On June 20th we are pairing up with our wonderful friends at Inspirefest, Europe’s leading conference of technology, science and the arts, to bring you Niamh Given, Chief Growth Officer at Nest.vc, an innovation platform that is enabling start-ups to achieve the extraordinary through access to investment, partnerships and community engagement across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. 

Niamh is responsible for all corporate programmes across the business and is focused on driving synergies as Nest scales across diverse regions and industries. Having spent the past 14 years in Asia, she has unique insights on innovation in this region and an extensive background in tech start-ups as well as corporate experience at PCH.

Niamh joined Nest with more than 12 years of operations experience, focusing on strategic growth and the development of new business units. With more than eight years’ experience working in product development in China as well as co-founding her own online wine start-up, she has worked extensively with both Fortune 500 companies and with start-ups to bring their products to the global marketplace.

At PCH, Niamh led the team that enabled hardware start-ups to navigate the complexities of manufacturing product at scale, reducing time to market and minimising risk. She was also a pivotal founding member of Highway1, a premier hardware accelerator based in San Francisco that has brought more than 60 hardware start-ups through a four-month accelerator programme and raised more than $80m in funding.