Anna Brailsford has been running Code First Girls as CEO since June 2019. In that time, the organisation has grown from five corporate partners to over 130, including Deloitte, NatWest, Skyscanner, Morgan Stanley, and Capgemini. That’s not a rebrand. That’s a business being built from scratch inside a social enterprise.
Before Code First Girls:
Before joining Code First Girls, Anna was the Commercial Director of Lynda.com and LinkedIn. When LinkedIn acquired Lynda for $1.5 billion in April 2015, she became part of the fourth-largest acquisition in social media history and subsequently contributed to the creation of LinkedIn Learning.
She also co-founded Frisbee, a Founders Factory incubated EdTech startup, before moving to Code First Girls. Her background spans commercial leadership, early-stage founding, and large-scale product rollout. That mix matters when you’re trying to run an education business at scale.
What She Actually Built:
Code First Girls is now the largest provider of free coding courses for women in the UK, having taught more than 150,000 women to code, which is five times as many women as the entire UK university undergraduate system.
Since Anna joined, over 57% of learners have come from under-represented groups, and 49% are career switchers, with 80% of students coming from non-STEM backgrounds. These aren’t vanity metrics. They signal that the model works for people the traditional education system tends to leave behind.
In 2023, CFG partnered with more than 90 universities across every region of the UK and Ireland, as well as government departments including GCHQ and the Cabinet Office.
The Model, Not the Mission:
When Anna joined, Code First Girls was originally founded as a mission-driven non-profit. She turned it into a commercial business by connecting education with real job opportunities.
The structure is B2B. Companies pay to access the talent pipeline. Women get the education free. CFG has delivered over $74.2 million worth of free technology education, with a 96% success rate of women moving from education into their first roles in technology.
CFG has raised £4.5 million and is using it to create one million learning opportunities for women. The target is ambitious, but the track record gives it grounding.
Anna Brailsford, Board and Beyond:
Anna is also a board member for the Institute of Coding, a UK-wide initiative connecting universities with industry on digital skills. She’s spoken at events tied to GCHQ’s CyberFirst Girls program and appears regularly in senior leadership forums. In April 2025, she contributed to HR Magazine’s C-suite series, reflecting on six years at Code First Girls and what it takes to build resilience as a founder.
She was also named among Computer Weekly’s 50 Most Influential Women in Tech.
Why it Holds Up:
The Women in Tech conversation often stays at the level of awareness. Anna Brailsford has spent six years moving it to employment. If you’re thinking about Women in Tech pipelines or building more inclusive hiring, Code First Girls offers a working model rather than a set of talking points.
Anna Brailsford isn’t pitching a future. She’s operating one.
