Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022Speakers 2022
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We prioritize that which accelerates the progress of early-stage founders. Our stage program is ruthlessly focused on timeless, practical company-building advice.
Want to put someone on our radar for Slush 2023 stages? Suggest speakers for 2023 here. Please note that we only contact those who we wish to invite as a speaker.
Here’s who stepped onto stage at Slush 2022.
Ev Williams
Ev is co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium. For the last twenty years, he has helped shape the modern internet.
Starting in January 1999, Ev co-founded Pyra Labs, which created the blog-publishing service Blogger (and coined the term “blogger”) and was acquired by Google in early 2003. He then co-founded Odeo and Obvious Corp, which gave birth to Twitter in 2006. Ev was Twitter’s co-founder, lead investor, and former CEO.
In 2011, Ev, along with Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, restarted Obvious Corp and began a mix of start-up investing and incubation. His investments have included Beyond Meat (IPO May 2019), Blue Bottle Coffee (acquired by Nestle), and others. Ev co-founded Obvious Ventures in 2014 with James Joaquin and Vishal Vasishth.
Ev started Medium, in 2012 and served as CEO until 2022. He is currently the Chairman of Medium.
Ev grew up on a farm in Clarks, Nebraska.
About Obvious Ventures
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Mar Hershenson
Mar is Pear’s Founding Managing Partner. As Pear’s co-founder and managing partner, Mar brings operational and technical expertise to the investment team.
After earning a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Mar developed a groundbreaking technique of optimizing the design of analog semiconductors. Since then, she has accrued over 13 years of founder experience, co-founding three startups in mobile/ecommerce, enterprise software and semiconductor industries and has registered 14 separate patents.
Mar is based in the Bay Area and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as a Top Innovator Under 35, named a Champion of Innovation by Fast Company, awarded the Digital Automation Conference’s Marie R. Pistil Achievement Award, and currently #29 on the Forbes Midas List.
About Pear VC
Founded: 2013 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Max Levchin
Max Levchin is Founder and CEO of Affirm, a financial services technology company, co-founder and Chairman of Glow, and co-founder and general partner at SciFi VC. All three companies were created and launched from his innovation lab, HVF. Max is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist and active investor in more than 100 startups.
Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal, where he served as Chief Technology Officer until its acquisition by eBay in 2002. In 2004, he founded Slide, which he sold to Google in 2010. Also in 2004, he helped start Yelp, where he was the first investor and Chairman of the Board from 2004 until 2015. He has served on several boards including Yahoo!, Yelp and Evernote.
About Affirm
Founded: 2012 | HQ: United States | Funding: IPO | Industry: Fintech
Kate Ryder
Kate Ryder is Founder and CEO of Maven, the largest virtual clinic for women’s and family health. Maven offers virtual care and services across fertility, maternity, and pediatrics, and operates the largest women’s and family health telehealth network globally. With Maven, employers and health plans can see improved maternal outcomes, lower costs, and attract and retain more parents in the workforce. Maven has raised more than $200 million in capital from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Oak HC/FT, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Lux Capital.
Kate founded Maven in 2014, reimagining healthcare for women and families from the ground up after seeing first hand how the lack of access to care impacted those starting a family and returning to work as new parents. Prior to founding Maven, Kate worked in venture capital and as a journalist, writing for The Economist from Southeast Asia, New York and London and for The New Yorker. In 2009, she worked with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, helping him write his memoirs about the financial crisis.
Kate has been named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 and to Fast Company’s “Most Creative People.” Kate received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her MSc from the London School of Economics. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and three children.
About Maven Clinic
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Funding: $287m | Industry: Healthcare
Doug Leone
Doug Leone is Partner at Sequoia Capital. He focuses on software investments aimed at the enterprise market. He is a Director of ActionIQ, Cyera, Island, Nubank, strongDM, Trade Republic, and Wiz. Doug was involved with Sequoia’s investments in numerous companies including Aruba (ARUN), Hyperion/Arbor Software (HYSL), Infinity International (SDS), International Network Services (ALU), Medallia (MDLA), MedExpress, Netezza (NZ), Plangrid (ADSK), Rackspace (RAX), RingCentral (RNG), and ServiceNow (NOW).
Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 1988, Doug held sales and sales management positions at Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Prime Computer. Doug holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, an MS in industrial engineering from Columbia University and an MS in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
About Sequoia
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Emmett Shear
Emmett Shear is the CEO and Co-Founder of Twitch, an interactive live streaming service for content spanning gaming, entertainment, sports, music, and more. At any given moment, on average, more than 2.5 million people come together from all over the globe to interact around this distinct form of entertainment that is created by the shared interactions of millions.
Prior to launching Twitch in 2011, Mr. Shear co-founded live streaming service Justin.tv in 2007. He is also a part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator where he advises startups on product and strategy. Mr. Shear graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a degree in Computer Science.
About Twitch
Founded: 2011 | HQ: US | Industry: Streaming
Edith Harbaugh
Edith Harbaugh is Co-founder and CEO of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform. LaunchDarkly serves 2,000+ global customers like IBM, Atlassian, and Intuit.
Edith has more than 15 years of experience in engineering, product, and marketing with both consumer and enterprise startups, including TripIt and Concur. She is co-host of “To Be Continuous”, a podcast on software trends.
She holds two patents in deployment. Edith earned a B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.
About LaunchDarkly
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Funding: $330m | Industry: Software
Nikolay Storonsky
Nik is the Co-founder and CEO of Revolut. The mission of Revolut is to transform the way we spend and transfer money abroad. Launched in 2015, Revolut is one of the Europe’s highest ever valued tech companies.
Since its inception, Nik has put Revolut on the path to becoming the world’s first truly global bank, changing the way we do all things money. Prior to launching Revolut, Nik worked as an equity trader.
About Revolut
Founded: 2015 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $1.7bn | Industry: Fintech
Sanna Marin
Sanna Marin is Prime Minister of Finland, appointed in December 2019. Sanna is the third female Prime Minister of Finland and the youngest prime minister in Finland’s history. Sanna will be taking the Slush stage with Eerika Savolainen, CEO of Slush.
Since 2006, Sanna has been actively engaged in politics. Sanna was elected to Parliament for her first run in 2015 and in August 2020, Sanna was elected as Chair of the Social Democratic Party. Previously, Sanna also served as Minister of Transport and Communications in Rinne Government. She is a member of the Tampere city council, which she chaired from 2013–2017.
Sanna lives in Tampere and Helsinki with her husband and their daughter. She holds a Master’s degree in Administration Sciences from the University of Tampere.
Olivier Pomel
Olivier is Co-founder and CEO of Datadog, the monitoring platform for cloud applications. Datadog went public in 2019, reaching a market cap of nearly $60bn at its height.
Prior to founding Datadog, Olivier Pomel built data systems for K-12 teachers as a VP, Technology for Wireless Generation, where he grew the development team from a handful of people to close to 100 of the best engineers in New York until the company’s acquisition by News Corp.
Before Wireless Generation, Olivier held software engineering positions at IBM Research and several internet startups.
About Datadog
Founded: 2010 | HQ: United States | Industry: Enterprise Software
Julianna Lamb
Julianna Lamb is the Co-Founder and CTO of Stytch. Stytch is the platform for user authentication. Prior to founding Stytch, Julianna was a software engineer at Plaid and Strava and a product manager at Very Good Security.
Julianna and her co-founder Reed McGinley-Stempel both worked on fraud and authentication at Plaid. They were frustrated with the tools out there for developers when it came to building user authentication. To solve this, they built Stytch, a developer-first platform that focuses on passwordless authentication to help companies elevate both their security and user experience.
Julianna graduated from Standford University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with History as a minor.
About Stytch
Founded: 2020 | HQ: United States | Funding: $126m | Industry: Enterprise software
Andrey Khusid
Andrey is Founder and CEO of Miro, the world’s most popular visual collaboration platform, funded by leading investors like Accel, Iconiq and others. Miro has more than 1400 employees in 11 offices across the globe, over 30 million registered whiteboarding fans. It is used by 99% of Fortune 100 companies for brainstorming & ideation, research & design, agile ceremonies and much more.
Prior to Miro, Andrey was Founder of Vitamin Group, an award-winning creative agency.
About Miro
Founded: 2011 | HQ: United States | Funding: $476M | Industry: Enterprise Software
Amrapali Gan
Amprapali Gan is CEO of OnlyFans. She oversees OnlyFans’ mission to revolutionize creator and fan connections by building the world’s safest social media platform where creators can maximize control over and monetize their content. Before taking over as CEO, Gan served as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer as OnlyFans experienced exponential growth. Gan is focused on leading OnlyFans and providing unparalleled opportunities for its community.
Gan’s background is with rapid growth companies and fast-moving consumer industries. She was Head of Brand Communications with unicorn Quest Nutrition, and worked for Red Bull Media House. More recently, she helped launch the first cannabis restaurant in the US as Vice President of Marketing.
She currently resides in Miami with her rescue dog, Fox.
About OnlyFans
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: – | Industry: Social Media
Matthew Prince
Matthew Prince is Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today, the company runs one of the world’s largest networks, which spans more than 275 cities in over 100 countries.
Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law.
Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He’s also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.
About Cloudflare
Founded: 2009 | HQ: United States | Funding: IPO| Industry: Enterprise Software
Linnéa Kornehed
Linnéa Kornehed is Co-founder and CMO of Einride, a Swedish company focusing on all-electric autonomous transport vehicles. Their mission is to design and develop intelligent technologies for movement. Einride has worked with several companies such as Coca-Cola, Oatly, Lidl and Electrolux, helping them switch to sustainable transport.
Einride has been recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies according to Fast Company.
Prior to founding Einride, Linnéa worked as a Business Solutions Consultant at Forefront Consulting. Linnéa has twice been on Forbes’ prestige list of Europe’s hottest entrepreneurs and is also a TEDx speaker.
About Einride
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: $152M | Industry: Transportation
Sebastian Siemiatkowski
Sebastian is Co-founder and CEO of Klarna. In 2005, Sebastian Siemiatkowski co-founded Klarna in order to provide safe and smooth online payments.
With Sebastian as Chief Executive Officer, Klarna has been on a mission since then to revolutionize the retail banking industry, meeting the changing demands of consumers by saving them time and money while helping them be informed and in control of their personal finances. Sebastian has overseen the company’s rapid global growth with Klarna now operating across 45 markets. Klarna is a fully licensed bank with over 150 million active consumers and 400,000+ merchant partners.
Sebastian holds a master’s degree from the Stockholm School of Economics.
About Klarna
Founded: 2005 | HQ: Sweden | Industry: Fintech
Max Rhodes
Max is Co-founder and CEO of Faire. As a former small business owner, Max is passionate about the positive impact of local commerce on society, and has made it his mission to help independent retailers and brands build thriving businesses and grow stronger communities.
Prior to co-founding Faire, Max was Founding Member at Square Capital and Early Product Lead at Square, where he worked on Cash App, a product that helped more than 230,000 merchants access capital to grow their businesses.
Max holds a BA in history from Yale.
About Faire
Founded: 2017 | HQ: United States | Funding: $1.5bn | Industry: E-Commerce
Garima Kapoor
Garima Kapoor is the Co-founder and COO at MinIO. Prior to this role, Garima served as the company’s CFO. Garima is an active investor and advisor to emerging technology companies in Silicon Valley.
Garima holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Accounting and Finance from Nirma University, a Masters in Economics from Banasthali Vidyapith, and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Delhi University.
About MinIO
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Funding: $146m | Industry: Enterprise software
Peter Fenton
Peter Fenton has served as one of the 5 equal General Partners at Benchmark Capital since 2006.
He currently serves on the boards of 12 private companies including Docker, Sorare, Airtable, CockroachDB, Clickhouse, Robocorp, and previously served on the boards of Twitter, Yelp, Elastic, Cloudera, Zendesk, New Relic, Zuora, Quip, Zenly, SpringSouce, and Jboss.
About Benchmark
Founded: 1995 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Nadia Singer
Nadia Singer is Chief People Officer at Figma, where she leads the people and talent teams.
Before joining Figma, she led recruiting for the Pete Buttigieg 2020 campaign. Prior to that she worked in venture capital and at Quora.
About Figma
Founded: 2012 | HQ: United States | Funding: $333M | Industry: Enterprise Software
Jay Kreps
Jay Kreps is a co-founder of Confluent and has served as CEO since its founding in September 2014. Prior to founding Confluent, Jay spent seven years at LinkedIn, where he was one of the original creators of Apache Kafka and served as an engineer, engineering manager, and software architect from 2009 to 2014.
He holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz.
About Confluent
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Funding: IPO | Industry: Enterprise Software
Sophia Amoruso
Sophia Amoruso is Founder of Business Class, a comprehensive 10-week digital course for entrepreneurs, creatives, and freelancers, which has built a community of over 2,000 founders across the globe.
Sophia made her mark when she founded Nasty Gal, raising $60 million and scaling the business to over $100 million in annual revenue. In 2014 she wrote the 18-week NYT Bestselling book #GIRLBOSS, which became a NETFLIX series produced by Charlize Theron.
She is an active angel investor in Public, Pipe, Superhuman, Kindbody, Popshop Live, Base, Eight Sleep, and 16 other companies.
About Business Class
Founded: 2020 | HQ: United States
Eric Glyman
Eric is Co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a finance automation platform designed to help companies save time and money. He started Ramp in 2019 after observing that much of the traditional financial services industry offered points and rewards programs that were misaligned with customers’ goals. Eric and his Co-founders sought to build products that would help companies and their employees save time and money. Today, Ramp is the fastest growing corporate card and bill payment software in America, and comes standard with best-in-class integrated expense management, reimbursement, accounting automations, and more.
Prior to Ramp, Eric co-founded Paribus, a price-tracking app to help consumers save money on their everyday online purchases. Paribus was acquired by Capital One where Eric then led the savings automation team. Born and raised in Las Vegas, Eric now lives in New York City, where he is an active angel investor.
About Ramp
Founded: 2019 | HQ: United States | Funding: $670m | Industry: Fintech
Luciana Lixandru
Luciana Lixandru is Partner at Sequoia, where she focuses on enterprise and consumer technology companies across Europe. Luciana works closely with companies like Xentral and Getir, and is passionate about helping founders at all stages to unlock their potential and think on a global scale.
Prior to becoming Sequoia’s first partner in Europe, Luciana worked at Accel for eight years, where she led investments in UiPath, Deliveroo, Miro and Hopin. She has also held positions at Summit Partners and Morgan Stanley.
Luciana holds a B.S. in Economics and Mathematics from Georgetown, and currently resides in London.
About Sequoia Capital
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed–Growth
Alex Bouaziz
Alex Bouaziz is Co-founder and CEO of Deel, the automated international compliance and payment platform. Deel helps businesses of all sizes hire and pay their international teams and has grown to 400 employees in just 2 short years.
Alex was born in 1993, the same year as the World Wide Web (coincidence?). After graduating MIT with a Master’s in Civil and Environmental Engineering, he co-founded Lifeslice and Sarona Ventures. In 2020, he was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Tech in 2020. When Alex is not managing all things international hiring, he enjoys playing video games and cheering on PSG.
About Deel
Founded: 2018 | HQ: US | Funding: $629M | Industry: Jobs & Recruiting
Jessica Schultz
Jessica is Partner at Northzone and Co-founder of HelloFresh. At Northzone her main focus is DTC and consumer internet. Her portfolio includes Red Points, Na-Kd, Matsmart, Klarna, Outfittery, Flink and Fyndiq.
Prior to joining Northzone, Jessica co-founded and was CMO of market-leading meal-kit service HelloFresh, spearheading the global marketing operations.
She started her career in consulting at LEK, and holds an MSc, Economics and Business from the Stockholm School of Economics.
About Northzone
Founded: 1996 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed-Series B
Markus Villig
Markus founded Bolt in 2013 at the age of 19. After building the first version of the app himself and recruiting its first drivers on the streets of Tallinn, Markus has built Bolt into a mobility super app offering five products to over 100 million customers across 45 countries. He does not have a driving licence.
About Bolt
Founded: 2013 | HQ: Estonia | Funding: €1.1B | | Industry: Mobility & Delivery
Johanna Småros
Johanna Småros (PhD) is one of RELEX Solutions‘ three Co-founders. Before founding RELEX, Johanna conducted ground-breaking research on consumer goods supply chains.
