Karim Samra

As COO of the Hult Prize foundation, home of one the most ambitious and successful social venture funding models in the world, Karim leads initiatives around entrepreneur empowerment and training, pipeline development, crowd-sourced idea generation, business incubation, and global partnerships. He has previously worked closely with multi-national corporations and family businesses across multiple geographies to optimize their capital structures, acquire/ dispose of assets, raise more than $600m of debt and equity capital, and evaluate more than $2bn of investments in the industrials, healthcare, and energy spaces. He has advised senior government officials on fiscal reform and public private partnerships, underwritten debt and equity investments at GE Capital, helped launch an emerging markets B2B platform, and founded one of the first business incubators in the MENA region seeking to address unemployment through job creation and entrepreneur empowerment. Most recently he was on Barclays' COO team, where he helped evaluate and streamline the firm's operating structure and strategy, evaluate more than $200m of product related investment, and support a number of the firm's key clients. He was also appointed to the working group on Impact Investing where he helped shape and define the firm's approach to responsible investing. He holds a B.A. in History from Boston College and an M.B.A from NYU's Stern School of Business, and is a frequent speaker and author on impact investing and business 2.0. He currently serves as a board member to NanoHealth Technologies.