Chief Operating Officer, AccelerateHER
Elizabeth brings with her over 20 years of accounting experience including 10 as Finance Director of what was one of Scotland’s largest, independent care home providers. For the past six years she has worked in economic development in Scotland supporting start up and growing companies across several sectors including life sciences, technology and tourism.

Elaine has had a varied career which has, for the last 20 years, focused on the development of small businesses and new innovations mostly within the STEM sector. Elaine is skilled in strategic business development, growth, and exit; stakeholder engagement; market assessment, positioning, engagement, and development; ideas generation; product development; strategic financing; personnel management, and branding. She is a passionate advocate for creative innovation especially when combining healthcare with environmental impact. She has acted as a business assessor, advisor, mentor, and Investing Women Angel investor.

After working for the Scottish Enterprise Grampian Inward Investment team to help establish and develop new international companies in Scotland, Elaine joined oil services company RWS in 2006. Acquired by EVPE (Energy Ventures private equity) in 2010 Elaine, as COO, supported the creation of a spinout; Meta Downhole, which focused on the commercialisation of an award-winning sealing technology. From concept through R & D, Meta realised a £16m global turnover in 4 years. Elaine became acting CEO and, together with EVPE, positioned the company for exit and managed the acquisition by Schlumberger in 2016. Prior to sale, 2 further companies were spun out, Morphpackers and Tubular Sciences (TS Ltd).

Elaine was asked by EVPE to become CEO of TS Ltd and raised over £600k in Seed funding via grant and private investment, driving the creation of a ground-breaking engineering concept to reduce carbon emissions at source. Elaine was chosen to take part in a UK based Technology Accelerator course and won a 9 month, highly competitive accelerator programme in Canada focused on finding companies with “billion-dollar potential”. In 2020 she won Investing Women’s Accelerateher Award in the Climate and Environment category.

Elaine has judged on a technology led, accelerator programme (OGTC TechX); worked as an evaluator for the Scottish Government’s Scottish Edge grant programme; regularly works as a small business agitator and mentor for Elevator and mentored on a pre-company programme for females with interest in starting up STEM companies; as well as having been a “Dragon” for social enterprise firm, The Foyer and HIE. She has worked across a wide range of sectors from Engineering and Renewables to Food, Drink, Health and Reusables. She undertakes consultancy work for start-up companies primarily focusing on raising funds.