Helen Kareva, The Art of Redefining Corporate Humanity
By Hafsa Qadeer
When Helen Kareva moved to Dubai a few years ago, she expected new horizons, but she did not expect silence. Not the literal kind, but a professional quiet that muffled the voices of people like her, skilled, experienced, and yet somehow unseen. She and her co-founder had both spent years in corporate and creative worlds, speaking at panels and events back home, but when they tried to enter the global speaking circuit, they found the doors half closed.
They attended conferences and panels hoping to find a way in, and what they saw unsettled them. The same speakers appeared again and again. The same ideas recycled on different stages. Meanwhile, thousands of professionals with real stories to tell were left behind. It was not a question of talent, Helen realized. It was a question of access.
From that silence came SpeakUp, a platform built not just to help people talk, but to help ideas travel. “We wanted to build something that made finding and booking the right voice as easy as calling an Uber,” Helen says. The mission was audacious, but its roots were deeply human. SpeakUp was not born in a boardroom; it was born out of a longing for connection, a frustration with barriers, and a belief that intelligence, both human and artificial, could bring people together.
The Bridge That Didn’t Exist
Before SpeakUp, the speaking industry was fragmented. Traditional agencies promoted only high-priced speakers because commissions mattered more than discovery. The same familiar faces dominated conference stages. Organizers spent weeks messaging contacts and sifting through databases. Speakers filled out endless forms that led nowhere. The industry was running on legacy systems in a world that had already gone digital.
Helen and her team decided to fix what no one else dared to. They created an AI-powered ecosystem where speakers, organizers, podcasters, and journalists could connect directly without intermediaries. Their matching system analyzes event goals, audience demographics, speaker expertise, and engagement metrics to make intelligent pairings within seconds. Conversations happen inside the app. Bookings can be confirmed instantly. Teams can collaborate in one shared space without ever touching a spreadsheet.
“It’s not just a tool,” Helen explains. “It’s an infrastructure for global communication.”
That sentence captures the quiet revolution behind SpeakUp. It does not just simplify logistics; it rewrites the rules of who gets to be heard. For decades, access to a microphone depended on money, networks, and location. Helen wanted to break that hierarchy. In her words, SpeakUp is “for every brilliant mind who was told their voice was too new, too different, or simply not on the list.”
Learning to Walk Again
The path to building SpeakUp was neither linear nor smooth. Right after filming The Final Pitch Dubai, Helen’s life shifted dramatically when she was diagnosed with a giant cell tumor in her leg. While the company was expanding across markets, she was recovering from surgery and learning to walk again. The contrast between physical stillness and professional momentum was profound.
“After you’ve learned to walk again, everything else feels easy,” she says softly. “It changed everything about how I see leadership, resilience, and balance.”
In that difficult season, Helen discovered that the most important kind of strength is not loud; it is quiet, patient, and deeply human. She began to see entrepreneurship not as a race, but as an endurance journey, a process of continuous adjustment. “When you’ve faced something like that, you stop fearing business challenges,” she reflects. “Investor negotiations or product pivots stop feeling like real problems. They’re just part of the process.”
That experience also taught her to trust her team more deeply. She learned to let go, to slow down, and to focus on purpose rather than pressure. “The hardest part of entrepreneurship,” she smiles, “was learning to walk again. Everything else is just a series of small adjustments on the way to a bigger goal.”
The Rise of Intelligent Connection
Today, SpeakUp operates in more than twenty-eight countries and is quietly reshaping the global speaking ecosystem. Its AI not only matches speakers with events but also generates analytics that reveal what topics audiences engage with, where diversity gaps exist, and which conversations are shaping industries.
Helen believes the next decade will redefine how ideas travel. “AI is not a trend,” she says. “It is a revolution in how people, ideas, and opportunities connect.”
Her prediction is bold but grounded in real data. On average, SpeakUp users save fifty hours per month on coordination tasks. Booking cycles are ten times faster, and speaker matches are sixty percent more relevant than before. A process that once took months now happens in minutes.
For Helen, efficiency is only part of the story. The real transformation is emotional, restoring human energy to an industry that had become mechanical. “When booking a speaker becomes as easy as booking a flight, you give people back their time, but also their excitement. You remind them why they wanted to tell stories in the first place.”