RELEX is a Helsinki-based international software company, offering software as a service (SaaS) solutions for supply chain and retail planning to customers like Marks & Spencer Food, Rite Aid, PetSmart, Rossmann, and MediaMarktSaturn. RELEX recently made news by raising €500 million in funding at a €5 billion valuation.
About RELEX Solutions
Founded: 2005 | HQ: Finland | Funding: $774m | Industry: Enterprise Software
Ilkka Paananen
Ilkka is Co-founder and CEO of Supercell, the Finnish mobile games developer behind Clash of Clans, Hay Day, Boom Beach, Clash Royale and Brawl Stars. Founded in 2010, Supercell’s games have been featuring in the global top 10 for years after launch and are played by hundreds of millions of people every month.
Supercell is the first European technology start-up to have reached a valuation of $10 billion.
About Supercell
Founded: 2010 | HQ: Finland | Funding: Acquired | Industry: Games
Marcia Kilgore
Marcia Kilgore is Founder of Beauty Pie. Through its fully digital marketplace, Beauty Pie sells luxury beauty products without luxury beauty prices, by sourcing from manufacturers and cutting out intermediaries.
Her ventures include industry revolutionising Bliss Spa, sold to LVMH after only three years from its launch; bath, body and cosmetics brand Soap & Glory, sold to British Drugstore giant Alliance Boots/Walgreen; biomechanics meets fashion footwear brand FitFlop; and naturally-derived bath & body product brand Soaper Duper.
Most recently, in October 2016, Kilgore founded Beauty Pie, her radical new luxury beauty product buyers’ club, aimed at democratising the luxury beauty industry by disrupting the existing business model.
About Beauty Pie
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: €90M | Industry: Cosmetics
Guy Podjarny
Guy Podjarny is Founder and President of Snyk, the leading Developer Security platform, helping developers secure as they build.
Guy was previously CTO at Akamai, co-founded Blaze.io (acquired by Akamai), and was the product manager of AppScan, the first AppSec scanner, through Sanctum, Watchfire and IBM. Guy is a public speaker, O’Reilly author, and an active early stage angel investor.
About Snyk
Founded: 2015 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $1.4B | Industry: Cloud Security
Eléonore Crespo
Eléonore Crespo is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Pigment, the multidimensional business planning platform. Pigment’s mission is to allow businesses everywhere to make better, faster decisions in a changing world – drawing on data analysis, intuitive design and sophisticated modelling to help leaders spend more time thinking and less time number-crunching.
Prior to Pigment, Eléonore was an investor at Index Ventures, working side-by-side with entrepreneurs and spearheading investments in Alan, Spendesk, Swile and Slite. Before Index she worked as a senior analyst at Google, reporting directly to the EMEA president and CFO on matters of strategy and planning.
Eléonore studied quantum physics and engineering at the École Normale Supérieure and the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines, two of the most competitive institutions of higher education in France.
About Pigment
Founded: 2019 | HQ: France | Funding: $99M | Industry: SaaS
Articles:
Always Be Hiring: an Early-Stage Talent Playbook for FoundersSeptember 27, 2022Nicolas Cary
Nic is the Co-founder and Vice Chairman at Blockchain.com where he is responsible for ensuring we continue to bring new adopters into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In 2015, Nic was named the European Digital Leader of the year. Nic is the Founding Commissioner of the Blockchain Commission for Sustainable Development and Co-Authored The Future is Decentralised. Nic is trilingual, and has a deep passion for positive digital disruption. He’s also the Co-Founder and Chairman of SkysTheLimit.org, the leading non-profit digital business accelerator.
Prior to Blockchain.com, Nic was a founding Partner at PipelineDeals.com where he focused on product development and management. Nic is a proven leader, investor, public speaker, and brand ambassador. He’s deeply focused on designing performant cultures that persevere in adverse markets.
About Blockchain.com
Founded: 2011 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $490m | Industry: Crypto and defi
Arik Shtilman
Arik Shtilman is Co-founder and CEO of Rapyd, a global fintech partner that simplifies and advances commerce in every market.
Arik is a cloud services advocate and a serial entrepreneur who is experienced in building high-growth technology companies that leverage cloud computing to scale and meet global customer demand. Prior to Rapyd, Arik founded ITNAVIGATOR, which was acquired by Avaya in 2013.
Rapyd was launched in 2016 and is one of the world’s fastest-growing global fintechs. Rapyd has offices in London, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Reykjavik, Singapore, Dubai, Miami, Denver, and Mexico City.
About Rapyd
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $770m | Industry: Fintech
Mette Lykke
Mette is CEO of Too Good To Go. She is driving impact at scale on the issue of food waste, which is responsible for 10% of all GHG emissions. Too Good To Go is the world’s largest marketplace for surplus food, and more than 130 million meals have been saved in 17 countries by 55 million users.
A founder in her own right, Mette co-founded fitness and training community Endomondo in 2007, acquired by Under Armour in 2015. In 2017, she joined Too Good To Go, drawn by the mission to lead her second company.
About Too Good To Go
Founded: 2015 | HQ: Denmark | Funding: $75m | Industry: Surplus Food
Miki Kuusi
Miki Kuusi is the CEO of Wolt and Head of DoorDash International. Founded in 2014, Wolt is a technology company that makes it incredibly easy to discover and get the best restaurants, grocery stores and other local shops delivered home or to the office. Wolt joined forces with DoorDash in 2022 and operates in 27 countries today, 23 of which are with the Wolt product and brand.
Previously, Miki was the CEO of Slush, one of the leading tech and investor events in the world attended by more than 25,000 people annually. Wired listed Miki as #32 on their top technology influencers in Europe for 2015, while Forbes featured Miki on their 30 under 30 list for 2016.
About Wolt
Founded: 2014 | HQ: Finland | Funding: €705M | Industry: Food Delivery
Sofia Nunes
Sofia Nunes is Co-founder of Mambu, mentor and leadership coach. Sofia has been instrumental in building Mambu’s unique and diverse company culture through scaling over the last decade from three to nearly a thousand Mambuvians. She focused on creating an environment where employees can thrive and become their best selves. She is now on a one year break from Mambu, having built its people function from day 1.
Sofia holds a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and she is passionate about using experience design in building high performing, healthy and supportive workplaces.
About Mambu
Founded: 2011 | HQ: Netherlands | Funding: $427m | Industry: Fintech
Bill Magnuson
Bill Magnuson is Co-founder and CEO of Braze, a leading comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers interactions between consumers and brands they love. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.
Bill began his journey in mobile at Google working on App Inventor for Android and is continuously looking for ways to humanize the relationships between brands and customers to create stronger, more sustainable, and valuable relationships utilizing technology. He was named a 2019 Digiday Future Leader and one of Inc.’s 2017 “30 Under 30 Brilliant Young Entrepreneurs.”
About Braze
Founded: 2011 | HQ: United States | Funding: $150m | Industry: CRM
Josefin Landgård
Josefin Landgård is Founder and CEO of MANTLE, a Swedish cannabeauty company en route to becoming the number one premium CBD brand. MANTLE was founded in 2020 by Josefin and Stina Lönnkvist, and has quickly earned a cult following due to their bold confidence and perfect formulations. The products have won multiple awards by e.g. ELLE, Swedish Beauty Awards, Costume, Eurowoman, and Vogue.
Prior to founding MANTLE, Josefin co-founded the unicorn telemedicine company KRY/Livi, acting as CEO and COO. She has also co-founded several other startups. She is also a prominent angel investor.
About MANTLE
Founded: 2019 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: $2M | Industry: Health & Beauty
Benedict Evans
Benedict Evans has spent 20 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. He is now an independent analyst, whose newsletter reaches over 150,000 subscribers.
Benedict is known for his yearly presentations that reveal and analyze macro and strategic trends in the tech industry.
Having been Partner at a16z for five years, Benedict is currently Venture Partner at both Entrepreneur First and Mosaic Ventures.
John W. Thompson
John W. Thompson is Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. John joined the Microsoft board in February 2012 and is the lead independent director.
Thompson brings over 40 years of experience in the technology industry. Most recently, he served as chief executive officer and director of Virtual Instruments. Before this, he was the chairman and chief executive officer of Symantec for 10 years, during which time he helped transform the company into a leader in security, storage and systems management solutions. Thompson also held several leadership positions during his 28 years at IBM in the areas of sales, marketing, and software development, and he also served as general manager of IBM Americas.
Thompson serves on the board of directors for Illumina, Rubrik, and Inexption.
Thompson holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Florida A&M University and a master’s degree in management science from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business, and Florida A&M University.
About Lightspeed
Founded: 2000 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Shimona Mehta
Shimona Mehta is Managing Director EMEA at Shopify. She’s built Shopify’s European presence nearly from scratch since 2019.
A pioneer in tech, Shimona is eager about making commerce better for everyone and oversees the European market for Shopify, the global commerce platform that enables millions of modern, high-growth and high-volume brands including Gymshark, Emma Bridgewater, AllBirds and Heinz.
About Shopify
Founded: 2006 | HQ: United States | Industry: E-commerce
Stani Kulechov
Stani Kulechov is Founder and CEO of The Aave Companies, a technology company that builds open protocols, applications, and tools for Web3. The company is best known for creating the Aave Protocol, a decentralized liquidity protocol for users to supply and borrow cryptographic assets without intermediaries. In 2022, Aave launched the Lens Protocol, an open social networking protocol for content creators to implement flexible, customizable monetization strategies and form direct relationships with users.
In 2016 while in law school, he began exploring Ethereum and decentralized finance (DeFi). His vision was to create an open, transparent, and accessible system for supplying and borrowing capital governed by a decentralized community. In 2017, in his university dorm room, Stani started building the Aave Protocol and later that year, launched what became The Aave Companies. Today, Stani resides in London, where The Aave Companies is headquartered. He is an angel investor and NFT collector.
About Aave
Founded: 2017 | HQ: UK | Funding: $32.5m | Industry: DeFi
Sophie Adelman
Sophie is the Co-founder & CEO of The Garden, a community for the curious that enables anyone, anywhere to engages with the world’s greatest minds and each other through live Talks & conversations. The Garden was founded in 2021.
Prior to The Garden, Sophie co-founded Multiverse scaling the company as its President. Multiverse is a leading Future of Work scale up building an outstanding alternative to university. She has also been an Entrepreneur in Residence at Index Ventures.
About The Garden
Founded: 2021 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: private | Industry: Education
David Helgason
Programmer-technologist, multi-disciplinary nerd, and dropout from studies in physics, psychology, Arabic and Middle Eastern studies.
Co-founded Unity (NYSE:U) in 2003. Served as Unity’s CEO until 2014, and remains on Unity’s board.
Passionate about climate change, civilizational decarbonization, and all-around sustainability. Also democracy and civil liberty.
About Foobar
Founded: 2012 | HQ: Denmark | Industry: Climate tech
Ross Mason
Ross is Partner at Dig Ventures, a founder centric pre-seed and seed enterprise infrastructure and SaaS fund.
Prior to starting Dig, Ross was co-founder and CTO of Mulesoft (acquired by Salesforce for $6.5B).
About Dig Ventures
Founded: 2019 | Stage: Pre-seed and seed
Katelin Holloway
Katelin is Founding Partner at Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, managing the firm’s operations and actively investing in early stage tech companies. Having spent her early career at Pixar Animation Studios, she parlayed her culture-building skills to tech, dedicating over a decade to developing teams as a senior executive at some of the internet’s most influential startups, including Klout and Reddit.
In early 2020, Katelin made the leap from operator to investor, committed to helping founders and the broader venture ecosystem evolve their diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging practices. As an investor, she is passionate about funding and supporting the people-first companies that will shape the future of work, health, sustainability, and the delicate balance that enables us to thrive.
About Seven Seven Six
Founded: 2020 | HQ: United States
Thibaud Hug de Larauze
Thibaud is Co-founder and CEO of Back Market. He spent his 5 years of business school traveling the globe, between France, Toronto, Mexico, Spain and India for his studies, then Haiti on a break to build schools. Upon his return to France, Thibaud joined the Neteven company, where for 3 years he supported refurbishing factories on the development of their distribution on the web. It was during this professional experience that he realized the know-how of these factories and the fabulous opportunity presented by the refurbishing. The Back Market project was born.
About Back Market
Founded: 2014 | HQ: France | Funding: $1B | Industry: Marketplace
Johannes Schildt
Johannes is Co-founder and CEO of Kry/Livi, Europe’s largest digital healthcare provider. Sitting alongside Stockholm-founded alumni such as Spotify, Klarna and iZettle, Kry/Livi is revolutionisng the way people access primary and secondary care by combining medical expertise with state-of-the-art technology.
Currently available in Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, and Norway, the business has pioneered digital healthcare by enabling people to see a medical doctor, a nurse or a psychologist via on-demand video consultations. To date, Kry/Livi has delivered over 6 million appointments.
About Kry
Founded: 2014 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: $561m | Industry: Healthcare
Holly Liu
Holly Liu is Co-founder of Kabam, the unicorn mobile gaming company. Kabam has made games with Hollywood IP, such as Marvel, The Hobbit, Star Wars, Transformers, The Hunger Games and many more. In 2017, Kabam sold to Netmarble and FoxNext. After exiting, Holly was a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator, an early stage accelerator that has birthed companies like Twitch, Airbnb, Dropbox and many others.
Holly now runs a collective – PKO – with Patrick Lee (Founder and former CEO of Rotten Tomatoes, Kun Gao (Founder and former CEO of Crunchyroll) and Kevin Lin (Founder of Twitch). They get the most notable people (founders, execs, celebrities and investors) in entertainment and tech for the founder. The collective also funds founders building at the intersection of entertainment and tech.
About Kabam
Founded: 2006 | HQ: United States | Funding: $240m | Industry: Mobile gaming
Rahul Vohra
Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. Backed by the likes of a16z, Tiger Global and First Round Capital, Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made.
Rahul previously founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users, which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012.
He is also a tech investor whose angel fund has backed more than 30 portfolio companies, including Clearbit, Pitch, and Clubhouse.
About Superhuman
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Funding: $111m | Industry: Enterprise software
Vanessa Stock
Vanessa Stock is Co-founder and Chief People Officer of Pitch, an open platform for presentations and content collaboration.
Before joining Pitch, Vanessa focused on hiring the core team at Wunderlist (acquired by Microsoft), and has previously served as an HR consultant and HR director at Clue and other Berlin-based startups.
About Pitch
Founded: 2018 | HQ: Germany | Funding: $136m | Industry: Software
Niklas Zennström
Niklas is CEO and Founding Partner at the London-headquartered venture capital firm Atomico, investing in gamechanging tech companies at Series A and beyond.
Niklas is an experienced technology investor and entrepreneur, having previously co-founded and managed globally successful technology companies including Skype, Kazaa and Joltid. He currently sits on the boards of Lilium, Pipedrive, Oden Technologies and Varjo. In 2007, he co-founded Zennström Philanthropies with his wife, Catherine. They invest strategically in two areas: human rights and the environment. Niklas also sits on the international advisory board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
About Atomico
Founded: 2006 | HQ: United Kingdom
Sophia Bendz
Sophia is Partner at Cherry Ventures. Sophia is based in Stockholm, where she brings her expertise in the Nordics, femtech, and marketing to the Cherry network. As a passionate advocate for diversity, Sophia also works to enhance diversity and inclusion across European tech.
Before joining Cherry Ventures Sophia played a pivotal role in the early days of Spotify as the audio platform’s Global Marketing Director. She helped launch the company in 56 markets. At the time, Sophia began shifting to VC and also began angel investing, having now over 45 companies in her portfolio. Eventually she joined Atomico, where she created their angel program.
About Cherry Ventures
Founded: 2013 | HQ: Germany | Stage: Early Stage
Nicolas d’Audiffret
Nicolas is co-founder and Co-CEO of Ankorstore, the first marketplace that connects brands and creators with shops all over Europe. He has dedicated his professional life for helping independent business owners thrive through technology.
