Founder Institute

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Founded in 2018, Tilia Impact Ventures is the first social impact fund in the Czech Republic. Co-founding partner Silke Horáková has worked in private equity and is also a co-owner of Albatross Media. Co-founding partner Petr Vítek has worked for nine years as a Deloitte consultant. He is also co-founder of Impact Hub in Prague, Brno and Ostrava. Both have experience working in the social enterprise sector.  About 23 investors have contributed to the impact fund. Tilia plans to have 10 local social impact companies in its portfolio, each with an expected investment life of five to seven years. The VC has invested in four companies to date: smart vending SaaS platform MIWA Technologies, data-mining startup Datlab, ready-made spectacles supplier DOT glasses and waste-to-resource marketplace Cyrkl.

Founded in 2003, Bezos Expeditions is a family investment office based in Mercer Island in the US. The firm was originally set up to manage the personal investments of Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.The Bezos fund owns the Washington Post, Blue Origin space projects and the Bezos family foundation. The fund has also backed early tech startups like Twitter, Airbnb and Uber. Today, Bezos Expeditions also supports non-profit projects. In 2013, it helped to recover parts of two engines from the Atlantic Ocean that were later identified as belonging to Apollo 11, the first space mission that successfully landed humans on the moon in 1969. The crew of the ship Seabed Worker spent three weeks at sea pulling up pieces of the Apollo F1 engines.

London-based Sustainability Ventures is one of the UK’s leading early-stage investors in Cleantech. It comprises a group of successful entrepreneurs with a track record in building and investing in high-growth start-ups. It has created Europe’s largest ecosystem for cleantech and sustainability startups, as a business founder and investor, provider of accelerator and support services and provider of shared workspaces. Active since 2011, Sustainability Ventures has raised £250m in total equity funds to date. Its focus is on agritech and food, building technology, circular economy, future energy and mobility. It has established 10 companies, invested in 30 and supported the development of over 250 more enterprises as of 2021 and aims to develop 1,000 sustainable startups by 2025.  

Jason Stockwood is the chairman and co-owner of Grimsby Town Football Club. The Grimsby working-class lad managed to get a scholarship to study in the US, worked at Trailfinders and Lastminute.com in the 1990s. He was a non-executive director of Skyscanner and international MD at Travelocity Business and also at Match.com. In 2010, he became the CEO and vice-chair of online insurance company, Simply Business, that was sold for £400m in 2017.The co-founder of VC 53° has also invested in British startups across market segments, including the Series B investment round of food-sharing app OLIO in September 2021 and August 2020 financing of carbon tracking platform for banks and investors CoGo UK.

Rothenberg Ventures is a Silicon Valley VC, also previously known as Frontier Technology Venture Capital. Based in San Francisco, the VC was also a spin-off from River Ecosystem. Founded with seed capital of $5m raised by Mike Rothenberg in 2012, the firm has invested in more than 100 startups in VR/AR, AI, machine learning, drones, robotics and space. In 2016, the VC and its founder were investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2018, Rothenberg himself and the VC were charged with fraud. Rothenberg has resigned from the firm and agreed to be barred from the brokerage and investment advisory business for five years. The SEC is seeking $18.8m disgorgement penalties and $9m civil penalty plus $3.7m pre-judgement interest.

Google co-founder Larry Page is controlling shareholder of Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company. As of June 2021, Page’s net worth was $106.2bn, making him the sixth richest person in the world. To date, he has made disclosed investments in five tech companies. The two most recent were both in 2016: an undisclosed quantum of investment in US-based electric personal aircraft startup Kitty Hawk Corporation, as well as participation in space mining company Planetary Resources’ $21m Series A round. 

Owen van Natta was formerly COO of Facebook and CEO of MySpace, and also previously held senior positions in Amazon and Zynga. He is an angel investor, founder of 415 LLC as well as a founding partner of tech-focused VC firm Prefix Capital, and has invested in a number of startups to date. His disclosed investments include participation in the March 2017 $800,000 seed round of Irish water regulatory platform SwiftComply and the November 2015 undisclosed funding round of US-based unicorn Diamond Foundry, the first certified carbon-neutral lab-produced diamond manufacturer. No pic on SM

David Spector is the president and co-founder of the online lingerie company ThirdLove. A former partner at Sequioa Capital, he is a prolific angel investor with investments in around 30 startups across different geographies and market segments.  Spector’s most recent disclosed investments are from 2020 and include participation in the $4.6m seed round of US fintech provider CapChase and in the $70m Series C round of US mobile marketing company Attentive. 

Nour Akbaraly completed a master’s in engineering at Centrale Lille and also a master’s in applied mathematics at Lille University in 2010. In 2011, Akbaraly joined industrial manufacturing consultancy firm Avencore as a consultant in Paris.The avid photographer and F&B enthusiast also went to various tea-tasting classes at a tea specialist college until 2015. Passionate about gastronomy, he began exploring alt-protein alternatives to address the environmental and ethical challenges of food supply chains.In 2016, he went on an engineering training course for agronomy and agri-food at AgroSup Dijon, the National Institute of Agronomic, Food and Environmental Sciences.A year later, he founded Les Noveaux Affineurs, a startup specializing in plant-based alternatives to cheese. His ambition is to create a new range of French gastronomic vegan cheese products for consumers in France and overseas.Since 2010, Akbaraly is also a volunteer at the Action Contre la Faim, a Paris-based international NGO founded in 1979. The “Action Against Hunger” projects include running awareness campaigns on food security issues in colleges and schools in France and other countries like India and Sudan.

Pedro Lourenço is the Portuguese co-founder and CEO of Consumers Trust, the company behind consumer complaints platform Portal da Queixa, founded in 2009. Since 2019, he has also been European Consumer Rights Ambassador at the European Commission, a position he was selected for thanks to his work at Consumers Trust. He is also co-founder and CEO at digital agency Megaklique Multimedia, and until 2015 was a co-founder of creative and innovation association Mexe-te. He holds a degree in Graphic Design, lives in Porto and is married to Consumers Trust co-founder Sónia Lage Lourenço.

Nitesh Kadyan (also known as Nitesh Kumar) is a computer scientist, robotics engineer, inventor, maker and hacker. He was one of the three co-founders of Graviky Labs, a startup producing ink from captured carbon emissions. He worked at Graviky Labs from 2016–2018, during which he led its hardware development and prototyping. Currently, he works as a senior creative technologist at Lowe's Innovation Labs India.Kadyan holds a degree in computer science from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore and did a research stint on AI and robotics at Freie University, Berlin. His background includes expertise in machine learning and embedded systems. Kadyan’s past projects include self-driving model cars, autonomous smart wheelchairs, an augmented reality interface for laser cutting, as well as machines that sketch and draw. He also founded a startup that does 3D printing in nearly any material, from plastic and metallic clay to chocolate, playdoh and fabric, and which was incubated at MIT Global Startup Labs 2014.Kadyan was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2016. He is a recipient of the Campus Diaries 25 Under 25 award, and is a two-time speaker at TEDx.

Co-founder of Maimai.

A co-founder of Dorabot, Zhou Dandan has more than 10 years experience in software development. The former chief software engineer of video game maker Gameloft met fellow Dorabot co-founder Zhao Hao at Chaihuo Makerspace, Shenzhen’s first and leading maker/hackerspace. 

Co-founder and CMO of Maimai.

Co-founder of Souban and Creams.

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