Building a Culture of Courage and Humor
Inside SpeakUp, Helen’s leadership philosophy feels refreshingly different. She often jokes that leadership is thirty percent strategy, thirty percent chaos management, and forty percent coffee, but her humor hides a deeper truth. “You cannot build innovation on fear,” she says. “Only on energy and purpose.”
She believes in clarity over control, trust over micromanagement. Every team member is encouraged to experiment boldly and fail gracefully. “We have a simple rule,” she smiles. “Don’t bring me problems, bring me experiments.” Some of SpeakUp’s most celebrated features were born from what she calls “beautiful accidents,” when a small mistake sparked a bigger idea.
Her team celebrates small wins, mixes memes with investor updates, and speaks to each other like equals. It is a culture that values intelligence and empathy in equal measure. “Leadership for me is not about being the loudest voice in the room,” Helen says. “It’s about creating a space where every voice can be heard. Which, in a way, is what SpeakUp itself stands for.”
The Human Stories That Keep Her Going
Among the thousands of speakers on SpeakUp, one story stays close to Helen’s heart, that of Mark Jennings-Bates, an adventurer, humanitarian, and motivational speaker who donates his speaking income to charity. He has driven across deserts and sailed through storms to raise funds for spinal cord research. “Mark reminded us why we’re doing this,” Helen says. “He uses his voice not for fame, but for change.”
Stories like his reaffirm SpeakUp’s deeper mission, to amplify goodness, not just volume. By being commission-free, the platform allows every dollar earned to go directly to the speaker or, in cases like Mark’s, to the causes they champion. “When you remove barriers,” Helen says, “you don’t just amplify voices. You amplify goodness.”
A Global Platform That Feels Personal
Operating across continents has taught Helen that communication is not universal in tone, but it is universal in intent. “Every culture has its rhythm of dialogue,” she explains. “What feels inspiring in Dubai may feel formal in London or bold in Istanbul.” Instead of seeing that as a barrier, she sees it as a blueprint.
Each market strategy at SpeakUp is designed like a local campaign, shaped around cultural values and emotional cues. “Building a global platform means more than translating an interface,” she says. “It means understanding people.”
The results are already visible. In Turkey, the platform grew organically through word of mouth, interviews, and influencer mentions without any paid promotion. In Spain and the UAE, SpeakUp has become a trusted name among media professionals and event organizers. “A speaker in Dubai, a podcaster in Spain, and an organizer in London can now all feel equally represented,” Helen says. “Not by being the same, but by being seen for who they are.”
The Evolution of Events
Helen’s perspective on the future of events is both analytical and poetic. “People are tired of just going to events,” she says. “They want belonging, not just networking.”
Through the data SpeakUp collects, Helen’s team has identified a global shift from conferences to communities. The future, she believes, lies in what she calls “club formats”, smaller, recurring ecosystems built around shared interests, where conversations continue long after the lights go out. “Events will stop being moments and start being movements,” she says.
She envisions a world where major conferences evolve into living, breathing ecosystems, where a panel discussion becomes a long-term collaboration, a podcast becomes a platform, and audiences become active participants in the stories being told. “That’s where the future of influence, learning, and storytelling truly lives,” she says.
Setting a New Standard for Being Heard
Helen’s ambitions for SpeakUp go far beyond growth metrics. She wants to redefine what quality means in public speaking. Her next major initiative, the SpeakUp Global Awards, aims to become for speakers what Michelin stars are for chefs, a symbol of credibility and impact.
“These awards will recognize the most impactful conferences, the strongest podcasts, and the most trusted voices,” she explains. But unlike traditional awards, the criteria will not be based on fame or popularity. “They will be powered by real data, analytics from the platform that show who truly moves audiences and shapes thought.”
In the next few years, Helen hopes to see a fully transparent, commission-free ecosystem where event teams worldwide save millions of hours, and where brilliant minds from every country have a fair chance to be heard. “If people say, years from now, that they book speakers in minutes because of SpeakUp, and that a SpeakUp Award is the gold standard of excellence,” she says, “then we will know we have done something meaningful.”
For Helen Kareva, SpeakUp is not just a company. It is a conversation, one that began with frustration, evolved through resilience, and now echoes with possibility. She has built not just a platform for speaking, but a future that listens.
Because for her, the ultimate goal is simple. It is not only about speaking. It is about setting a new standard for what it means to be heard.
