Mary McKenna

Group Lead, Tech Northern Ireland Advocates

Mary McKenna, AwakenHub/AwakenAngels co-founder, serial entrepreneur and angel investor.

Mary McKenna is a Donegal based Northern Irish serial tech entrepreneur and angel investor.  She co-founded, built & sold successful Derry based online learning company Learning Pool.

Since selling Learning Pool in 2014 Mary has worked extensively with early stage startups and scaleups across the entire European ecosystem and especially with female and first time entrepreneurs.  She has angel invested in 21 very early stage companies to date, most (but not all) of them technology businesses.

She is an EU Horizon Europe innovation judge, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Oxford and in 2020 along with some likeminded friends she launched the AwakenHub community for female founders across the island of Ireland.

Mary was awarded an MBE by Her Majesty the Queen in the 2014 New Year’s Honours for services to digital technology, innovation and learning.

Mary is a prominent figure in the world of angel investing, winning both European and UK Angel Investor of the Year, 2023.