Lera Leonteva

Lera Leonteva is the founder of Leo AI, one of the first software companies to apply AI to video content for marketing, a top 10 AdTech firm in the UK with $2 million secured in VC funding. She has been a judge for global events like the SC Awards and the National AI Awards. In 2025 she was shortlisted as Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the UK Startup Awards. Lera's background is in ethical hacking as a qualified OSCP, leading penetration testing and red teaming projects for PwC and healthcare brands. In her former role as Senior Manager for Advanced Computing at Allen & Overy, she used her experience as a self-taught programmer in Python, Golang and C++ to lead the Harvey AI and Microsoft Copilot projects for security and engineering for all AI components. For the past decade, she has been an active tech community leader, speaking on security, AI and engineering at national conferences: BSides, National DevOps, leading a panel at Cloud Security Expo, Code First Girls Conference. In her work with Code First Girls, she led software development workshops for 100s of women resulting in those women being hired into technical roles. She is a published researcher with Wiley on "Evaluating Adversarial Attacks Against Artificial Intelligence Systems in Application Deployments" that received 1k views and references in notable legal AI research. Recently, she has moved to the US with the Extraordinary Ability visa, having achieved a distinguished reputation in the security field.