Our Advisors
Natacha Fazal Karim
Advisor
A serial entrepreneur with a diverse portfolio spanning across business aviation, hospitality, F&B, real estate, design, and fashion. She founded HerMeNow, an accelerator that supports early-stage women-led social enterprises in the Middle & and Africa and leads philanthropy in her family office. Natacha is an advisor and an early-stage angel investor in Rama Impact.
Hoda Salman
Advisor
Senior professional with over 20 years of experience in finance, investments, sustainable development, and impact investing in developed and emerging markets (Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia).
Zevae Zaheer
Advisor
Zevae has 20+ years of insights, successes, and failures in solving business problems in global consultancies, governments, foundations, and startups. He is currently the founder and CEO of Collider Studio, which has supported organizations to run investment readiness programs in 20+ countries, and 100+ startups, creating $250m+ attributable growth. He is a board member at numerous startups, an author of 50+ articles, a speechwriter for ministers, and an ex-senior advisor to the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs in the UAE, the Prime Minister’s Office, and The Executive Office of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Before this, in the UK, he was the Director of Innovation for a global non-profit in education at Teach For All.
Ottavia Pesce
Advisor
Ottavia is the CEO of Be That Girl, a foundation that aims to help women live self-determined lives. She joined the foundation at its onset and shaped its portfolio to provide girls and young women from disadvantaged backgrounds with opportunities to access quality education and employment training, supported by mentors and role models that help them gain life skills and overcome gender-based barriers.
Before Be That Girl, Ottavia was an economist with the United Nations for nine years, working on trade policy and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
Javed Maqsood
Advisor
Javed has 20+ years of operational experience in Silicon Valley in building and leading best-in-class growth and post-sales strategy and teams at high-performing businesses like Algonomy, AppDynamics (acq. by Cisco), Reflektion, Box, BloomReach, Autonomy (acq. by HP), and more. He started his career in consulting, then moved on to lead multiple startups towards growth and successful exits over his career.
Formed High Plains Consulting (HPC) a few years back, currently with a total of 3 team members. As the CEO of HPC, Javed and his team are supporting founders and executives of startups and scale-ups across the world. He is partnered with leading VCs (Atomico), accelerators (Plug and Play, DMZ), and incubators (Imperial College, London) in North America and abroad, and works deeply in their ecosystem. He offers growth and operational efficiency oriented advisory & turnkey consulting; specializing in GTM and Post Sales. Javed is also an LP at Stage 2 Capital and works with their portfolio companies.
Alicia Marie Maitland
Advisor
In her current role at Convergence Blended Finance, Alicia is responsible for leading on a variety of capacity building and engagement initiatives to educate and foster the global Blended Finance ecosystem, with the aim of developing impactful investment opportunities. Alicia joined Convergence with over 10 years experience across the financial services, media, and non-profit sectors and across multiple geographies. In her role at AVPN in Singapore, Alicia worked directly with stakeholders across the spectrum of social investment, including development agencies, corporates, philanthropic foundations, impact investors as well as PE/VCs funds in support of their strategic initiatives. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from McGill University in Canada and a Master’s Degree in Strategic Studies from NTU in Singapore, Alicia’s specific area of interest and expertise lies at the intersection of profit and development and in cultivating community, facilitating important connections and providing valuable insights to catalyze impact.
Kanwal Rathi
Advisor
Kanwal Rathi is a Senior Associate on Convergence’s Market Acceleration and Design Funding Team. She has over 8 years of experience in investing, including 6 in the field of impact investing. Before joining Convergence, Kanwal worked as a Senior Investment Officer at Enabling Qapital, AG and managed a portfolio of clean cooking and carbon finance transactions in Sub-Saharan Africa. She also previously worked at Social Investment Managers and Advisors, LLC. There she specialized in the underwriting and due diligence of structured debt investments in off-grid solar and microfinance sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and designing new innovative funds and projects.
Kanwal began her career in Pakistan in Corporate Finance at a leading logistics player before switching to the impact investing space. She holds a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi and is a CFA Charterholder.