Before co-founding Ankorstore, Nicolas co-founded A Little Market, a marketplace allowing handcrafters to sell their creations online. After the company was acquired by Etsy, he led Etsy in continental Europe and invested in 10+ marketplaces (one of which isBackMarket where he still serves at the board) with always the same vision: provide great tools to independent business owners to help them compete with the big players.
About Ankorstore
Founded: 2019 | HQ: France | Funding: $417m | Industry: B2B Marketplace
Mariya Gabriel
Mariya Gabriel is the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education, Youth and Sport.
Under her leadership, the new Horizon Europe, Erasmus+, and the cultural strand of Creative Europe programmes (2021-2027) will be defined and implemented. Between 2017 and 2019, Mariya Gabriel was Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. She was elected Member of the EP in 2009, 2014 and 2019. She is First Vice-President of the EPP, and since 2012 Vice-President of EPP Women.
Marcelo Lebre
Marcelo Lebre is Co-founder and COO of Remote, the company making global employment accessible for businesses of all sizes.
Marcelo previously worked as the VP of Engineering at Unbabel, has held several CTO positions and is a startup advisor. In addition to his Remote Engineering Stories podcast, he frequently speaks at events about engineering leadership and managing remote teams. He is a passionate engineer, proud dad, and sci-fi nerd.
About Remote
Founded: 2019 | HQ: United States | Funding: $496m | Industry: Recruiting platform
Quinn Slack
Quinn Slack is CEO and Co-founder of Sourcegraph, the code intelligence platform helping engineering teams understand, fix, and automate changes across their entire codebase. Many of the world’s leading companies are Sourcegraph customers, including 3/5 FAANG, PayPal, Canva, Uber, Plaid, GE, Reddit, and Atlassian. The company is valued at $2.625B from leading investors Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Craft Ventures.
Quinn is also Board Member of Hack Club, a global network of programming clubs where members learn to code. He has studied Computer Science at Standford University and lives in San Fransisco Bay Area.
About Sourcegraph
Founded: 2013 | HQ: United States | Funding: $223m | Industry: Enterprise software
Jessica Ennis-Hill
Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill is Founder and Co-CEO of Jennis, a fem-tech app that helps women understand their own bodies and maps movement to their unique hormonal cycles. Through hormone-intelligent AI Jennis offers advice to improve their health at every life stage.
She is one of the greatest British track and field athletes of all time. A specialist Heptathlete whose pinnacle of her athletic career came in 2012, when she claimed Olympic gold in London and captured the hearts of a nation in the process. Jessica won three world titles (2009, 2011, 2015) and was European champion in 2010. Displaying extraordinary resilience, Jessica won the heptathlon world title in Beijing, just fifteen months after giving birth to her son Reggie.
Jessica balances the demands of being Co-CEO of Jennis with BBC Sport TV punditry on athletics and raising her two young children.
About Jennis
Founded: 2019 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $1.3m | Industry: Health Tech
Harry Stebbings
Harry Stebbings is Founder of 20VC, one of the largest media assets in venture and startups, now with over $175M in AUM. Harry’s Twenty Minute VC podcast series reaches some 700,000 subscribers and has 120 million downloads to date.
Harry started 20VC podcast with not a single contact in VC. The first episode was released in January 2015. 7 years later Harry has now released 2750 episodes, with more than 1.3M plays per show. He is ranked one of the top solo capitalists in 3Q21. At 22 years old Harry was the youngest to make the list on the Forbes Finance 30 Under 30 in Europe.
Prior to 20VC Harry was Partner at Stride VC a firm he co-founded in 2018. Harry then went on to launch his venture capital fund, 20VC in May 2020. Harry raised two 20VC funds, a $33m early-stage fund, and another $107m growth fund, which he leads as a solo general partner.
About 20VC
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United Kingdom | Industry: Venture Capital Media
Ravi Gupta
Ravi is Partner at Sequoia Capital, where he focuses on consumer, fintech, mobile and internet investments. He serves on the boards of Acelerate, Faire, Noom, Remote and Vise, and is also involved with our investments at Fireblocks, Front and Instacart.
Prior to joining Sequoia, Ravi served as COO and CFO of Instacart from 2015 to 2019. Before joining Instacart, Ravi also spent a decade at KKR after starting his career at McKinsey.
Ravi holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Duke University and lives in Woodside with his wife and three sons.
About Sequoia
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Rachel Delacour
Rachel is Co-founder and CEO of Sweep, a leading carbon emission management service.
In 2009, she cofounded BIME Analytics, a pioneering business intelligence SaaS which was acquired by US customer service company Zendesk in 2015. Rachel continued at Zendesk as General Manager until she decided to use her talent to help clean the climate mess with Sweep.
A leading female figure in European tech, Rachel was elected co-President of France Digitale in 2018 and her thought leadership has been featured in The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. An advocate for women in tech, she has backed several female-founded US and French startups.
About Sweep
Founded: 2020 | HQ: France | Funding: $100M | Industry: Climate Tech
Matias Van Thienen
Matias Van Thienen is Partner at Founders Fund, where he focuses primarily on growth stage and international investments. Since joining in 2018, he’s led or played a role in the firm’s investments in Trade Republic, Kavak, Modern Health, Scale AI, Figma, Faire, Cedar, Solugen, Workrise, Newfront, LeafLink, TruckSmarter, Supermove, Luko, Belvo and others.
Previously, Matias was at Insight Partners and CapitalG, where he invested in CrowdStrike, UiPath, Qualtrics, Looker, ezCater and others. He also led Corp Dev at Wallapop, a secondhand marketplace in Spain, where he was responsible for strategy, fundraising and M&A. He holds a BS in Finance and Information Systems from NYU Stern.
Matias is originally from Buenos Aires and currently based in Miami, after a decade living in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona and Shanghai. He’s an avid kite surfer and skier.
About Founders Fund
Founded: 2005 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Leigh Marie Braswell
Leigh Marie Braswell is Principal at Founders Fund.
Before joining Founders Fund, she was an early engineer & the first product manager at Scale AI, where she originally built & later led product development for the LiDAR/3D annotation products, used by many autonomous vehicles, robots, and AR/VR companies as a core step in their machine learning lifecycles. She also has done software development at Blend, machine learning at Google, and quantitative trading at Jane Street.
Leigh Marie is originally from Alabama, graduated from MIT, and loves to play poker, run long distances, and scuba dive.
About Founders Fund
Founded: 2005 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Jochen Engert
Jochen is Co-founder and, since April 2022, Supervisory Board Director of Flix, the world’s leading sustainable mobility company. Over the Flix journey, he has been driving international expansion, corporate development and the successful Flix M&A strategy. He has also led all funding rounds to ensure a strong capital setup of the group.
Jochen is an active investor into the German and European startup ecosystem and supports multiple tech entrepreneurs along their journey. As a member of the Advisory Board of the Boston Consulting Group’s [email protected] initiative, Jochen recognizes the importance of sharing his experience in building a company with young people. He believes promoting entrepreneurial spirit, self-initiative and business knowledge at an early age has great benefits to society and the economy.
About FLix
Founded: 2013 | HQ: Germany | Funding: $886m | Industry: sustainable mobility
Oskari Saarenmaa
Oskari Saarenmaa is Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aiven. Aiven is a next-generation managed cloud services company, offering the market leading open source data technologies. The mission of Aiven is to empower businesses around the world and make developers’ lives better.
Aiven has raised $420M and has hubs on three continents with headquarters in Helsinki and hubs in Berlin, Boston, Paris, Toronto, Sydney and Singapore and Tokyo.
Oskari is a programmer and an open source contributor who truly understands the pain points of developers working with data. He previously founded and managed several software development agencies and worked as a software architect designing secure, large-scale database systems.
About Aiven
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Finland | Funding: $420M | Industry: Enterprise Software
Judith Dada
Judith is a General Partner at La Famiglia, a European seed stage venture capital fund investing into B2B technology companies that enable or disrupt large industries. She focuses on the future of work, as well as data and ML-driven business models. Judith also advises the German government on matters relating to technology, diversity and migration.
Judith was previously at Facebook, managing Amazon Europe’s marketing strategy and Facebook’s VC Initiative.
About La Famiglia
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Germany | Stage: Seed
Shahed Khan
Shahed Khan is the co-founder and CEO of Prologue, a technology holding company that owns and operates Hyper, a startup accelerator focused on helping companies with distribution—and Product Hunt, the largest tech community to launch your startup.
Prior to Prologue, Shahed was the Co-founder and President of Loom, the video communication platform for async work that helps companies communicate better at scale. Founded in late 2015, Loom has more than 15M users across 200K organizations and has raised $203M from world-class investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, ICONIQ, and others.
About Loom
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United States | Funding: $204M | Industry: Enterprise software
Jeannette zu Fürstenberg
Dr. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg is Founding Partner of La Famiglia VC, a European based Venture Capital fund investing in early-stage tech companies across Europe and the US.
La Famiglia is backed by leading entrepreneurs from various industries that provide precious early market access, impactful partnerships and deep expertise for its portfolio companies.
About La Famiglia VC
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Germany | Stage: Early Stage
Niccolo Perra
Niccolo Perra is Co-Founder and CTO of Pleo, an expense management system that processes expenses, pays invoices and issues smart company cards to employees.
Niccolo oversees the engineering team, driving tech innovation with a focus on the end-user experience. Niccolo is passionate about how spend management technology can produce impactful value to businesses; boosting productivity, delivering real-time data and insights and empowering employees.
About Pleo
Founded: 2015 | HQ: Denmark | Funding: $426m | Industry: Fintech
Vilma Mattila
Vilma is Co-founder of 5ire Chain, a layer one blockchain ecosystem designed with economic and environmental sustainability at its core. 5ire’s main goal is to create a user-centric sustainability-driven ecosystem. Founded in 2021, 5ire has raised over $120m and reached unicorn valuation in July 2022.
In addition to 5ire Chain, she has founded Node Kapital and is currently Advisor at TechStars. Vilma is also an active angel investor.
About 5ire
Founded: 2021 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $121m | Industry: Blockchain
Scott Sandell
Scott Sandell is Managing General Partner at NEA, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms with $24B in cumulative committed capital since the firm’s founding in 1977. During his 25+ years at NEA, Scott has served as head of the firm’s technology investing practice. He has helped numerous entrepreneurs start and build technology companies and his investing track record includes more than two dozen successful public offerings and acquisitions in the technology space.
Scott is currently the lead independent director of Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) and is a director of Coursera (NYSE: COUR) and serves on the boards of a number of private companies. He also remains actively involved with the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Additionally, Scott currently serves as the inaugural Chairman of Global Innovation Venturing (GIV), an organization focused on strengthening ecosystem collaboration to support entrepreneurs and foster innovation.
Outside of NEA, Scott is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford University in the Department of Management Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering where he co-teaches a course on principled entrepreneurship. He also previously served on the Board of Advisors of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth for over a decade (from 2009 – 2021) and is currently an emeritus member.
About NEA
Founded: 1977 | HQ: United States
Yoko Spirig
Yoko Spirig is Co-founder and CEO of Ledgy, Europe’s leading equity management company.
Yoko studied Physics at the University of Oxford, CERN, and ETH Zürich, where she met her Ledgy co-founders Ben Brandt and Timo Horstschaefer.
She was also project lead of Swissloop, helping to build the first Hyperloop pod in Switzerland.
About Ledgy
Founded: 2012 | HQ: Switzerland | Funding: $35M | Industry: Enterprise Software
Danny Rimer
Danny Rimer is Partner at Index Ventures. He opened the firm’s London and San Francisco offices, and has been ranked by the Midas List as one of the world’s top investors for more than a decade.
He led Index’s investments in Figma, the design and collaboration software; Patreon, the membership and monetisation platform; and Discord, the communication service used by over a hundred million people. His other investments include Etsy, Farfetch, King and Multiverse.
About Index Ventures
Founded: 1996 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed–Growth
Ashley Paston
Ashley Paston is Partner at Meritech, focused on fintech, enterprise software and marketplaces. Most recently, Ashley invested in Pigment, a Paris-based FP&A company.
Prior to Meritech, Ashley spent four years at Bain Capital Ventures, where she was responsible for sourcing and executing early stage and growth equity investments across fintech, enterprise software, and marketplaces, investing in companies such as SmartRent (SMRT), ACV Auctions (ACV), Pleo, GoCardless, Material Bank, Autoleap, Orum, Finix, and Moov. Ashley began her career in the Strategy and Corporate Finance group of McKinsey & Company.
Ashley graduated summa cum laude from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania.
About Meritech Capital
Founded: 1999 | HQ: United States | Stage: Series A-Growth
Tom Okman
Tom Okman is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Nord Security, a global leader in internet privacy and security solutions and Lithuania’s second tech unicorn. Established in 2012, Nord Security now has more than 1700 employees and serves millions of users worldwide.
Nord Security is home to advanced security solutions that share Nord values, including the world’s most advanced VPN service NordVPN, the next-generation password manager NordPass, encrypted cloud storage NordLocker, the advanced network access security solution NordLayer and consumer cybersecurity company Surfshark.
About Nord Security
Founded: 2012 | HQ: Lithuania | Funding: $100m | Industry: Cybersecurity
Sarah Sclarsic
Sarah Sclarsic is Founding Partner of Voyager, a venture firm investing in early-stage climate technology companies.
Sarah has been building and investing in transformative technology companies since 2009 and brings expertise in mobility, biotech, food and materials production and carbon removal. She co-founded car-sharing firm Getaround and served as the founding business director of Modern Meadow, the world’s first company making biofabricated leather and meat. Sclarsic enrolled in the PhD program at MIT in 2018 to research bioengineering strategies for carbon removal, completing her Master’s thesis before launching Voyager.
Sarah is a graduate of Harvard and of MIT, where she researched atmospheric carbon removal. She lives in New York City.
About Voyager
Founded: 2020 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed
David Fischer
David Fischer is Founder and CEO of Highsnobiety. Founded in 2005 as a streetwear and subculture-focused passion blog, Highsnobiety has since evolved into a global media brand. Today, Highsnobiety sits amongst the most visited global sources on emerging trends and products in fashion, music, art and lifestyle.
Through its curated editorial content, in-house content production agency, Highsnobiety+, and e-Commerce platform, the media brand acts as a cultural liaison that connects brands with the next generation of style-conscious tastemakers and trendsetters. Highsnobiety was acquired by Zalando in 2022.
About Highsnobiety
Founded: 2005 | HQ: Germany | Industry: Media & Fashion
Monika Liikamaa
Monika Liikamaa is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Enfuce, Nordic payment service provider. Monika’s visionary thinking and her over 20 years of experience in the fast-paced payment industry has enabled Enfuce to integrate services for its customers in record time. Building sustainable solutions is a core value of the company and this is made possible thanks to Monika’s wide knowledge of the industry. Monika believes wholeheartedly that a business is nothing without a great team of people, and that is why she has joined forces with industry experts as co-founders and employees. Enfuce is one of the leading fintechs in Europe, with over 16 million end-users on its platform.
About Enfuce
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Finland | Funding: $68m | Industry: Fintech
Alex Zaccaria
Alex Zaccaria Co-Founder and CEO at Linktree, the link-in-bio category creator enabling creators, brands, artists, publishers, agencies, and businesses of all sizes to curate an online ecosystem, engage with their audience and monetise their passion. Since founding the company in 2016 as a side-hustle, he has grown the company to become the front door of the online world for more than 25 million global users.
A self-confessed space nerd and Prince enthusiast, Alex’s formative years involved watching his parents run their own business, a music retail store in Melbourne. It shaped the way he thought about work and eventually led him to launch leading music and entertainment specialist digital agency Bolster alongside his brother, Anthony and mate, Nick Humphreys. Today, Alex is an angel investor in 15 startups.
About Linktree
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Australia | Funding: $166M | Industry: Social Media
Sofia Hmich
Sofia is Founder of Future Positive Capital, a new venture firm seeking Europe’s boldest entrepreneurs who use advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, genetics, and other deep technologies to solve problems such as feeding the world’s growing population sustainably, tackling climate change and coping with an ageing population. Her investments includes Ynsect – the global leader in alternative protein supply, Meatable, who are pioneering the next generation of lab-grown meat, BioBeats, the world’s first unified computational platform for preventative mental health and What3Words – the global multi-award winning location technology company, providing unique 3-word identifiers for any location.
