Manchester Startup Weekend Day 3: Lyan’s Den

Application link for Lyan’s Den:

https://airtable.com/shrHEav41k3kDkluS

A weekend full of workshops from industry partners, leaders and brands to help you get your idea, business from 0 to 1. Come with an open mind, laptops and energy.? ?

This is a place where you learn, iterate through ideas and fail with no judgement. We are a soft landing pad from the startup and VC world. ? We embrace all businesses/startups in all stages and forms.

Day 3 : Sat 26th March 2023

Time: 11am-3pm

Event type: Pitch Event - £10,000 investment & consideration spot on cohort

Order of day:

● 11am--12pm Brunch

● 12pm-12.15pm Welcome to Lyan’s Den

● 12:15-12:30pm Intro to Black Seed, Event sponsors and format of events

● 12:30-1:30pm Pitches & Feedback

● 1:30pm-2pm Judging: Natwest (Sharniya Ferdinand) , TBC , Black Seed (Cyril Lutterodt)

● 2pm-2.15pm - Announcement of winner

● 2.15pm-3.00pm - Closing Remarks

Sharniya has worked in banking for a decade, in her current role as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Consultant Sharniya supports the bank to develop and deliver DEI strategies, programmes and initiatives. She is passionate about inclusion and empowering those who are underrepresented in their industries. In previous roles, she created and delivered customer focused initiatives engaging with diverse communities and encouraging inclusive entrepreneurship support. Sharniya led a programme to accelerate multi-ethnic owned businesses, which was highly commended at the 2019 European Diversity Awards and won the Supplier Diversity programme of the year at the 2022 British Diversity Awards. Most recently Sharniya was awarded Employee of the Year at the Multicultural Business & Community Champion Awards (2022).

Sharniya has a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and a Masters in Events and Exhibitions Management.

Cyril is a founder turned funder with experience in ecosystem building who profoundly understands the venture capital market, combining entrepreneurial insights with technologies and building business models at scale.

He is passionate about leading teams and mentoring entrepreneurs to find new disruptive innovations with a unique value proposition to scale the company and produce seven-figure annual revenue potential.

His belief in democratising access to venture for all led him to co-found Black Seed as a partner, a seed fund, community and co-working space led by Black founders, for Black founders. We are rooted in Brixton with global ambition. Black Seed empowers Black founders to build the impossible and is raising a £6m fund to invest exclusively in Black founders in the UK.

Cyril is a thought leader in the future of computing, health, DEI as a sub-asset class and venture capital. He has founded three separate companies: ZOI, a telediagnosis startup with the vision of creating a future society with no sickness and Neu Robotics to help expedite the transition of repetitive tasks through the incorporation of artificial intelligence in real-world applications. He has spoken at the University of Cambridge, TedX, and NVIDIA and has multiple patents and publications.

Host or Publisher Black Seed