GRAND FINAL – TUESDAY 12TH NOVEMBER 2024
Tata Varsity Pitch 2024, powered by NACUE is a national initiative, dedicated to both current students and recent graduates (those graduating in 2017 or after) celebrating high potential, early-stage ventures coming directly out of colleges and universities from across the UK.
NACUE and the Tata group have worked together for fifteen years through this competition and worked together in ‘Powering the Enterprising Generation’ to support talented and ambitious young people, committed to innovating their own career through enterprise and entrepreneurship.
We’ve now reached the Grand Final stage, with seven fantastic finalists, which is being held on 12th November 2024 and if you are interested in attending this prestigious event and seeing who is crowned the winner of Tata Varsity Pitch 2024 then please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Meet Our Finalists
(IN CATEGORY ORDER-JUST CLICK THROUGH ON LOGOS FOR MORE DETAILS)
OUR JUDGES ARE
Tim Jones, CBE is the Executive Director of Tata Limited, representing the Tata Group in London. After graduating from Christ’s College Cambridge with a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science, his early career was spent at Shell UK, Lucas Industries and playing guitar in a pop group. Tim spent seventeen years at NatWest, working extensively on payment systems including the development of Mondex digital cash, before going on to become NatWest’s Chief Executive of Retail Banking. After NatWest Bank, Tim was the CEO of Simpay Limited, a payments initiative owned by Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange and Telefonica Moviles. In 2007, the UK Government appointed Tim to lead the design and build of what became NEST Pensions, during which time he became a customer of TCS. He was awarded a CBE for his work on pensions. Tim left NEST to return to the world of digital cash, designing and leading Tibado, a new design for Central Bank Digital Cash. Tim’s corporate Board service includes Capital One Bank (Europe) PLC in London and ITG Inc, a NYSE listed institutional broker/dealer, in New York. He served as an Independent Director at ITG for fourteen years until its takeover by Virtu Financial in 2019. Alongside his role at Tata, he also currently serves as a Non-Executive Director of Diligenta a UK based, Financial Services Authority regulated subsidiary of Tata Consultancy Services. Tim is married with three children and lives in Brighton, on the Sussex coast.
Morgan Meaker is a senior writer at WIRED, covering Europe and European business from London. She won the top prize at the BSME Awards in 2023 and was part of the team that worked on WIRED’s award-winning investigation series “Inside the Suspicion Machine.” Before she joined WIRED in 2021, her journalism was published by the BBC, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, Reuters, the Guardian, Politico, Deutsche Welle, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, and De Correspondent.
Hushpreet Dhaliwal is currently the Deputy Director-Defence & Security at The Alan Turing Institute and is passionate about supporting high-value innovation in its various forms that best support UK PLC, using her extensive experience and knowledge of building things from the ground up and running projects in complex environments. She launched her career as CEO of NACUE, the first student-led organisation in the world and went on to win a multi-million government contract to spur entrepreneurship growth amongst young people in education and oversaw the development of flagship programmes such as the UK’s Start-up Career Launchpad, Student Enterprise Conference and the Varsity Pitch Competition. In 2014, she was hand-picked by the Prime Minister’s Enterprise Advisor, Lord Young, based in Number 10, to further this agenda within government. In eight months, during the run-up to the next general election, she worked on delivering several new initiatives including 'The Duke of York Award for University Entrepreneurship’, a nationwide schools’ pilot of Enterprise Advisors and the launch of ‘The Careers and Enterprise Company’.
