Karina Robinson
CEO, Redcliffe Advisory Ltd
Karina Robinson FCSI (Hon) is the CEO of Redcliffe Advisory Ltd, which provides chair and CEO advisory services. Karina is a champion of the City of London, with a deep belief in the power of diversity and inclusion and a reputation as a benign disruptor. She connects the worlds of finance, deep tech and defence, helping startups and scaleups connect with finance and business partners.
In the finance sector she sits as Non-Executive Director on the Board of Atlanti, an Anglo-Swiss fund management firm that specialises in the subordinated bonds of blue-chip financial institutions.
In the quantum ecosphere, Karina is Senior Advisor to Multiverse Computing, Europe’s largest quantum and AI software firm, which uses a revolutionary mixture of quantum-inspired methods with AI to compress LLMs.
She is the Founder of The City Quantum and AI Summit, a unique event in the heart of the City of London, now celebrating its fifth anniversary of bringing together the international quantum ecosphere, the Global City and Defence, with the aim of supporting the UK’s incredible start-ups and scale ups in this field. She is a member of the UKQuantum Working Group on International Cooperation and Trade and was involved in brainstorming NATO’s Quantum Strategy.
Karina is a European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator judge, helping target funds at promising Deep Tech startups and scaleups in critical fields like space.
In the City, she was Chair of the Lord Mayor’s Appeal Advisory Board, which groups together the CEOs and chairs of major City institutions, as well as a Trustee of the Lord Mayor’s Appeal, having helped grow it from a pop-up charity to a multi-year institution. She is a Past Master of the Worshipful Company of International Bankers, and an Honorary Fellow of the CISI.
Karina ran Robinson Hambro with City legend Rupert Hambro CBE for over a decade. The firm specialised in board search and chair and CEO advice.
At the London School of Economics, she is an Emeritus Governor and Co-Director of The Inclusion Initiative, a research unit at the LSE that uses insights from behavioural science to change the culture of City firms and deep tech. She spent two terms as a NED on the LSE’s Finance Committee.
Why do you support the work of The Entrepreneurs Network?
Over the last decade The Entrepreneurs Network has grown from scratch into an organisation that truly represents entrepreneurs in the UK. A sector that is the backbone of the economy, and its future hope, had lacked a voice. The Entrepreneurs Network listens to the challenges and opportunities through its vast network of entrepreneurs and transmits the messages to government and the wider public superbly, whether it be on taxes, immigration, or any other relevant topic.
What research should more people read?
The Entrepreneurs Networks research is hugely insightful. The Financial Times still has the best reporting on business and politics in the UK and abroad, and their long reads are, in essence, top research. It is also hugely important to take the time to read books, such as Parmy Olson’s Supremacy on the AI race, or Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy on the lessons from the Apollo Space Mission on how to drive growth in our economies.
Why is the UK an attractive place to grow a business?
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of The City Quantum & AI Summit in 2025 we published Race for Growth, a white paper on how the UK is in pole position to take advantage of the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics. There are new opportunities for collaboration between democracies in advancing deep tech, new opportunities in hiring talent, new opportunities in defence spending, which generally results in dual-use technology that is useful in civilian life.