Human-led. Boutique.
28+ years of trust.
THE LEADERS WHO WILL DEFINE YOUR NEXT CHAPTER WON'T BE FOUND
ON LINKEDIN.
ConsultantBox places C-suite, board, and senior leadership for PE-backed tech companies,
AI governance mandates, cybersecurity firms, and life sciences scale-ups.
We Work With Companies Where the Next Hire Is Genuinely Consequential.
PE and VC firms trust us at the moments that matter most: post-acquisition integrations, leadership gaps at portfolio companies, and executive team builds ahead of exit. We don’t send you a database. We go and find the right person, discreetly.
Our clients are organisations where a wrong hire at the top costs far more than a search fee. Our candidates are leaders who don’t apply to job adverts, and who need a trusted introduction, not a LinkedIn message.
Why Clients Choose a Boutique Over a Big Firm.
The big search firms are good at what they do. But they’re expensive, process-heavy, and account-managed by people who’ve never worked in your sector. Here’s what’s different about working with us:
• You speak directly to Vips, Simon, or Kim, every time. No juniors running your search.
• 28+ years of executive search in tech. Our life sciences lead has actually worked in the lab.
• We are genuinely not AI-driven in how we search. In a world where every firm claims “AI-powered search,” our network, judgement, and direct relationships are the differentiator.
• We operate with total discretion. Whether you’re replacing a leader before the announcement, or filling a gap after a sudden departure, confidentiality is non-negotiable.
• Our candidate experience is handled with the same care as our client relationships. This protects your brand as well as ours.
Four Specialist Areas. One Boutique Firm.
AI GOVERNANCE
& AI STRATEGY LEADERSHIP
The AI C-suite is the most in-demand and hardest-to-reach leadership cohort.
CAIOs, CTOs with genuine AI deployment experience, and CDOs with a GenAI mandate don’t respond to inbound.
They need a trusted introduction from someone who understands their world.
We find them, assess them, and make that introduction.
PE-BACKED & VC PORTFOLIO COMPANIES
PE firms hire through downturns.
One Operating Partner relationship is worth more than twenty cold outreach attempts.
We work directly with Operating Partners and Heads of Portfolio Operations to support leadership needs across the portfolio, quickly and confidentially.
We know how to move at PE speed.
CYBERSECURITY & DEFENCE TECH
CISOs and security-cleared technology leaders operate in a closed network.
We have been in it for over 14 years.
Security-sensitive organisations cannot use LinkedIn freely, and they need a trusted intermediary who understands both the technical landscape and the discretion required.
From CISO to Head of SecOps, we plug the right people into the right boardrooms.
LIFE SCIENCES & DIGITAL HEALTH
Our life sciences practice is led by Kim, a biomedical scientist who has worked in the lab.
She holds peer-level conversations with CSOs, VPs of R&D, and scientific boards that no generalist search consultant can replicate.
We place CEO, CSO, and C-suite leaders in PE-backed biotech, medtech, AI drug discovery, and university spin-outs, connecting deep scientific credibility with boardroom-ready leadership.
We don't work on contingency.
Every search begins with an engagement fee that confirms mutual commitment, then a placement fee on success.
You get one search lead, two founders, and a network built over three decades, not a junior researcher and a hope.
We typically work on 3–4 searches at a time.
That's deliberate. We're not a volume business.
Meet the Team
ConsultantBox's Tech and Life Sciences practice is led by people who have lived the industry, not just recruited for it Simon and Vips Kirrage bring 28 years of executive search expertise across AI, cybersecurity and technology, placing board-level and C-suite leaders at the companies that shape the sector.
Their search is human-led, relationship-driven, and built on the kind of market knowledge that only comes from nearly three decades in the room.
Joining them is their daughter Kim, who leads our Life Sciences vertical. An HCPC-registered Biomedical Scientist with hands-on NHS laboratory experience, Kim brings a depth of scientific credibility that no generalist firm can offer.
Together, they work with clients who want the right leader, not just a fast shortlist.
Vips Kirrage
Co-Founder
Vips brings more than 28 years of executive search expertise built on one conviction: the right leader in the right role changes everything, and finding that person requires more than a database search.