At the intersection of entrepreneurship and investment, her career has encompassed tech innovation throughout with stints at Index Ventures, Europe’s top venture capital firm, and Deezer, the worldwide digital music service, where she was in charge of international expansion.
Sofia has been recognised by Forbes as “30 Under 30”, by the World Economic Forum as a “Global Shaper and is part of Founders Forum.
Steve Anavi
Steve is the co-founder and President of Qonto, the leading European business finance solution.
After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), INSEAD, the University of Tokyo (Todai), he started his career at Deloitte Consulting, before joining Groupon as Chief Operating Officer for France, then Europe and Asia.
In 2013, he founded Smok.io together with Alexandre Prot – the first connected electronic cigarette, and experienced the complexity and frustrations of business banking. Therefore they decided in 2017 to found Qonto, the business finance solution energizing SMEs and freelancers, simplifying everything from everyday banking and financing to bookkeeping, invoicing and spend management. Qonto has raised €622 million from the world’s largest investors. The company now serves 300,000 clients in 4 countries (France, Italy, Spain and Germany), and has over 900 employees.
About Qonto
Founded: 2016 | HQ: France | Funding: $689M | Industry: Fintech
Josh Coyne
Josh Coyne is Partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he focuses on investments in enterprise software and financial services. His portfolio includes early investments in companies like Enterpret, Figma, Firstbase, Loom, Moveworks, Rippling, Secureframe, Stord, Synthesia, and Viz.ai.
Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Josh was at Qatalyst Partners where he helped advise on multi-billion dollar acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, and financings across a variety of technology sectors.
Originally from Cleveland, Josh graduated summa cum laude from Boston College with a degree in Computer Science and Finance. Outside of work, Josh loves playing music, competing in triathlons, and nerding out on health.
About Kleiner Perkins
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed-Growth
Denise Johansson
Denise Johansson is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Enfuce, Nordic payment service provider. She is a thought leader within payments and open banking, a key driver of bringing sustainable financial solutions for the world, and also an active spokesperson for women in fintech. She has 15+ years of experience in the payment industry.
At Enfuce, she draws on her deep experience within financial services to lead the company towards sustainable growth. She established ambitious objectives guiding Enfuce to expand, employ the latest digital technologies, and push the team further than they’d been before. Teamwork is a central aspect of Denise’s role: she makes sure the management team at Enfuce is fully aligned. She also puts a great deal of effort into making sure that everyone sees each other not just as colleagues, but as a part of the team that’s going to make it happen.
About Enfuce
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Finland | Funding: $68m | Industry: Fintech
Christian Facey
Christian is Co-founder and CEO of AudioMob, the world’s first non-interrupting gaming advertising solution that allows game developers to monetize their audience via audio advertising. AudioMob, a VC backed company who recently closed $14m in funding at a $110M valuation, with Investors such as LightSpeed Ventures, Makers Fund, Google, Supernode Global, and Atomico and Sequoia’s angel fund. AudioMob’s work and achievements have been featured in Billboard, Techcrunch, Forbes and Business Insider.
Before founding AudioMob, Christian was a strategist at Google managing up to $100m in advertising spend. He was also at Facebook as a marketing science partner, using cutting edge solutions to measure the true value of advertising.
About Audiomob
Founded: 2020 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $15.6M | Industry: Gaming
Ophelia Brown
Ophelia is Founder of Blossom Capital, an early-stage venture fund that brings a wholly differentiated approach to investing. Blossom makes a small number of high conviction investments each year, which allows the team to work closely with their companies, helping them achieve their ambitious goals. Fascinated by user behavior and design, Ophelia loves worked with founders with strong product DNA and design-oriented teams.
Ophelia is also Founder of ALT “Ambitious Ladies in Tech” – a mentor program that matches junior women in technology start-ups with senior functional leaders to provide them with valuable coaching, skills development, and networking. The network includes executives from some of the world’s leading tech companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Uber and many more
Previously Ophelia was a GP at LocalGlobe and a principal at Index Ventures where she led investments into a number of outstanding companies like Typeform and Robinhood. Blossom Capital’s portfolio includes travel startup Duffel, payments company Checkout, rental marketplace Fat Llama, brand management platform Frontify, deep learning and AI development platform Spell, and monitoring and security protection platform Sqreen.
Oscar Höglund
Oscar Höglund is Co-founder and CEO of Epidemic Sound, a MusicTech company on a mission to soundtrack the world. Over his 20 year career, Oscar has founded several start-ups and is known for his bold innovations and proven business results such as Epidemic Sound becoming one of Sweden’s latest billion-dollar companies.
Since its inception in 2009, Oscar has led Epidemic Sound’s journey to become the market leader of royalty-free music for storytellers and is responsible for the company’s global expansion strategy. Epidemic Sound has garnered critical acclaim for its democratization of music and innovative digital rights model that helps creators use music freely while simultaneously supporting musicians both financially and creatively. Oscar founded Epidemic Sound from a stint at one of the leading TV production companies in Sweden, Zodiak Television.
About Epidemic Sound
Founded: 2009 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: $510M | Industry: Music
Keith Adams
Keith Adams is Founding Partner at Pebblebed, a seed-stage tech fund by and for technologists. He is one of these computer people. His engineering experience spans 16 years at VMware and Facebook, and 4 years as Chief Architect of Slack. Currently, he is also a member of ICONIQ Capital’s Technical Advisory Board.
About Pebblebed
Founded: 2022 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed
Tomáš Čupr
Tomáš Čupr is Co-founder and CEO of Rohklik, poised to revolutionize the online grocery market across Europe.
Building on his background in e-commerce, Tomáš prioritizes data-led customer service. He works to fully understand the delivery needs of his customers and, using these insights, leverages the latest technologies so the company can deliver full shopping baskets within 90 minutes.
Last year alone, the business grew a record 60% to claim an 80% share of the Czech online grocery market. It is now the country’s first unicorn, with Tomáš having successfully rolled out services across Hungary, Austria and Germany with Romania, Italy and Spain to be launched in 2022 aiming to become Europe’s No. 1 online food retailer.
About Rohlik
Founded: 2014 | HQ: Czech Republic | Funding: $593M | Industry: Food Delivery
Maximilian Bittner
Maximilian Bittner is a tech entrepreneur and CEO of Vestiaire Collective, the leading global app for desirable pre-loved fashion empowering a community of fashion activists to drive change through the circular economy.
Before joining Vestiaire Collective, Bittner founded Lazada, the leading online shopping destination in Southeast Asia, in 2012. As CEO, he was the driving force behind the company, which quickly consolidated its position as the market leader in the region. Lazada was acquired by Alibaba group in 2016. Bittner stepped down from his CEO position in March 2018 and moved into an advisory role.
He started his career at Morgan Stanley’s Investment Banking division in London prior to joining McKinsey & Company in Germany.
About Vestiaire Collective
Founded: 2009 | HQ: France | Funding: $647m | Industry: E-commerce marketplace
Dina Radenkovic
Dr Dina Radenkovic is Co-founder and CEO of Gameto, a biotechnology company using cell engineering to develop novel therapeutics for the diseases of the female reproductive system, focusing on infertility and menopause.
Beyond Gameto, Dina is Partner at SALT Bio Fund. She has had research posts at King’s College London and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Dina was also
Co-founder & Chief Science Officer of Hooke, longevity research clinics.
She qualified with a dual degree in medicine and physiology from UCL Medical School, London, UK, and did her residency at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.
About Gameto
Founded: 2021 | HQ: United States | Funding: $40m | Industry: Health
Matt Jacobson
Matt Jacobson is General Partner at ICONIQ Growth, having joined the team in 2013. He sits on the firm’s Executive and Management committees.
Matt currently serves on the board of directors of Datadog, GitLab, Miro, Braze, Collibra, BambooHR, Sprinklr, Relativity, Monte Carlo Data, Gem and Orca Security. Matt also helped lead ICONIQ’s investments in Snowflake, Adyen, Coupa, Fastly, Alteryx, Twistlock, Turbonomic, Intercom, Lucid Software, Dataiku, Axonius, Highspot, Fivetran, Sendbird, Robinhood, Hightouch and others.
Prior to joining ICONIQ, Matt held operating roles at Groupon and investing roles at Battery Ventures and Technology Crossover Ventures. Prior to that, he began his career in investment banking at Lehman Brothers.
Matt received his B.S. in Economics with concentrations in Finance and Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
About ICONIQ Capital
Founded: 2011 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Series A-Growth
Rachael Palmer
Rachael Palmer is Head of VC and Startup Partnerships at Google. Rachael drives Google’s strategic partnerships with top VCs and Startups across the Europe Middle East and Africa region. Her day-to-day work involves collaborating with EMEA’s major VC funds, working to define Google’s VC strategy, and helping startups partner across Google’s product areas. She also leads key strategic initiatives for Google including its Black Founders Fund in the region which is now in its second year.
Prior to Google, Rachael consulted to numerous startups and led marketing and business development efforts for EY’s world famous Entrepreneur of the Year Program. Rachael also held positions at American Express where she served as the product manager for its Business Gold Rewards card and at Microsoft where she held a variety of marketing and business development roles.
Currently, Rachael also serves on the board for the Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust (LON: USA) and as an Advisor for Soho House (NYSE: MCG). She received her MBA from The Wharton School with a dual concentration in Strategic Management and Marketing and her BSE in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania accompanied by minors in mathematics, psychology and economics.
About Google
Founded: 1998 | HQ: United States
James Vincent
James is Founder and CEO of FNDR, who work hand in hand with transformative founders, harnessing the power of narrative to give voice to their vision and shape their companies’ future.
For over a decade, James worked alongside Steve Jobs building Apple’s narrative for ground-breaking products such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store & iPad. He founded and was CEO of Apple’s global agency of record, Media Arts Lab and later went on to work directly with Brian Chesky at Airbnb to build the Trips Platform, before launching FNDR to drive growth for founder-led businesses globally, including Sara Menker (Gro Intelligence), Nicolas Julia (Sorare) and JC Samuelian (Alan).
James is the host of Fast Company’s ‘Most Innovative Companies’ podcast where he interviews some of the most transformative founders of our time, to understand how they think, how they innovate and what lessons they have to share.
About FNDR
Founded: 2017 | HQ: United States| Industry: Marketing
Quentin Clark
Quentin Clark is Managing Director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that partners with seed to endurance-stage founders to help build companies that withstand the test of time.
Quentin focuses on investing in and enterprise SaaS, software, and platforms that are concentrating on transforming the workplace. He’s invested in Aviatrix, Eightfold, Glean, Lessen, Neon, Percent, TripleBlind and among others. He was an early investor and is on the boards of Coda, Commure, Minio and ThoughtSpot.
Prior to joining GC, Quentin was CTO at Dropbox, where he led the company’s engineering, product, design, growth, and IT teams. He worked with them through its IPO. Prior to Dropbox, Quentin spent 20 years with Microsoft, eventually leading the whole data platform business into Microsoft’s cloud, Azure. He then joined SAP, first as CTO then as Chief Business Officer where he led strategy and product direction for the platform and ultimately for the company.
About General Catalyst
Founded: 2000 | HQ: United States | Stage: Series A-Growth
Sabina Wizander
Sabina is Creandum’s first female Partner based in Stockholm. She spent four years working at the Creandum funds’ portfolio company Kry. At Kry, Sabina held different senior management positions ranging from Director of Business Operations, Chief Commercial Officer, and most recently, Chief Strategy Officer. As the nineteenth employee at Kry, Sabina played an essential role in scaling the company to become today’s European digital health category leader. She joined Kry shortly after spending a couple of years in Creandum’s team as an Investment Manager from 2015 to 2017.
Prior to Kry and Creandum, she was with McKinsey in San Francisco, supporting some of the large tech companies there. Sabina is an active Angel investor and her passion for social change has driven her to work with social ventures as an advisor to the entrepreneurs on the side of her normal work.
Sabina holds a M. Sc. in Industrial Engineering. Sabina lives with her husband and child in Stockholm, has a special favor for Digital Health and Climate Tech companies but works in different industries all across Europe.
About Creandum
Founded: 2003 | HQ: Sweden | Stage: Seed-Growth
Matt Miller
Matt Miller is Partner at Sequoia focused on early and growth stage investments in technology companies. A self-proclaimed nerd from an early age, Matt started building computers and writing code at 12 years old in his mother’s kitchen. He has worked as an entrepreneur, an advisor and now an investor. At Sequoia, Matt has worked closely with companies like Carbon Black, Confluent, Docker, Graphcore, Hirevue, Okta, Simplisafe, SkyHigh Networks, Tecton, Tessian and Yokoy.
Prior to Sequoia, Matt worked at Goldman Sachs and graduated from Brigham Young University.
In his spare time, Matt is wrangling three young kids with his wife and looking for people with whom he can practice his Swedish.
About Sequoia
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Sarah Cannon
Sarah Cannon is a General Partner and Head of Europe for Coatue, where she leads the firm’s European private investment efforts. Prior to Coatue, Sarah was a Partner at Index Ventures, a principal at Alphabet’s private equity fund CapitalG, and also served as a policy advisor on the National Economic Council at the White House during the Obama administration.
Sarah received a BA in ethics, politics, and economics from Yale College, an MPA/ID from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
About Coatue
Founded: 1999 | HQ: United States |
Harry Nelis
Harry Nelis is Partner at Accel. He joined the fund in 2004 and focuses on software, fintech and consumer internet companies.
Harry led Accel’s investments in Carto, KAYAK (NASDAQ: KYAK; acquired by Booking.com), Showroomprive (EPA: SRP), Funding Circle (LON: FCH), Callsign, Celonis, CHECK24, Instana (acquired by IBM), Miro, Taxdoo and Zepz.
Harry started his career in Silicon Valley as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard before founding a venture-backed software company. Harry is from the Netherlands and graduated from Harvard Business School and Delft University of Technology.
About Accel
Founded: 1983 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed-Growth
Articles:
Taking control of your destiny: 3 things founders should focus on in the current climateJune 1, 2022Elizabeth Rossiello
Elizabeth Rossiello is Founder and CEO of global fintech AZA Finance (previously BitPesa), accelerating economic growth in Africa through its best-in-class foreign exchange, payments, settlement and treasury services. She founded the company in Nairobi, Kenya, to bring digital currencies to the African market, having now executed more than £200 billion in global transactions.
Elizabeth is committed to expanding access to financial technologies. She co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Council on Blockchain in addition to sitting on the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Global Advisory Board.
Elizabeth was recently named as a 2021 Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst. She holds an M.A. in International Business and Finance from Columbia University.
About AZA Finance
Founded: 2013 | HQ: Kenya | Funding: $20m | Industry: Fintech
Andrew Beebe
Andrew is Managing Director of Obvious Ventures, bringing a lifelong passion for building companies around sustainable systems and people power.
For nearly two decades, Andrew has focused on clean technology and clean energy solutions. He started down the clean tech path with Energy Innovations in 2003, which he grew from a business plan to a major solar developer serving customers like Google, Disney, Sony Pictures, and British Telecom. After selling the company to Suntech in 2008,
Andrew served as Chief Commercial Officer at Suntech as well as Vice President of Global Product Strategy. During his tenure, Suntech became the largest solar company in the world. After leaving Suntech, Andrew spent two years as Vice President of Distributed Generation for Nextera Energy, the largest clean energy developer in the U.S.
Before his clean tech career, Andrew spent a decade building companies in the early days of “Web 1.0.” In 1998 Andrew co-founded Bigstep.com, an e-commerce platform designed to serve the needs of small businesses entering the Internet age.
About Obvious Ventures
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Kia Kokalitcheva
Kia Kokalitcheva is a technology and business reporter at Axios, based in San Francisco. She covers venture capital, technology, startups, and Silicon Valley. She was previously at Fortune and VentureBeat, also covering the technology industry and startups, mostly with a focus on the “on-demand economy” and venture capital.
She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in political economy.
Matti Niebelschuetz
Matti is Co-founder and Managing Director of CoachHub, the leading global digital coaching platform on a mission to democratize coaching worldwide. Funded with over $330M, Coachhub has scaled to a team of over 850 people.
Matti is a serial entrepreneur and former management consultant at McKinsey Digital with 15 years of experience in Future of Work, startups and digital business building.
