later I founded Naked Kimchi & Co, an award-winning UK food brand. Then Mint Ventures brought me into angel investing — writing cheques as small as £2,000, learning deal by deal, and watching the firm democratise investment among women. That experience opened my eyes: capital does not have to be concentrated to be powerful. It became the bridge from operator to investor, and eventually to General Partner at Scaler Capital.

I call myself an architect of regenerative economies — systems where talent, capital, markets and wellbeing reinforce each other. To me that is a design brief, not a slogan. It means backing underestimated founders, opening angel investing to more women, and surrounding companies with the grants, government programmes and go-to-market relationships they need to survive. The measure of success is not just financial; it is whether the people and places around a company end up better off.