Umaima Ahmad

Umaima Ahmad is a British Asian entrepreneur and qualified lawyer whose career has spanned financial services, life sciences, and medtech. She holds an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge, as well as degrees from King's College London and the University of Strasbourg, and spent over a decade at AstraZeneca leading complex billion-dollar oncology asset transactions across licensing, acquisition, and divestment.

In 2018, alongside her husband Dr. Saif Ahmad, Umaima co-founded 52North — a Cambridge University spinout on a mission to reinvent the healthcare journey. Her transition from corporate deal-making to deep-tech founder was inspired by a postgraduate idea she entered into Cambridge's Postdoc Business Plan Competition, which won second place and seeded the company's early development. She now serves as CEO, steering the company's commercial strategy, investor relations, and regulatory navigation.

Under her leadership, 52North has raised over $6 million in funding, secured backing from KHP Ventures and Cedars-Sinai in a landmark UK–US hospital VC deal, and achieved breakthrough device status under the UK Government's Innovative Devices Access Pathway for its flagship product Neutrocheck® — an at-home point-of-care test for neutropenic sepsis in cancer patients. Umaima was named on Management Today's 35 Under 35 Women in Business in 2022 and has been a board member of the UK Pharmaceutical Licensing Group and Health Tech Enterprise.