About Coachhub
Founded: 2018 | HQ: Germany | Funding: $331M | Industry: Learning & Edtech
Marta Sjögren
Marta is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Paebbl, the carbon re-storing company. Paebbl was founded on the premise that the captured CO2 can and should be put to good use. Paebbl’s vision is to repurpose captured CO2 into widely used raw materials.
Prior to co-founding Paebbl, Marta was an early stage investor, with over a decade in venture capital (Northzone as a Partner, DN Capital where she started her career), and a proven track record in a range of verticals, including B2B SaaS, gaming, and edtech. Marta decided to focus only on clearly defined planet-positive businesses when she realised that every euro invested has an impact, one which companies either downplay or highlight relative to economic upside.
About Paebbl
Founded: 2021 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: €8M | Industry: CLimate Tech
David Nothacker
David Nothacker is Co-founder and CEO of Sennder, Europe’s leading digital freight-forwarder platform.
David co-founded Sennder during his MBA studies at INSEAD. Under his leadership, over 12,500 connected trucks have completed more than 500,000 FTL shipments throughout Europe. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Sennder has 850 employees across 8 European offices. To date, Sennder has raised over $350m from leading investors.
David started his career at the strategy consulting firm Roland Berger. He is also the co-founder of Smiling Box.
About Sennder
Founded: 2015 | HQ: Germany | Funding: $322M | Industry: Logistics
Robin Li
Robin Li is an investor at GGV Capital based in New York, focusing on investments in consumer, fintech, and the digital economy.
She serves on the board of directors for Bustle Digital Group, Flieber, Glow Concept, Odeko, and Snappy. She is also a board observer or actively involved with Bowery Farming, Chief, Frubana, Function of Beauty, K Health, Shelf Engine, Slice, StockX, Swimply, and Yami.
About GGV Capital
Founded: 2000 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed–Growth
Jonathan Lai
Jonathan Lai is General partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he invests in games. As a founding investor of a16z Games Fund One, Jon focuses on investing at the intersection of games and consumer social, web3, infrastructure, and fintech. Today, Jon serves on the boards of Ready Player Me, Singularity 6, Overwolf, Raid Base, Mountaintop, Mainframe, and Elodie.
Before joining Andreessen Horowitz, Jon led the North America games investments team at Tencent. Prior, Jon was a senior product manager at Riot Games, the developers of League of Legends, where he shipped the Riot Games API before the company was acquired by Tencent. He started his career in investment banking for Morgan Stanley.
Jon graduated from Harvard University with an MBA and BA in Economics, and lives in the Bay Area with his family.
About Andreessen Horowitz
Founded: 2009 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Mia Diawara
Mia Diawara is a Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, where she invests in ambitious teams building needle-moving climate tech, and does so with an eye toward equity and inclusion. Before Lowercarbon, Mia spearheaded decarbonization strategy across a portfolio of over $90B in assets at TPG, advised companies across industries at Bain & Company, and assessed climate policy and market-based climate solutions at NRDC and RMI, respectively.
When’s she’s not busy unf*cking the planet, she moonlights a poet and dancer, having performed professionally with the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company. She also chairs the Nominating & Governance Committee on the board of Robert Moses’ Kin—an SF-based dance company.
About Lowercarbon Capital
Founded: 2018 | HQ: United States
Lindsay Ross
Lindsay Ross is Chief Human Resources Officer of Bitpanda. She brings over 10 years of experience in creating people strategies for multinational, hyper-growth organizations – from start-ups to multi-billion-dollar enterprises.
Lindsay’s versatile background includes a broad mix of leadership and specialist roles during which she has implemented and nurtured strategies to build high-performing, diverse and purpose-led cultures.
Prior to joining Bitpanda, Lindsay held senior roles for tech giants MessageBird and Adyen, as well as Tommy Hilfiger and its holding company PVH Corp, helping them scale by enhancing and transforming their human resources operations.
About Bitpanda
Founded: 2014 | HQ: Austria | Funding: $496M | Industry: Fintech
John Doran
John is a General Partner who helped set up and launch TCV’s London office in 2012. He focuses on investments in software, internet, and FinTech companies. John’s current investments include Believe (Euronext Paris: BLV), Brex, Dream Sports, FlixMobility, Klarna, Mambu, Miro, Mollie, Qonto, Razorpay, Redis Labs, RELEX Solutions, Revolut, Sportradar (NASDAQ: SRAD), SuperVista AG, TourRadar, The Pracuj Group (WSE: GPP), Trade Republic, and Zepz.
John was previously an investor at Summit Partners, where he focused on investments across software, internet, and financial technology. John started his career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, where he worked in both London and New York.
About TCV
Founded: 1995 | HQ: United States | Stage: Growth
Huey Lin
Huey Lin is Venture Partner at GGV Capital, where she invests and supports the fund’s portfolio companies. She also leads special projects at Terraformation whose mission is to catalyze global forest restoration to solve climate change.
Huey was the founding Chief Operating Officer at Affirm (NYSE: AFRM). She was responsible for building the Finance, Compliance, Legal, HR, G&A, Business Operation, Client Success, and Customer Service teams.
Huey began her career at PayPal as one of the company’s first product managers. She subsequently spent more than a decade at the firm where she led China and Asia-Pacific operations in addition to serving in key leadership roles in product, international risk, and policy strategy.
Most recently, she was the President of Asia at Flexport, a modern freight forwarder and one of the fastest-growing companies in global trade. She led all activities for Flexport across Asia, the company’s most strategic market.
Huey holds a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and an A.M. from Stanford University. Huey serves on the board of directors of Hang Seng Bank and Nium. She advises Chainlink Labs, Monetary Authority of Singapore, PayU, amongst others.
About GGV Capital
Founded: 2000 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Mathieu Flamini
Mathieu Flamini is Co-founder and CEO of GFBiochemicals, a leading sustainable biochemical company with the mission to end chemical pollution by finding safer and more sustainable alternatives to the harmful petrochemicals commonly found in everyday products. He is a former footballer for Arsenal FC, AC Milan and the French national team.
After founding GFBiochemicals in 2010, he was part of the team behind BIOCIRCE, Europe’s first Masters’ degree dedicated to the bioeconomy. He subsequently became a WEF Young Global Leader in 2018, joined the Atomico Angel Program in 2021 and is a member of the Paris 2024 Olympic Environmental Excellence Committee.
About GFBiochemicals
Founded: 2010 | HQ: France | Industry: biotechnology
Lisa Xu
Lisa is Principal at FirstMark, where she leads early stage (Seed and Series A) investments. Lisa joined the investment team in 2018 and focuses on consumer applications and infrastructure. She also works closely with and supports several of FirstMark’s portfolio companies as a Board Observer.
Prior to joining FirstMark, Lisa was a Product Manager at NYC-based Peloton (NASDAQ: PTON) and Handy, which was acquired by Angi Inc. (NASDAQ: ANGI). Previously, Lisa was a Senior Associate Consultant at Bain & Company, where she performed due diligence for consumer-focused private equity and growth equity firms.
Lisa graduated summa cum laude from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Finance and Management.
About FirstMark Capital
Founded: 2008 | HQ: United States | Stage: Early Stage
Julian Teicke
Julian Teicke is the Founder and CEO of wefox, which is a full-stack digital insurance company driven by a single purpose: to make people safe by reinventing insurance at scale through technology.
About wefox
Founded: 2015 | HQ: German | Funding: $912m | Industry: Fintech
Sofia Dolfe
Sofia is an investor with a particular passion for consumer businesses spanning ecommerce, sustainability, healthtech and gaming.
Focused on mainland Europe and the Nordics, she is fascinated by companies tackling the problem of sustainability, as well as large markets that may have been neglected because of their complexity or customer base. She works with Kry, one of Europe’s largest digital healthcare businesses; mobile-games maker Dream Games; Otrium, a fashion marketplace for excess stock and end-of-season items; and Rohlik, the leading online grocer in Europe.
Before joining Index in 2018, Sofia worked as an investor at EQT Ventures in Stockholm and a consultant at EY-Parthenon in London and Paris. She also spent time with the European Union Delegation to the OECD.
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About Index Ventures
Founded: 1996 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed–Growth
Mike Lobanov
Mike Co-founded Target in 2012 and has a special focus on the firm’s investments in Fintech, as well as overall management of the firm.
He has led Target’s investments in Rapyd, Copper, Cryptofacilities, Mercuryo, Finom, 3Commas and others.
Mike holds a Bachelor’s degree from London School of Economics and is a history buff which led to Target Global creating a series of books on the history of Russian entrepreneurship pre-1917.
About Target Global
Founded: 2012 | HQ: Germany
Åsa Lidén
Åsa Lidén is Chief Operating Officer at Pitch.
Before joining Pitch, she worked as the VP of Engineering at Natural Cycles, where her team enabled the company to gain FDA approval as the first mobile app for birth control. Prior to Natural Cycles, she held various engineering leadership positions at Spotify for over five years, building up the product growth organization and leading the development of Spotify on Playstation. Additionally, Åsa serves as a board member of audio brand Transparent and advises early stage startups on growth strategies and leadership.
About Pitch
Founded: 2018 | HQ: Germany | Funding: $136m | Industry: Software
Frederic Court
Frederic is Founder and Managing Partner of Felix Capital, a London-based venture capital firm operating at the intersection of technology and creativity, founded in 2015. Felix manages over $1.2 billion of venture and growth capital, focusing on emerging digital consumer brands and related enabling-technologies. Illustrative investments in Europe and North America include Farfetch, Mirakl, Mejuri, Juni, Moonbug, Oatly and Peloton.
Frederic was named “Investor of the Year” in Europe by his peers at the 2012 and 2019 Investor All Stars event. Frederic has been on the Midas List Europe each year since 2017.
Prior to starting Felix Capital, Frederic was General Partner at Advent Venture Partners in London, where he led investments across Consumer and Software early-stage businesses. Before VC, Frederic started his career in 1994 with Lazard, the investment bank, working across their London, Milan and New-York offices, with a focus on Telecommunications, Media and Technology.
He is a graduate of ESSEC business School in Paris and Bocconi University in Italy.
About Felix Capital
Founded: 2015 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed-Growth
Joy Tuffield
Joy Tuffield is Partner at Generation Investment Management, a pure-play sustainable investment manager. Joy is a member of the Growth Equity strategy, which invests $50m-$150m as active minority investors in high-growth companies that are scaling sustainable solutions. The firm has partnered with companies such as Asana, Back Market, Benevity, Convoy, Gusto, Pivot Bio and Toast, amongst others.
Joy joined Generation in 2013.
Previously, Joy worked in the investment banking division of Jefferies International and in the Energy, Environment, and Resources department of Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs). Joy received a master’s degree in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford University. Joy serves on the board of Convoy, o9 Solutions, and project44, and is fluent in Farsi.
About Generation Investment Management
Founded: 2004 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Growth
Steven Jacobs
Steve is Venture Partner and CPO at Lakestar focused on sourcing deep tech investments and providing support to portfolio founders and CPOs.
Before Lakestar, Steve spent over a decade leading product teams at Apple, Google, Facebook, and HP. He helped launch the following first generation products: iPhone, Beats by Dre Headphones, HP Spectre, Pixelbook, Fitbit, GoPro, Portal TV, and Nest Thermostat.
Steve was also the Founder and CEO of Olio Devices, an early leader in the smartwatch space which he later sold to Flex (NASDAQ: FLEX). Post-acquisition, he became the GM of Flex’s Wearable Technology Group.
Steve has a MSc in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University where he currently guest lectures and a dual BSc in Mechanical Engineering and Material Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
About Lakestar
Founded: 2012 | HQ: Switzerland | Stage: Seed-Growth
Emma Lehikoinen
Emma Lehikoinen is the COO at Swappie, where she has been leading the business side of the fastest growing scaleup in Europe since fall 2021. Emma joined Swappie at the beginning of 2020 as part of the expansion team, subsequently leading it and bringing outstanding results across the region, among which the amplification of the number of countries the company operates in from 4 to 15 in just over a year.
Emma has for years been an integral part of the startup ecosystem in Europe. Prior to joining Swappie she was the President of Slush, one of Europe’s biggest startup & tech events, where she had the opportunity to work with the global startup ecosystem.
In her personal time, Emma loves to travel and spend time hiking across the beautiful Finnish scenery.
About Swappie
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Finland | Funding: €170M | Industry: Consumer Electronics
Paul Murphy
Paul Murphy is Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. As a product developer and eventual multiple-time Founder, he discovered a knack for fundraising while working on the other side of the business on behalf of his own companies. After three years at Northzone, Paul once again indulged his passion for building products, creating Katch, an app designed to free busy people from their calendars.
Paul first crossed paths with Lightspeed while he was at Betaworks. Lightspeed had invested in two companies Paul helped develop: Giphy and Poncho. He was reintroduced to Lightspeed years later while working together on a co-investment, and it was then when he decided to make the jump to Lightspeed and help build the firm’s European presence.
About Lightspeed
Founded: 2000 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Adam Chekroud
Dr. Adam Chekroud is President and Co-Founder of Spring Health, based in New York City, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University.
His research seeks to improve treatment outcomes in mental health, and has been featured in the Lancet, JAMA Psychiatry, Lancet Psychiatry, and PNAS, and covered in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, BBC, CNN, and NPR.
About Spring Health
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United States | Funding: $294M | Industry: Health
Natasha Lytton
Natasha is a Director at Seedcamp, the leading European seed fund, where she drives the fund’s post-investment strategy with a particular focus on how to support the 1000+ founders in the portfolio which includes the likes of publicly listed UiPath and Wise, and unicorns Hopin, Revolut, viz.ai, wefox, Pleo and Sorare.
Natasha cut her teeth in agencies before taking on a number of CMO roles at consumer-focused startups prior to joining Seedcamp six years ago. Outside of work, Natasha is a fitness fanatic, lover of live music, and former jazz singer. During lockdown, she released her first single.
She has an MA from Oxford University in French and Spanish.
About Seedcamp
Founded: 2007 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed
Kun Gao
Kun is co-founder & COO of GGWP, which is modernizing moderation and tackling toxicity in gaming and the metaverse.
Previously, he founded and was CEO of Crunchyroll, the world’s largest destination for anime and manga. He brings 15 years of experience in consumer media, including founding social mapping service Frappr, product and engineering at Slide and HOTorNOT. Kun graduated from UC Berkeley with honors B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and B.A. in Applied Mathematics in 2004, and was a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
About GGWP
Founded: 2020 | HQ: United States | Funding: $12M | Industry: Gaming
Esther Hare
Esther Hare is Senior Director, Worldwide Developer Marketing at Apple. Since joining Apple 18 years ago, Esther has played a key role in helping to inspire and grow the number of women that become involved in the app economy through her leadership roles in Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations organization.
She is also the executive sponsor for Women at Apple, and manages Apple’s student program for WWDC, which has empowered 1000s of students to take part in the conference each year. Esther is also instrumental in Apple Entrepreneur Camp, which supports underrepresented founders.
Esther has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Kent at Canterbury, spent a year at Université de Paris Sud XI, and holds an MBA from San Jose State University, California.
Tamás Kádár
Tamas Kadar is Founder and CEO of SEON. He founded the company in 2017 with his Co-Founder when they were still at university and built it from scratch. A graduate of the elite Corvinus University, he studied Deep Info Comms where he saw first-hand how fraudsters and hackers looked to get around security measures.
SEON is a fraud prevention technology startup; with complex analysis of digital footprints, it filters out potential fraudsters in online transactions. This year the company raised record investment of $94m Series B for further international expansion, and is now the go-to fraud prevention solution for any online businesses, including ambitious fintech leaders, like Revolut, Patreon and mollie.
Tamas has been featured in Forbes’ ‘Hottest Young Startups in Europe’. He’s been portrayed in an exclusive on Business Insider, elected as ‘Founder of The Year’ at Hustle Awards in 2022. Being a true tech enthusiast, product visionary and business leader of his 280 people team operations across 4 continents, he’s on a mission to create a fraud-free world.
