Ana Bakshi

Biography

Ana is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Oxford Foundry, the University of Oxford’s multidisciplinary entrepreneurship centre. She is an entrepreneur who has a strong track record in effecting systems change and culture change within universities, and she is an expert in building global best-practice frameworks for entrepreneurship centres, creating university-based accelerators that complement academic research, and designing transformational experiential learning programmes and teaching models.
Ana is passionate about diversity and social inclusion. She believes that education has a unique ability and responsibility to address the world’s challenges, and that by building communities of support, and embedding entrepreneurship into the curriculum at universities, young people are empowered to develop their ideas into businesses that have positive impact, and that directly contribute to GDP and to the growth of local and global economies.
As an entrepreneurial ecosystem builder, Ana creates successful partnerships and builds global networks of thought-leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and experts. She firmly believes that the most impactful innovation happens at the intersection of industry, talent and academia – and that by building and leveraging on these structures and networks, we can change the face of learning, entrepreneurship and education worldwide.
Under Ana’s leadership, within 24 months, the Foundry has built a diverse community of over 3,000 students. It has delivered over 7,500 hours of student experiential learning, and enabled Oxford’s first scholarship for black students from disadvantaged backgrounds. By bringing together multidisciplinary expertise from academia and industry, and connecting this with student talent, the Foundry is tackling some of society’s most pressing problems.
The Foundry has accelerated 19 ventures across two cohorts of its 6-month long OXFO L.E.V8 accelerator programme, who have raised £8m and created 70+ jobs globally, and their impact is already being felt worldwide. Collectively they have saved 1800 cubic tonnes of CO2 in the hospitality industry through sustainable laundry technology, developed and scaled a rechargeable lighting solution to give schoolchildren in remote villages in India an additional 30 minutes study time each evening, and published books that have enabled over 500,000 children from BAME backgrounds in 35 countries to see themselves represented in the stories they read.
Nurturing talent and taking a data-driven approach to developing and refining programmes is at the heart of Ana’s ethos. At Oxford, Ana has pioneered ‘5:5’, the University’s unique five-stage entrepreneurship learning model, with a five-step delivery method. She has established initiatives to support Oxford’s future women leaders, built a Student Advisory Board model, established a global Advisory Board and launched Oxford’s first inter-College student ideas competition.
Prior to Oxford, Ana was Co-founder of the Entrepreneurship Institute, King’s College London, spinning out the Institute internally, founding the Institute’s first incubator, accelerating 50+ ventures and upskilling 10,000 students, leading to the team winning a Higher Education Team Enterprise award in the Enterprise Educators Awards.
Ana is a trustee of Ascend Charity, which provides key skills to hard-to-reach and marginalised groups, and she is a member of Fast Company’s globally-elected Impact Council. She has a Master’s degree in International Development and has worked in government and the third sector.