Co-founder of ConsultantBox since 2000, she has placed consultants to C-suite and senior technology leaders across SAP, cybersecurity, AI, and digital transformation with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies, and every PE-backed and VC-backed business in between.
Her particular gift is accessing the hidden market: the leaders who aren't looking, who rarely surface on the open hiring radar, and who only become available when someone they trust picks up the phone.
Where Simon sees the horizon, Vips builds the road. Her precision, operational rigour, and deep candidate assessment are the engine behind ConsultantBox's results, and why clients bring her their most difficult briefs, the ones where culture fit matters as much as credentials, and where the wrong hire simply isn't an option.
A certified joint venture broker and entrepreneur with Swedish roots and a straight-talking style, Vips has also spent three years partnering with the UK armed forces, helping veterans translate exceptional leadership capability into civilian careers. That work says everything about how she approaches executive search: with genuine commitment to the individual, not just the placement.
Trusted by CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CISOs, and transformation leaders across EMEA and APAC, she brings the commercial intelligence, discretion, and quiet tenacity that PE and VC clients depend on when the stakes are high and the timeline is short.
Simon Kirrage
Co-Founder
Finding the skill is usually the easy part.
Finding the right person is what takes 28 years to get good at.
Simon has spent nearly 3 decades building one of the most trusted names in executive search, not by following the market but by staying consistently ahead of it.
Co-founder of ConsultantBox since 2000, he has specialised in placing the leaders that businesses need most: Consultants to C-suite and board-level executives in SAP, AI technology, and cybersecurity, the disciplines sitting at the heart of every major technology transformation today.
His clients span Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies, PE-backed portfolio businesses, and VC-backed scale-ups, and across all of them, his reputation rests on a single ability: he finds the people others can't.
Senior leaders at this level don't apply for roles. They are identified, approached with intelligence, and moved by someone they trust. That requires years of relationship-building, deep domain knowledge, and a commercial instinct that cannot be taught.
Simon has all three, and has deployed them across some of the most complex, high-stakes searches in the market.
Where Vips builds the road, Simon reads the horizon. His strategic perspective on where markets are moving, which leadership profiles will define the next decade of technology, and which candidates hold value that hasn't yet been fully recognised, is the advisory layer that clients lean on long before a formal brief is written.
With a background spanning sales leadership, strategic hiring, and client advisory, he has supported boardrooms through their most consequential moments: critical senior hires, rapid transformation programmes, and post-M&A integrations where leadership continuity is everything. His approach is pragmatic, discreet, and entirely outcome-focused, the kind of service that PE and VC clients return to because it simply delivers.
Kim Kirrage
Head of Life Sciences
She has led the Dissection area, trained and mentored junior scientists, and built trusted working relationships with Consultants and Specialist Registrars.
She knows what rigorous science looks like from the inside.That hands-on credibility is what sets her apart as an executive search specialist. Kim can engage with scientific candidates at a genuine peer level, assessing whether a Chief Scientific Officer's technical depth is real, understanding what strong science looks like in an AI drug discovery or digital health context, and asking the questions that consultants without a laboratory background simply don't know to ask. For clients who have been burned by search firms that didn't truly understand what they were looking for, the difference is immediate.
Kim specialises in placing C-suite and senior leaders into PE-backed biotech, digital health, medtech, and AI-enabled drug discovery companies, including Chief Scientific Officers, Chief Medical Officers, CTOs, and CEOs at the crossover between science and commercial leadership. She also manages ConsultantBox's cross-border corridor, drawing on her own dual British and Swedish nationality as both a cultural bridge and a personal understanding of the international journey she helps her candidates navigate.
For founders and investors building something that genuinely matters in life sciences, Kim is the search partner who speaks your language, because she has lived it.
Kim leads ConsultantBox's life sciences vertical, and brings credentials no generalist firm can offer;
She is an HCPC-registered Biomedical Scientist with three years' hands-on experience in an NHS Histopathology laboratory.
A BSc (Hons) Biomedical Science graduate (University of East London), Kim has worked across the full histopathology workflow at Broomfield Hospital's Chelmsford Histopathology Laboratory, with specialist expertise in immunohistochemistry, special stains, microtomy, embedding, and quality control.