About SEON
Founded: 2017 | HQ: Hungary | Industry: Cyber Security
Michelle You
Michelle You is Co-founder and CEO of Supercritical, a fast-growing software platform that’s fighting the climate crisis by helping businesses reach net zero. Michelle started Supercritical as – like her co-founder, Aaron Randall – she wanted to leave a better future for her young child, and the climate crisis can’t wait.
A former venture partner at LocalGlobe, where she focused on climate investments, Michelle is a repeat entrepreneur with a proven track record. As co-founder of Songkick, she grew the company to over 20 million monthly unique users and raised capital from Y Combinator, Index Ventures and Sequoia before exiting to Warner Music Group in 2017.
About Supercritical
Founded: 2021 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $2.6M | Industry: Climate Tech
Brian Ta
Brian is Growth Product Manager at Coinbase, where he leads the Growth Acquisition team. He leads various top of funnel acquisition channels such as SEO, Conversion Rate Optimization, Performance Marketing, Logged Out App, and Crypto Advocacy.
He’s a regular speaker at YCombinator where he speaks about Growth to their newest batches.
Before Coinbase, he worked on the Growth at Airbnb, Strava, and AngelList. He’s also consulted for various tech companies such as Spotify, Notion, Brex, and MongoDB on growth.
About Coinbase
Founded: 2012 | HQ: United States | Funding: IPO | Industry: Fintech
Antti Karjalainen
Antti Karjalainen is Co-founder and CEO of Robocorp, an open-source Enterprise company that’s set out to redefine Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Backed by investors such as Benchmark and Canvas Ventures, Robocorp is democratizing access to RPA through open-source tooling that allows anyone to start building and operating bots that can automate virtually any routine software task that people do manually today.
Before founding Robocorp, Antti has been a long-time open-source enthusiast with a background in software engineering. He serves on the board of the Robot Framework Foundation which is a non-profit dedicated to advancing the community around the Robot Framework project.
About Robocorp
Founded: 2019 | HQ: United States | Funding: $33M | Industry: Enterprise Software
Mikael Thuneberg
Mikael is Founder & CEO of Supermetrics. In 2009, Mikael was working as a web analyst, and was looking to get rid of manual data transfer work. He became the first person to successfully connect the newly launched Google Analytics API with Excel, and the story of Supermetrics began. Mikael worked alone until 2016 when he hired Supermetrics’ first employee. Supermetrics brings data from 100+ marketing and sales tools and platforms into spreadsheets, visualization tools, and data warehouses.
The company has grown rapidly in the last few years and is expected to be one of the next Finnish unicorns. It has over 300 employees and 17,000+ customers in over 120 countries. 15% of global online ad spend is reported using Supermetrics products. In a world where all businesses must use data, Supermetrics’ mission is to make data simpler, productive, and more connected so that the working world can be more productive and less chaotic.
About Supermetrics
Founded: 2013 | HQ: Finland | Funding: $48M | Industry: Enterprise Software
Tom Hulme
Tom is General Partner and Head of Europe of Google Ventures. He brings an innate curiosity to startups across fintech, enterprise, science, and consumer applications. Tom joined GV in 2014 to found the European office.
Previously, Tom was design director at IDEO, where he ran the firm’s startup efforts globally and founded OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform on which over 300,000 users from more than 170 countries solve social good challenges.
Tom has led early stage investments in companies including GoCardless, Lemonade (NYSE), Snyk, Scandit, Currency Cloud (acquired by Visa), Nothing, Vaccitech (NASDAQ), Blockchain, Multiverse, and Genesis Global.
Tom earned a first-class bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Bristol and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he received the Baker Scholar Award of high distinction. He also received an honorary doctorate in Design from the University of the Arts London.
About GV
Founded: 2009 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Amy Lewin
Amy is Editor at Sifted, the media platform for Europe’s startups, backed by the Financial Times. She leads Sifted’s team of journalists, cohosts Sifted’s weekly podcast and coauthors Sifted’s weekly VC newsletter, dabbles in reporting on startups and VC and regularly appears onstage at top industry events across the continent.
Before joining Sifted as its first employee, she was Features Editor at print magazine Courier, also covering startups.
Daniel Waterhouse
Daniel is General Partner of Balderton. Having joined in 2013, he currently sits on the boards of Furhat Robotics, Kbox Global, Infarm, Lovecrafts, Merama, Simple Feast, Thread, Vivenu, and Workable and is a board observer for Attio and The Org.
Daniel previously held board positions at Revolut, Frontier Car Group (sold to OLX) and Tictail (sold to Shopify). He also worked on Balderton’s Liquidity Fund and led this Fund’s investments in (amongst others) Darktrace, Truecaller, Housecall Pro, Lendable and McMakler.
Prior to Balderton, Daniel spent five years as a partner at Wellington Partners and worked on investments including Spotify (IPO on NYSE), Hailo (now part of FREE NOW), Qype (sold to Yelp), Readmill (sold to Dropbox), and Bookatable (sold to Michelin).
Before Wellington, Daniel was a sector partner at 3i where he worked on all of their venture and private equity investments in the internet sector in North America and Europe.
About Balderton
Founded: 2000 | HQ: United Kingdom | Stage: Seed-Growth
Keily Blair
Keily is Chief Strategy & Operations Officer at OnlyFans. She is responsible for formulating, implementing and communicating OnlyFans’ strategic initiatives and future goals to users, commercial partners, and other key stakeholders. As a practicing attorney, Keily is responsible for the enterprise-wide approach to online safety and leads OnlyFans’ communications, human resources, operations and legal functions.
Keily’s background is in law, operational strategy, and government affairs. Prior to her role at OnlyFans was a partner at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and led the Cyber, Privacy & Data innovation practice in London. Keily advised on international privacy, cyber and online safety laws and regulations and helped clients to build effective regulatory relationships including leading internal and external regulatory investigations.
Keily is a ranked practitioner and has represented the private sector at the United Nations and the European Criminal Bar Association. She is committed to improving diversity and social mobility in the legal and fintech sectors and has won numerous awards for her work in this space.
About OnlyFans
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: – | Industry: Social Media
Daniel Metzler
Daniel Metzler is Co-Founder and CEO of Isar Aerospace, a Munich based company, developing orbital space launch vehicles with the vision of engineering the future of space flight. Daniel has co-founded the company in 2018 to develop the first purely privately financed European orbital launch vehicle to provide flexible, sustainable and cost-effective access to space and lower the barriers for commercial space access.
Before founding Isar Aerospace, Daniel led a team of 40 students at the rocketry research group WARR, a scientific workgroup situated at the Technical University of Munich.
About Isar Aerospace
Founded: 2018 | HQ: Germany | Funding: $188M | Industry: Space
Zeeshan Feroz
Zeeshan is Chief Strategy Officer of MoonPay. For over a decade, Zeeshan has been at the forefront of financial innovation in the payments and crypto sector.
Prior to joining MoonPay, Zeeshan was the CEO of Coinbase’s international business, where he built all the regulatory, banking and legal infrastructure from the ground up in over a hundred countries and oversaw go-to-market strategy. His other esteemed roles include the VP of sales a payments giant Paysafe Group, and Global Head of Payments at Tilt.com.
About Moonpay
Founded: 2018 | HQ: United States | Industry: fintech
Rebeca Tristan
Rebeca Tristan is Head of Customer Experience at Pigment, the business planning platform fuelling better decisions for forward-thinking companies. Her teams span Professional Services, Customer Success, Support, Community, Education, Content and Product Marketing with the common goal of delivering value for Pigment’s customers. She also leads the People team at Pigment.
Before joining Pigment, she led Client Success, Scaled Solutions, and Workplace for Good for Workplace from Facebook. She joined as the first hire globally and grew Workplace from $0 to $100M in annual revenue, with over $60M in software donated to charities annually. Before that, she worked at LinkedIn as a Customer Success Manager.
Rebe is a trustee at Artbox London, an art studio and gallery supporting people with learning disabilities and autism. She is also passionately involved in diversity efforts within the Latinx and differently-abled communities.
She is a graduate of ITESM in Mexico, The University of Toronto in Canada, École des Ponts ParisTech in France, and Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management in Belgium.
She lives in London with her husband and two children, where they spend most of their time being super competitive over board games and planning their next adventure.
About Pigment
Founded: 2019 | HQ: France | Funding: $164M | Industry: SaaS
Robert Lacher
Robert is Founding Partner at Visionaries Club, a Berlin based venture capital fund backed by a family of leading digital founders and family business entrepreneurs. Visionaries Club has invested in companies such as Xentral, Personio, Choco, Taxdoo, Arculus, Ree, Acapela, Superlist, Rows and Pigment.
Before that, Robert has invested in more than 30 early stage companies with his seed fund La Famiglia. Robert is also Founder of the fashion platform AMAZE which he sold to Zalando in 2016.
Robert studied engineering and business at RWTH Aachen, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Harvard University.
About Visionaries Club
Founded: 2019 | HQ: Germany | Stage: Seed-Growth
Cordel Robbin-Coker
Cordel Robbin-Coker is Co-Founder and CEO of Carry1st, the leading mobile games publisher and digital commerce platform for Africa. Prior to founding Carry1st, Cordel spent over a decade in private equity and investment banking with The Carlyle Group and Morgan Stanley, across the US, Europe, and Africa.
He most recently served as VP in the $700 million Carlyle Sub-Saharan Africa fund and previously as aide to Carlyle executives Bill Conway and Ed Mathias. Cordel serves as Director and Treasurer of the Milton Hershey School, and the Hershey Trust Company which manages its ~$20 billion endowment.
Cordel is a Venture Scout for Andreessen Horowitz, Venture Partner for Adaverse, and Venture Partner for The Raba Partnership.
He is a graduate of Stanford University and a native of Sierra Leone.
About Carry1st
Founded: 2018 | HQ: South Africa | Funding: $30m | Industry: Gaming
Katie Roof
Katie Roof is a Reporter for Bloomberg reporting on tech finance, including pre-IPO fundings and exits like IPOs and M&A.
Prior to Bloomberg, Katie has worked for the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and Fox.
Mark Kornfilt
Mark Kornfilt is President of Vimeo. He joined the company in 2017 with its acquisition of Livestream, the leading live video platform that powered over ten million streams a year, where he served as CEO and was a co-founder. Prior to Livestream, Mark was one of the developers of the popular peer-to-peer app LimeWire.
Mark also serves on the board of directors of Korab International, a global pulp and paper trading company, and as an advisor to humbition, a private investment firm that provides venture capital to early stage, founder-led companies in New York.
Mark earned his Masters of Science in computer science from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and received an Executive MBA from the London Business School.
About Vimeo
Founded: 2004 | HQ: United States | Funding: IPO | Industry: Media and Streaming
Victoria Turk
Victoria Turk is Features Director at Rest of World. She is responsible for Rest of World’s longform coverage on technology outside of the Western bubble, including stories from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
Before joining Rest of World, Victoria was Features Editor at Wired UK.
David de Picciotto
David is Co-founder and CEO of Pledge, a climate infrastructure platform making it simple for businesses to integrate carbon measurement & offsetting tools into their customer experience. Founded in 2021, Pledge has raised $4.5m from investors like Lowercarbon Capital and Visionaries Club.
Before Pledge, David worked for Partners Group, a global private equity firm, where he focused on growth equity investments. Prior to this, David was at Revolut, the UK FinTech, where he led International Expansion. David is also the co-founder of media start-up iRewind where he exited in 2016.
He holds a BA in Economics and Statistics from the University of St. Gallen and Columbia University, as well as an MSc in Data Analytics from Imperial College London.
About Pledge
Founded: 2021 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: $4.5m | Industry: Climate Tech
Hannah Miller
Based in San Francisco, Hannah Miller covers crypto venture capital and startups for Bloomberg News. She previously covered crypto for The Information and worked for The Financial Times, CNBC and CNN. She is a graduate of The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and Barnard College, Columbia University.
Mika Salmi
Mika Salmi is Managing Partner of Lakestar. He is a serial entrepreneur whose life has been primarily centered on discovering talent and driving new ideas.
In his roles as CEO or Founder, Mika has searched for talent in numerous industries. He has discovered Grammy and Oscar winning artists, created the original online short video company, run the internet’s most popular casual games web sites, built one of the first sports tracking apps, and pioneered new business models in education.
Entrepreneurs are Mika’s favorite kind of talent, and he enjoys helping them realize their ideas and dreams for their start ups. He has done this working with Accel, Raine, and Sequoia. Now he’s Managing Partner with Lakestar, a top global VC based in Europe.
About Lakestar
Founded: 2012 | HQ: Switzerland | Stage: Seed-Growth
Sten Garmark
Sten Garmark is VP of Consumer Experience at Spotify. He oversees Spotify’s consumer experience across all platforms and partnerships, serving users the world’s leading audio experience in your home, in your car, or on the go.
Garmark’s organization includes Product Management, Engineering, Design, Business Development, Product Insights, and Strategy Operations. Sten Garmark is also responsible for 20+ patented inventions since he joined Spotify. Mr.
Garmark holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
About Spotify
Founded: 2006 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: IPO | Industry: Streaming
Willemijn Verloop
Willemijn Verloop is a serial social entrepreneur and impact investor. She is Founding Partner of Rubio Impact Ventures. Rubio is a frontrunner impact VC based in the Netherlands. Rubio invests in world-changing entrepreneurs who unite powerful positive impact with a scalable commercial business. Willemijn has been a driving force behind the Social Enterprise movement since 2010 as she co-founded the Platform Social Enterprise NL and she has published several books and studies on the topic.
She also founded the international peace organization War Child at the age of 23 and is still vice chair of their Supervisor Board. She is an active board member at a.o. Tony’s Chocolonely, Winc Academy, V-Ventures, Anterra and serves as Chair of the Dutch National Advisory Board for Impact Investing.
About Rubio Impact Ventures
Founded: 2014 | HQ: Netherlands | Stage: Seed–Series A
Michiel Kotting
Michiel is a Partner at Northzone, focusing on SaaS, marketplaces, healthcare and AI. He leads Northzone’s investments in Personio, Spacemaker, Kahoot!, Medwing, TIER, Disperse, Catawiki, Forto, and Aidence. Prior to joining Northzone, Michiel was an investor at Accel London.
Originally from the Netherlands, Michiel spent the early years of his career at BCG. He then founded Digital Jones, an artificial intelligence company, in the Bay Area, which he sold to Shopping.com.
Michiel has a graduate degree in physics from Delft University of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
About Northzone
Founded: 1996 | HQ: London | Stage: Seed-Growth
Pepe Agell
Pepe is Partner at Pear VC. Pepe hails from Barcelona and moved to Silicon Valley in 2008, eager to surround himself and learn from other entrepreneurs. He was one of the key leaders at Chartboost (acquired by Zynga), a mobile advertising platform that gives developers tools for user acquisition and monetization, where he built and managed global sales, customer success and technical support. Pepe also started Chartboost’s offices in Amsterdam, Tokyo, Beijing, and Barcelona.
At Pear, Pepe works closely with founders to help develop and optimize their go-to-market, sales, and growth strategies. He is passionate about public speaking and has presented at many premiere mobile conferences including MWC Barcelona.
Earlier this year, Pepe moved back to Barcelona, where he leads the firm’s EMEA practice. He enjoys running, skiing and traveling with this family. He holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from the UPC Barcelona and the ETH Zurich.
About Pear VC
Founded: 2013 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Aggi Cantrill
Aggi Cantrill is a reporter for Bloomberg News, focusing on technology, media and telecoms. Based in Berlin, Aggi covers the German startup scene as well as broader issues facing technology in Europe.
Iain Martin
Iain Martin is Europe News Editor at Forbes. He writes about startups, technology and venture capital.
Prior to joining Forbes in 2019, Iain was the Asia Editor for journalism startup Storyful (acquired by News Corp) and worked as a financial journalist.
Eleanor Warnock
Eleanor is Commissioning Editor at Sifted. She is a multilingual, MBA-wielding writer who has spent time in both journalism and PR over her decade-long career.
Eleanor started her career at the Wall Street Journal in Japan where she covered central banking, markets and financial policy. Prior to Sifted, she was communications and marketing manager at one of Europe’s largest VC firms, Atomico.
Eleanor holds an MBA from INSEAD.
