London Business School's Illai Gescheit joins Unloq as Chair

Illai Gescheit chairs the board alongside co-founders Dr Yiannis Maos MBE and Satyen Fakey starting this September. The appointment comes as Unloq builds out its commercial side, and he will work with the founders on the decisions that set direction and on the route to market.

The appointment follows Unloq's $1.2m seed round, led by the West Midlands Co-Investment Fund with backing from Future Planet Capital Regional, Mercia Ventures and Haatch. The company is putting that round into product engineering and into growing its commercial team.

Gescheit teaches strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School and is an Executive Fellow at Harvard University. He is a founding partner of Gescheit & Partners, working with startups and investment firms across AI, robotics and climate technologies.

He has founded four companies across enterprise and consumer software, healthtech, climate tech and energy, and holds more than 20 patents. He built the corporate venture arms at bp and at Siemens Energy, where he was a Venture Partner in Siemens Energy Ventures. Earlier he led startup programmes and products for Amazon Web Services in EMEA. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's expert network and writes on startups, venture capital, AI and entrepreneurship.

Alongside teaching, Gescheit runs independent research in three areas: how AI accelerates fundraising, an AI-driven model of lean startup he calls 3A, and how startup and corporate boards get the tools and insight to decide well. The third of those is the problem Unloq was built to solve.

Dr Yiannis Maos MBE, co-founder and CEO of Unloq, says:

"We have built something genuinely different in Birmingham and we are winning work with our decision intelligence platform. We are hiring across the business, the product is moving quickly, and bringing Illai onto the board is the next piece of that. Much like our founding team, Illai has founded multiple companies, built the venture arms inside two of the largest names in energy, and taught founders how to scale. He knows the stage we are heading into and he has been through it from several sides. With him on the board, the next five years get a lot more ambitious with our combined expertise in building great businesses.

Illai Gescheit, Chair of Unloq, said:

"Everybody talks about AI, but at board level it is still not applied systematically. Boards need three things to work well: alignment, the ability to have tough conversations, and conviction. Tough conversations are easier with data, and conviction is easier when the intelligence arrives systematically instead of as one person's version of it.

I am optimistic about the future with AI, and I am optimistic because of the people rather than the technology. What interests me is what gets discovered when intelligence amplifies human judgement instead of replacing it: new business models, new materials, new medicines. That is the work I want to help Unloq do."

Unloq closed its seed round in May 2026. Gescheit is the first appointment to the board since then.

ENDS

About Unloq

Unloq is a Birmingham-based AI company helping organisations put AI to work on the decisions that matter most. Its decision intelligence platform runs on a company's own data and turns it into answers that show their working: what the answer rests on, and what moved the number. Forecasts, ranked recommendations and external market signals arrive in October 2026.

Founded by Dr Yiannis Maos MBE and Satyen Fakey, Unloq works with organisations to find where AI is worth applying and to embed it in how