Tessa Clarke

Tessa Clarke is the Co-Founder and CEO of OLIO, a global sharing platform that empowers neighbours and businesses to share surplus food and household items rather than waste them. Since launching in 2015, she has scaled OLIO to over 8 million users across 63 countries, with more than 120 million meals shared and 110,000 tonnes of CO₂ saved. After studying Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and earning her MBA at Stanford, Tessa held senior digital leadership roles at The Boston Consulting Group, Emap and Dyson before founding OLIO. Under her leadership, the company has raised over £34 million and earned UN recognition as a climate action beacon. Her speaking sessions equip organisations with practical strategies for building purpose-driven businesses, scaling community-led innovation, and embedding sustainability into everyday operations.

During her second maternity leave in 2015, Tessa Clarke was told by removal men to throw away perfectly good food because she couldn't find anyone nearby to share it with. That moment of frustration sparked the creation of OLIO, a neighbour-to-neighbour sharing app that has since grown into a global movement tackling waste at scale. Today, OLIO has over 8 million users across 63 countries, with more than 120 million meals and 15 million household items shared, saving 13 billion litres of water and 110,000 tonnes of CO₂. What began as a simple solution to an everyday problem has been recognised by the United Nations as a climate action beacon and by Vivatech as Europe's next potential unicorn.

Tessa's career has been defined by driving purposeful innovation across sectors. After studying Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and earning her MBA at Stanford, she held senior digital leadership roles at The Boston Consulting Group, Emap, and Dyson, where she worked closely with James Dyson as the company's first C-level digital director to lead its global digital transformation. At OLIO, she solved the platform's early cold start problem by creating the Food Waste Heroes programme, a network of 45,000 trained volunteers who collect surplus food from businesses like Tesco, Pret and Iceland and redistribute it through the app. This grassroots community model has been central to OLIO's success and its ability to raise over £34 million in funding, including a £27 million Series B. Her approach combines commercial rigour with deep commitment to sustainability, proving that profit and purpose can grow together.

A compelling and accomplished speaker, Tessa addresses audiences on sustainability, innovation, the entrepreneurial journey, women in leadership, and the future of business. She's a TEDx speaker, regular columnist for Sifted, and a sought-after voice at leading conferences including Business of Software and London Tech Week. Her recent writing challenges conventional startup thinking, from arguing that clear thinkers have become more valuable than coders in the AI era to advocating that sustainability messaging should focus on personal and community benefit rather than carbon metrics alone. This insight reflects her broader philosophy: real change happens when doing good feels human, accessible and rewarding. Tessa equips organisations with practical strategies for building purpose-driven businesses, scaling community-led innovation, and embedding sustainability into everyday operations, showing how small actions, done collectively, can change the world.