About Sifted
Founded: 2018 | HQ: United Kingdom
Otto Hilska
Otto Hilska is a serial entrepreneur who started his first software company at the age of 18. His second company Flowdock raised money from Silicon Valley and got acquired by Rally Software in 2013. After that, he spent four years scaling Smartly.io from 30 to 400 people as the Chief Product Officer.
Now Otto is building Swarmia, a SaaS product that helps the best software teams get better. They work with high-growth companies like Outreach, Blinkist, and Wolt that need to scale productivity while growing their engineering teams.
About Swarmia
Founded: 2019 | HQ: Finland | Funding: $8M | Industry: Enterprise software
Blake Robbins
Blake is a Principal at Benchmark Capital, where he leads early stage investments. Blake joined Benchmark last year and focuses primarily on consumer software. Blake also works closely and supports several of Benchmark’s portfolio companies as a Board Observer.
Prior to joining Benchmark, Blake was a Partner at Ludlow Ventures.
About Benchmark
Founded: 1995 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Juliet Bailin
Juliet Bailin is a Principal at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that partners with founders from seed through growth to build companies that withstand the test of time. At GC, Juliet works with founders in enterprise software and healthcare in Europe and the U.S. Prior to joining General Catalyst, Juliet was an Associate Partner at Mosaic Ventures in London after starting her investing career at Insight Partners in New York. Juliet is on the board of, or actively involved with, the following GC companies: Enable Medicine, Evvy, Gitpod, Packfleet, Lottie, Charm Therapeutics, Alinea Health, Shareback, and Percent.
About General Catalyst
Founded: 2000 | HQ: United States | Stage: Series A-Growth
Gabriel Kleinman
Gabe leads Founder Solutions and Marketing at Obvious, helping companies build resilient, values-driven operations and stewarding the Obvious brand.
He was previously at Medium where he led numerous functions. Prior to Medium Gabe co-led the Design for Learning practice at IDEO, helping organizations in the private, public, and social sectors tackle large-scale challenges in education. Gabe began his career at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) working across CAA Marketing, the CAA Foundation, and strategic agency initiatives for over a decade.
He recently co-founded and serves on the board of U.S. Megafire Response, an organization dedicated to ending the megafire crisis in the United States. He is on the steering committee of Venture ESG, and serves on the advisory board of Marketplace from American Public Media. Gabe received a B.A. in Philosophy and Anthropology from Cornell University.
About Obvious Ventures
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Yee Lee
Yee Lee is VP Growth & Capital Markets at Terraformation. He joined as employee no. 1. Yee has an extensive track record as a serial entrepreneur with involvement in many of the most impactful companies in the tech industry.
Yee began his career in Silicon Valley as an early team member at PayPal and has served in engineering and product management roles at eBay, Google, Skype, TaskRabbit, and Facebook. Yee founded four startup companies in the social network, ecommerce and fintech sectors. These roles have allowed Yee to leverage his extensive understanding of engineering, design, social, and fintech to scale transformative products.
At Terraformation, Yee leads the Growth team, focused on finding ways to help foresters be more successful and to start more new forestry projects in order to accelerate the growth of the global regenerative forest restoration industry.
Yee holds degrees in engineering from UC Berkeley and Stanford.
About Terraformation
Founded: 2017 | HQ: United States | Funding: $35M | Industry: Climate Tech
Clara Chappaz
Clara was nominated Director of La Mission French Tech in November 2021. The French Tech Mission is the French administration in charge of supporting the French startup ecosystem growth, part of the Ministry of Economy & Finance.
Prior to joining the French Tech Mission, Clara held various positions in the startup ecosystem all around the world. From 2019 to 2021, she was the Chief Business Officer of Vestiaire Collective, the French unicorn peer-to-peer marketplace for premium and luxury pre-owned fashion. Before that, she led the international expansion of Lyst and was Director of Zalora.
While pursuing her MBA at Harvard Business School, Clara launched her own venture, Lullaby, a pre-owned marketplace for baby products. She also holds an MCs in Business Administration & Management from ESSEC Business School, in Paris.
Seth Bannon
Seth Bannon is a Founding Partner at Fifty Years. Seth has seeded a range of startups shaping the world for the better — companies like Upside Foods (culturing meat to eat), Solugen (engineering enzymes to produce carbon negative chemicals), and Astranis (small satellites to cover the Earth in Internet).
Seth is also the co-founder of Impact.Tech, a community of entrepreneurs combining purpose with profit, and was previously the founder & CEO of startup Amicus. A graduate of Y Combinator, Seth was named twice to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Social Entrepreneurship.
An avid chess player, Seth can occasionally be found in parks around the world attempting to hustle chess hustlers.
About Fifty Years
Founded: 2015 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed
Ted Persson
Ted is a Partner at EQT Ventures and is focused on investments in frontier tech, impact and purpose — and is passionate about everything product design, UX, storytelling and branding-related. His investments include Einride, Heart Aerospace, Seeqc, Sana Labs and others.
Prior to joining EQT Ventures, Ted co-founded a number of successful digital agencies, including Speedway Digital Army (1997), Abel & Baker (1999) and Great Works (2002). Great Works has been part of the North Alliance (NOA), Scandinavia’s leading communications and technology network, since 2014.
While at Great Works, Ted also co-founded Our/Vodka, a global vodka made by local people in cities around the world run by Pernod Ricard.
About EQT Ventures
Founded: 2016 | HQ: Stockholm | Stage: Seed-Growth
Articles:
Building a brand for your startup: The pitfalls to avoid and areas you need to prioritizeDecember 14, 2021Christoph Hornung
Christoph Hornung is Partner at Molten Ventures leading the DACH activities with focus on B2B marketplaces and enterprise businesses. Christoph works with the likes of Aiven, Coachhub and Agora.
Prior to Molten Ventures, Christoph was with Rocket Internet in Asia and Australia, where he helped build The Iconic and Lazada. Previously, Christoph worked as Investment manager at Seven Ventures, where he focused on consumer and e-commerce investments. Christoph is also the founder of a data company in the Sports and Entertainment industry. Christoph is from Germany and graduated from Bayes Business School in London.
About Molten Ventures
Founded: 2006 | HQ: United Kingdom |
Sara Kemppainen
Sara Kemppainen is Founder in Residence at Fifty Years. She is particularly interested in supporting founders that are solving complex problems traditionally overlooked by investors. She is currently exploring solutions for combatting reproductive inequality.
Before joining Fifty Years, Sara was the Head of Program at Slush. She is also the founder of Women in Innovation and Leadership, a professional network that promotes personal growth, collaboration, and gender equality.
About Fifty Years
Founded: 2015 | HQ: United States |
Mike Butcher
Mike Butcher (MBE) is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. He has been named one of the most influential journalists in European technology by Wired and is a regular broadcaster. He founded The Europas Awards, the non-profits Techfugees and TechVets.
Louise Herping Ellegaard
Louise Herping Ellegaard has taken the journey from startup to exit – without taking in investors. Today, she spends her time as a business angel. Her portfolio consists primarily of app-based startups, e.g., Tiimo and MyMonii.
Louise had no plans to enter the tech industry when she enrolled in History at the University of Southern Denmark at the turn of the millennium – but a few years later, she co-founded one of the first EdTech startups in Denmark, Clio Online. Clio digitized an entire generation with its digital learning resources and out-competed old players in the industry. Clio was a high-growth company with around two hundred employees in Denmark, Sweden, and Ukraine and a turnover of approximately 15 Mio EUR when the founders sold Clio to Bonnier AB in 2018.
Timmu Tõke
Timmu Tõke is Co-founder and CEO of Ready Player Me, a cross-game avatar platform used by 4000+ companies. They’ve raised $72m from a16z and others.
Timmu has been building avatar tech for 9 years, starting from hardware 3D scanners to custom-building avatar tech for top gaming companies.
About Ready Player Me
Founded: 2014 | HQ: Estonia | Funding: $72M | Industry: web3
Ryan Browne
Ryan is a correspondent for CNBC covering the technology industry in Europe. His main coverage areas include Big Tech regulation, fintech, and cryptocurrencies.
Marta Krupinska
Marta Krupinska is Head of Google for Startups UK, where she supports the most exciting startups using tech for social good and founded by diverse entrepreneurs.
She has previously co-founded three startups, with two exits. Most notably, Azimo which raised almost $90M in funding from top VC firms. She’s particularly interested in climate tech, sits on the Impact Board of Climate.vc, she’s Chair of Youth Business International, a global non for profit, and Acua Ocean, a cleantech hardware startup.
Marta’s received multiple awards including Forbes 30 Under 30 in Finance in 2016 and Evening Standard London’s Most Influential People in 2017 and in 2018.
She holds a MA in Organisational Psychology and a Management degree from Columbia Business School.
About Google
Founded: 1998 | HQ: United States | Funding: IPO | Industry: Internet
Paulo Rodriguez
Paulo is Head of International at Vanta, the market leader in automated security and compliance. He spent the first 10 years of his career in technical roles, mostly in the cybersecurity space.
His keen interest in business growth made him pivot from engineering to sales, and joined Google in 2011 to help build the presales team of the then nascent cloud business. He then spent 7 years at Dropbox, at first leading the international presales team and helping on the European expansion and post IPO helping sales and engineering teams be aligned, leading the go to market strategy for the B2B division.
Paulo is half Spanish, half Irish, so you could likely see him playing rugby and cooking tortilla de patatas in his spare time.
About Vanta
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United States | Funding: $163M | Industry: Enterprise Software
Thomas Cuvelier
Thomas is Partner at Alven, focusing on backing technical founders in software, devtools and financial services. Prior and current investments include companies such as Next Insurance, Stoïk, Grafbase and Swarmia.
Based in London, he is a graduate of The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvannia and has a Computer Science background.
About Alven
Founded: 2007 | HQ: France | Stage: Early
Sebastien Borget
Sébastien Borget is the Co-founder and COO of The Sandbox decentralized Metaverse, a virtual world where players can create, play, own, govern and monetize their experiences using NFTs & SAND, the main utility token of the platform. Sebastien also became the President of the Blockchain Game Alliance in 2020, a non-profit organization of 400 key members of the industry.
He was recently named #4 in the Top #100 2022 most influential people in crypto by CoinTelegraph. The Sandbox has been featured in TIME100 Top 100 most influential companies of 2022 by Times magazine.
About The Sandbox
Founded: 2018 | HQ: Canada | Funding: $95M | Industry: web3
Our Hall of Fame
Here’s who’s taken the stage of Slush over the years.
John Collison
John Collison is the President and Co-founder of Stripe, the software company that is expanding internet commerce by making it easy to process transactions from anywhere. John and his brother Patrick Collison started Stripe in 2010 while John was studying physics at Harvard. Their goal was to make accepting payments online simpler and more inclusive, after learning firsthand how difficult it was. Today, the 1500-person (and growing) Stripe team powers online businesses around the world.
About Stripe
Founded: 2010 | HQ: United States | Funding: €89B | Industry: Financial Services
Renate Nyborg
Renate Nyborg is CEO at Tinder. With over 15 years experience building mobile and subscription businesses, Renate joined Tinder in 2020 to lead its European operations. Now Renate is the first female CEO at Tinder.
Renate joined Tinder from Headspace, where she built and led its first international product and marketing team. She previously spent four years at Apple, where she led the App Store subscription business in Europe. Renate is also the founder of Pleo, a human-centric app design studio, and was the first-ever Global Director of Mobile at Edelman.
Renate is of Norwegian and Dutch origin and has worked in London, Silicon Valley, Stockholm, Paris, and Switzerland. She is a Philosophy graduate from the University of Cambridge. Renate currently lives in Europe with her husband, whom she met on Tinder and her three stepkids. She loves food, her piano, and music, and can often be found hiking or Nordic skiing around the Alps.
About Tinder
Founded: 2012 | HQ: United States | Funding: €682M | Industry: Social Media
Ev Williams
Ev is co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium. For the last twenty years, he has helped shape the modern internet.
Starting in January 1999, Ev co-founded Pyra Labs, which created the blog-publishing service Blogger (and coined the term “blogger”) and was acquired by Google in early 2003. He then co-founded Odeo and Obvious Corp, which gave birth to Twitter in 2006. Ev was Twitter’s co-founder, lead investor, and former CEO.
In 2011, Ev, along with Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, restarted Obvious Corp and began a mix of start-up investing and incubation. His investments have included Beyond Meat (IPO May 2019), Blue Bottle Coffee (acquired by Nestle), and others. Ev co-founded Obvious Ventures in 2014 with James Joaquin and Vishal Vasishth.
Ev started Medium, in 2012 and served as CEO until 2022. He is currently the Chairman of Medium.
Ev grew up on a farm in Clarks, Nebraska.
About Obvious Ventures
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Mar Hershenson
Mar is Pear’s Founding Managing Partner. As Pear’s co-founder and managing partner, Mar brings operational and technical expertise to the investment team.
After earning a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Mar developed a groundbreaking technique of optimizing the design of analog semiconductors. Since then, she has accrued over 13 years of founder experience, co-founding three startups in mobile/ecommerce, enterprise software and semiconductor industries and has registered 14 separate patents.
Mar is based in the Bay Area and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as a Top Innovator Under 35, named a Champion of Innovation by Fast Company, awarded the Digital Automation Conference’s Marie R. Pistil Achievement Award, and currently #29 on the Forbes Midas List.
About Pear VC
Founded: 2013 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Tony Xu
Tony is Co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the market-leading food delivery company in the United States. DoorDash is passionate about transforming local businesses and dedicated to enabling new ways of working, earning, and living. The goal of DoorDash is to build the largest local commerce marketplace and platform globally.
When Tony grew up he was inspired by local business owners like his mom: people who hustle daily to create as much a livelihood for their families as they do meaning in their community and life. By building the last-mile delivery infrastructure for local cities, DoorDash is bringing communities closer, one doorstep at a time.
DoorDash announced on November 10th that they will acquire the Finnish food delivery company Wolt and continue their mission to become the largest local commerce and marketplace platform globally.
About DoorDash
Founded: 2013 | HQ: United States | Funding: Post IPO | Industry: Delivery
April Koh
April Koh is Co-founder and CEO of Spring Health, a comprehensive mental health benefits platform for employers.
April has received honors from the American Psychiatric Association and has been featured in numerous news outlets such as Forbes 30 under 30. She is also a Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Fellow.
About Spring Health
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United States | Funding: €269M | Industry: Health
Doug Leone
Doug Leone is Partner at Sequoia Capital. He focuses on software investments aimed at the enterprise market. He is a Director of ActionIQ, Cyera, Island, Nubank, strongDM, Trade Republic, and Wiz. Doug was involved with Sequoia’s investments in numerous companies including Aruba (ARUN), Hyperion/Arbor Software (HYSL), Infinity International (SDS), International Network Services (ALU), Medallia (MDLA), MedExpress, Netezza (NZ), Plangrid (ADSK), Rackspace (RAX), RingCentral (RNG), and ServiceNow (NOW).
Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 1988, Doug held sales and sales management positions at Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Prime Computer. Doug holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, an MS in industrial engineering from Columbia University and an MS in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
About Sequoia
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Margrethe Vestager
Margrethe Vestager is EU Commissioner for Competition. She previously served as Minister for Economic Affairs and the Interior (2011-14) and Minister for Education (1998-2001) of Denmark, and as President of the ECOFIN Council during the Danish EU Presidency (2012). She was Political leader of the Danish Social Liberal Party (2007-14), and has worked for the Danish Ministry of Finance (1993-95). Ms. Vestager holds an MSc in Economics (University of Copenhagen).
Max Levchin
Max Levchin is Founder and CEO of Affirm, a financial services technology company, co-founder and Chairman of Glow, and co-founder and general partner at SciFi VC. All three companies were created and launched from his innovation lab, HVF. Max is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist and active investor in more than 100 startups.
Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal, where he served as Chief Technology Officer until its acquisition by eBay in 2002. In 2004, he founded Slide, which he sold to Google in 2010. Also in 2004, he helped start Yelp, where he was the first investor and Chairman of the Board from 2004 until 2015. He has served on several boards including Yahoo!, Yelp and Evernote.
About Affirm
Founded: 2012 | HQ: United States | Funding: IPO | Industry: Fintech
Julia Hartz
As Co-Founder and CEO of Eventbrite, Julia Hartz has helped drive the company from an innovative ticketing solution to a comprehensive event technology platform that today powers millions of events around the world. Since the company launched operations in 2006, Eventbrite has generated more than $10 billion in gross ticket sales.
Under Julia’s leadership, company culture and workplace performance has remained an integral part of Eventbrite, which now boasts over 1,000 employees in 11 countries across the globe. Eventbrite has been recognized multiple times on Fortune’s Best Workplaces lists, including the Bay Area (2017 and 2018), Women, and Millennials and was also named a best company to work for in San Francisco by the San Francisco Business Times the past nine years running. In the years since founding Eventbrite, Julia has been honored as one of Fortune’s 40 Under 40 business leaders (2015 & 2017), Inc.’s 35 under 35 (2014), Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs (2013), and has been profiled for her leadership and impact in top publications around the world.
Julia landed in Silicon Valley via Hollywood where she began her career as a development executive at MTV and FX Networks. In today’s digital age, Julia believes that real-life, human experiences lead to individual happiness and strong global communities. This belief continues to fuel her passion while running Eventbrite today.
About Eventbrite
Founded: 2006 | HQ: United States | Funding: €521 8M | Industry: Event Management
Emmett Shear
Emmett Shear is the CEO and Co-Founder of Twitch, an interactive live streaming service for content spanning gaming, entertainment, sports, music, and more. At any given moment, on average, more than 2.5 million people come together from all over the globe to interact around this distinct form of entertainment that is created by the shared interactions of millions.
Prior to launching Twitch in 2011, Mr. Shear co-founded live streaming service Justin.tv in 2007. He is also a part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator where he advises startups on product and strategy. Mr. Shear graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a degree in Computer Science.
About Twitch
Founded: 2011 | HQ: US | Industry: Streaming
Sonali De Rycker
Sonali De Rycker joined Accel in 2008 and invests in consumer internet, software and fintech businesses.
Sonali led Accel’s investments in Avito (acquired by Naspers), Lyst, Spotify (NYSE: SPOT), Wallapop, Calastone, Monzo, Shift Technology, Letgo (acquired by Naspers), Kry/Livi, Soldo, Hopin, and Sennder. Prior to Accel, Sonali was with Atlas Venture (now Accomplice). She also previously served on the board of Match.com (NASDAQ:MTCH).
Sonali is from Mumbai and graduated from Bryn Mawr College and Harvard Business School.
About Accel
Founded: 1983 | HQ: United States | Industry: Venture Capital
Tony Fadell
Tony is Principal at Future Shape, an investment and advisory firm coaching deep tech startups. Currently, Future Shape is coaching over 200+ startups innovating game-changing technologies.
Tony is an active investor and entrepreneur with a 30+ year history of founding companies and designing products that profoundly improve people’s lives.
He is the founder and former CEO of Nest, the company that pioneered the “Internet of Things.” Tony was the SVP of Apple’s iPod Division and led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. Throughout his career Tony has authored more than 300 patents. In May 2016, TIME named the Nest Learning Thermostat, the iPod and the iPhone as three of the “50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time.”
About Future Shape
Founded: 2014 | HQ: France | Stage: Series A–Series B
Edith Harbaugh
Edith Harbaugh is Co-founder and CEO of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform. LaunchDarkly serves 2,000+ global customers like IBM, Atlassian, and Intuit.
Edith has more than 15 years of experience in engineering, product, and marketing with both consumer and enterprise startups, including TripIt and Concur. She is co-host of “To Be Continuous”, a podcast on software trends.
She holds two patents in deployment. Edith earned a B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.
About LaunchDarkly
Founded: 2014 | HQ: United States | Funding: $330m | Industry: Software
Cal Henderson
Cal Henderson is the co-founder and CTO of Slack. He led the technical development of Flickr from its founding, pioneered the use of APIs, and created the basis for oAuth and oEmbed, now used by YouTube, Twitter, and may others. Cal has a Computer Science degree from the University of Central England.
About Slack
Launched: 2013 | HQ: United States | Funding: €1.31B | Industry: Business Communication
Luciana Lixandru
Luciana Lixandru is Partner at Sequoia, where she focuses on enterprise and consumer technology companies across Europe. Luciana works closely with companies like Xentral and Getir, and is passionate about helping founders at all stages to unlock their potential and think on a global scale.
Prior to becoming Sequoia’s first partner in Europe, Luciana worked at Accel for eight years, where she led investments in UiPath, Deliveroo, Miro and Hopin. She has also held positions at Summit Partners and Morgan Stanley.
Luciana holds a B.S. in Economics and Mathematics from Georgetown, and currently resides in London.
About Sequoia Capital
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed–Growth
Michael Moritz
Michael Moritz is a partner at Sequoia Capital, which he joined in 1986. He has helped Sequoia adjust to the profound changes in global technology and was one of the co-founders of its business in China and India as well as Sequoia Global Growth, a global technology fund; Sequoia Heritage, the firm’s single pool of globally diversified, long-term assets; and Sequoia Capital Global Equities, a public market fund. Michael has represented Sequoia on the boards of a number of companies including Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, LinkedIn, and Kayak; and younger businesses such as Instacart, Klarna and Stripe.
Prior to joining Sequoia, Michael co-founded Technologic Partners and was a correspondent for Time, where he was the San Francisco bureau chief. Michael graduated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1976 with a MA in History and is an Honorary Student of the College. Together with his wife, Harriet Heyman, he has made a series of major donations to educational causes. He received a knighthood from the Queen of England in 2013.
About Sequoia Capital
Founded: 1972 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed growth
Lila Ibrahim
Lila Ibrahim is COO at DeepMind, a London-based research community building safe AI systems. At DeepMind, Lila oversees both technology and organizational infrastructure including Engineering, Operations, and People.
Originally a microprocessor engineer, Lila has helped grow some of the world’s leading technology companies including Intel, venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and Coursera, where she was the first executive hire.
Lila is Co-founder and Chair of education technology non-profit Team4Tech. She has previously served on the Board of Gannett, helping it become the largest US print media company. Her exceptional impact has been recognized by a Henry Crown Fellowship from the Aspen Institute and the Anita Borg Institute Award for Social Impact.
About DeepMind
Founded: 2010 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: Acquired by Google | Industry: Enterprise Software
Daniel Ek
Daniel Ek is the Chairman and CEO of Spotify, where he sets the company’s overall vision. Daniel oversees Spotify’s business and product strategies and is responsible for building a progressive, forward looking global organization. Daniel was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden where he founded Spotify in 2006.
About Spotify
Founded: 2006 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: €1.96B | Industry: Audio Streaming & Media Services
Juliet de Baubigny
Juliet de Baubigny joined Kleiner Perkins in 2001 as one of Silicon Valley’s first venture capital partners focused on leveraging the firm’s broad network and deep relationships to help entrepreneurs recruit the best talent and build iconic companies. Juliet is sought after by entrepreneurs for her expansive global network and strategic guidance in the areas of human capital strategy including executive leadership, talent, recruiting, compensation, corporate governance and team building.
Throughout her career, Juliet has contributed to building high-performance management teams at companies including Google, Amazon, DocuSign, Bloom Energy, Shazam, Chegg and One Kings Lane. At Kleiner Perkins, Juliet has led the development of several key initiatives including Kleiner Perkins Women Leaders (KPWL), an initiative aimed at mentoring and developing the next generation of female entrepreneurs, and the Kleiner Perkins Fellows Program, a program that brings the most talented engineering, design, and product management students into Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies. Juliet is a frequent contributor to Fortune as a Fortune Most Powerful Women Insider. She also appears often on Bloomberg TV, where she is an expert on Silicon Valley’s “War for Talent” as well as on millennials in the workplace, women in technology, and developing cultures of innovation.
Before joining Kleiner Perkins, Juliet was a managing director of Ramsey Beirne Associates, a leading provider of executive searches to high-growth, leading-edge companies. Earlier in her career, Juliet was a partner at Heidrick & Struggles, a global executive search firm where she led CEOand VP level searches. Juliet began her career with Procter & Gamble in the United Kingdom.
Juliet earned her bachelor’s degree in business from Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, where she also serves as a member of the Advisory Board. Juliet is also a passionate champion of innovation in philanthropy, contributing to leading organizations such as Product (RED), acting as an advisory board member for the Global Citizen and CHIME FOR CHANGE Girls’ and Women’s Committee, serving as co-chair for both CHIMEHACK and CHIMEHACK II, and most recently, co-founding Beyond Type 1, an organization focused on finding a cure for Type 1 Diabetes.
About Bond
Founded: 2018 | HQ: United States
Sebastian Siemiatkowski
In 2005, Sebastian Siemiatkowski co-founded Klarna in order to provide safe and smooth online payments. He currently serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Over the past decade, he has overseen the company’s rapid growth across Europe and North America. Klarna is a now fully licensed bank with over 60mn consumers, 130,000 retail partners and 2500 employees. Sebastian has received multiple awards for his leadership and holds a master’s degree from the Stockholm School of Economics.
About Klarna
Founded: 2005 | HQ: Sweden | Funding: €3.47B | Industry: Fintech
Amrapali Gan
Amprapali Gan is CEO of OnlyFans. She oversees OnlyFans’ mission to revolutionize creator and fan connections by building the world’s safest social media platform where creators can maximize control over and monetize their content. Before taking over as CEO, Gan served as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer as OnlyFans experienced exponential growth. Gan is focused on leading OnlyFans and providing unparalleled opportunities for its community.
Gan’s background is with rapid growth companies and fast-moving consumer industries. She was Head of Brand Communications with unicorn Quest Nutrition, and worked for Red Bull Media House. More recently, she helped launch the first cannabis restaurant in the US as Vice President of Marketing.
She currently resides in Miami with her rescue dog, Fox.
About OnlyFans
Founded: 2016 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: – | Industry: Social Media
Justin Rosenstein
Justin Rosenstein is the co-founder of Asana, the fast-growing work tracking app for teams. Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly. He’s also a featured author in Wavelength, an online publication for teams who aspire to do great things together—through a mindful, purposeful approach.
Justin has driven the development of products that billions of people use daily.
At Facebook, he co-invented features such as the Like Button and Facebook Pages. At Google, he managed several products in the communication/collaboration division including Google Drive, and helped create GChat. At Asana, he’s helped build one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, most recently valued at $900M in Series D funding led by Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.
Justin majored in Math and got part way through a Master’s in Computer Science at Stanford. He is a devoted student of yoga, meditation, and cats.
About Asana
Founded: 2008 | HQ: United States | Funding: €428M | Industry: Software
Michele Romanow
Michele Romanow is Co-founder and President of Clearbanc: the fastest, most affordable way for founders to fund their business. Recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Michele is a prolific investor who plans to invest $1 billion into 2,000 businesses this year and will continue to fund 8X more female-founded companies than traditional VC firms. As a “Dragon” on CBC’s hit show Dragons’ Den (Canada’s Shark Tank), Michele started five companies before her 33rd birthday and exited two before her 30th. She previously co-founded SnapSaves (acquired by Groupon) and was also Co-founder of Buytopia.ca, which acquired ten competitors including Shop.ca and WagJag.
About Clearbanc
Founded: 2015 | HQ: Canada | Industry: Lending firm
Al Gore
Former Vice President Al Gore is a co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management. He is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a member of Apple Inc.’s board of directors. Gore is also chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a non-profit organization devoted to solving the climate crisis.
Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years.
He is the author of the best-sellers Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assault on Reason, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, and, most recently, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.
He is the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and a new film premiering in July 2017, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Gore is the co-recipient, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change”.
April Underwood
April Underwood is a founding partner of the angel investing collective #Angels and a member of the board of directors for Zillow Group. Until 2019, April was the Chief Product Officer at Slack Technologies, Inc., a cloud-based software company that builds professional collaboration tools. Prior to joining Slack, April was Director of Product at Twitter from 2010 to 2015. Previously, April has held product, partnerships, and engineering roles at Google, Travelocity, and Intel.
April holds a B.B.A. in Management Information Systems and Business Honors from The University of Texas at Austin (2001), and an M.B.A. from The University of California at Berkeley (2007). April has received numerous honors, including Fast Company’s “Most Creative People” (2015), Fortune’s “40 Under 40″ (2016), and the highest alumni honor for professional achievement from The University of Texas at Austin, the “Outstanding Young Texas Ex Award” (2019).
About #Angels
Founded: 2015 | HQ: United States | Industry: Venture capital
Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor, and technology fan. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, focused on impactful clean technology and information technology investments. Mr. Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. One of Mr. Khosla’s greatest passions is being a mentor to entrepreneurs, assisting entrepreneurs and helping them build technology based businesses. Mr. Khosla is driven by the desire to make positive impact through scaling alternative energy, achieving petroleum independence, and promoting a pragmatic approach to the environment. He is also passionate about Social Entrepreneurship. Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from IIT, New Delhi, a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
About Khosla Ventures
Founded: 2004 | HQ: United States | Industry: Venture capital
Rebecca Kaden
Rebecca Kaden is a Partner at Union Square Ventures. She began her career as a journalist and, prior to USV, was a Partner at Maveron, a consumer-focused early stage fund. Rebecca was born in New York City. She studied English and American Literature at Harvard and received her MBA from Stanford.
About Union Square Ventures
Founded: 2003 | HQ: United States | Industry: Venture capital
Guillaume Pousaz
Guillaume Pousaz, is Founder and CEO of Checkout.com, the leading payments technology firm he launched in 2012. Driven by the belief that financial complexity is a barrier to innovation—and, therefore, economic prosperity—he founded Checkout.com to cut through the complexity and empower businesses to change the world.
Checkout has since become one of the most valuable private fintech companies in the world. Its customers include Shein, Patreon, Moonpay, and Grab, as well as many of the largest fintech companies such as Wise, Tansfergo, and Curve.
About Checkout.com
Founded: 2012 | HQ: United Kingdom | Funding: €755M | Industry: Fintech
Sanna Marin
Sanna Marin is Prime Minister of Finland, appointed in December 2019. Sanna is the third female Prime Minister of Finland and the youngest prime minister in Finland’s history. Sanna will be taking the Slush stage with Eerika Savolainen, CEO of Slush.
Since 2006, Sanna has been actively engaged in politics. Sanna was elected to Parliament for her first run in 2015 and in August 2020, Sanna was elected as Chair of the Social Democratic Party. Previously, Sanna also served as Minister of Transport and Communications in Rinne Government. She is a member of the Tampere city council, which she chaired from 2013–2017.
Sanna lives in Tampere and Helsinki with her husband and their daughter. She holds a Master’s degree in Administration Sciences from the University of Tampere.
Cameron Adams
Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Canva, an online design and publishing tool which makes graphic design simple for everyone.
Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown to over 15 million users across 190 countries, with more than 1 billion designs created – that’s over 33 designs per second! Today Canva is growing from strength to strength, with over 600 team members working together on a mission to empower everyone to create beautiful designs.
Cameron is responsible for heading up the design and product teams, as well as playing a key role on future product directions and innovations.
Prior to joining Canva, Cameron ran his own successful design consultancy, before joining Google, where he found himself working closely with Lars and Jens Rasmussen (co-founders of Google Maps) to realise the design vision for Google Wave.
He then moved on to build email startup Fluent, before meeting Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht and deciding to bring Canva to the world.
With a strong design background, Cameron has also authored five books on web design and regularly speaks at conferences around the globe.
In his spare time, Cameron enjoys spending time with his two kids, playing music or DJing. And you’re also likely to find him relaxing with a nice cup of hot chocolate!
About Canva
Founded: 2012 | HQ: Australia | Valuation: $40B
Peter Fenton
Peter Fenton has served as one of the 5 equal General Partners at Benchmark Capital since 2006.
He currently serves on the boards of 12 private companies including Docker, Sorare, Airtable, CockroachDB, Clickhouse, Robocorp, and previously served on the boards of Twitter, Yelp, Elastic, Cloudera, Zendesk, New Relic, Zuora, Quip, Zenly, SpringSouce, and Jboss.
About Benchmark
Founded: 1995 | HQ: United States | Stage: Seed-Growth
Caterina Fake
Partner & Co-founder of Yes VC. Board member, Public Goods, Sundance. Formerly Co-founder of Flickr, Chairman of Etsy. Advocate for online community, social software, art, literature, myth and poetry.