Israel Innovation Authority

Founders

Unai Sanchez

CTO and co-founder of HumanITcare

Sanchez is a computer and data science expert with a master’s degree in innovation and research in informatics with specialization in advanced computing from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona (UPC). He also holds multiple certifications from the John Hopkins University School of Education. Sanchez is currently CTO and co-founder of HumanITcare, a telemedicine platform for remote patient monitoring using real-world data and AI to treat patients affected by chronic diseases and also to accelerate drug development and clinical trials. Prior to HumanITcare, Sanchez worked as Data Scientist in a joint-project between the Spanish insurance company Catalana Occidente and technology consultancy Raona to develop a sales collaborative platform. He has also worked on projects in software development, mobile apps, server and hardware as well as prototyping for IoT devices in the fields of education, health and wellness.

Founders

Paula Sampaio

CSO and co-founder of iLoF

Paula Sampaio is a biochemist who completed a PhD in biomedical sciences at the University of Porto in 1998. She worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the IMBC INEB Associate Laboratory for four years. In 2002, she was promoted to the role of head of advanced light microscopy and stayed there until 2015. Sampaio is now the national coordinator for Portuguese bioimage platform PPBI and the head of advanced light microscopy at the Institute of Research and Innovation of the University of Porto (i3S).In November 2019, she joined iLoF as CSO and co-founder. iLoF gets technical support from i3S at the R&D center in Porto. The medtech startup focuses on personalized medicine through the use of AI and photonics to create optical fingerprints in a cloud-based library to gather and manages disease biomarkers and biological profiles.

Investors

EIT Food

Launched in 2015 in Brussels, EIT Food was established by the not-for-profit European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) and funded by the European Union as an investor and accelerator. Its aim is to support mainly European startups in foodtech areas ranging from traceability to alternative proteins, with sustainability a key deciding factor in the startups it backs from pre-seed to Series-B level. The organization currently has 55 startups in its portfolio, which raised more than €91m in investments in 2020. Its most recent investments include 700,000 Swiss francs (€637,000) in the seed round in January 2021 of Swiss biotech SwissDeCode, a company that applies DNA testing to food traceability. Another investment was the December 2020 €900,000 seed round of Spanish compostable-packaging tech Food Sourcing Specialists.

• Belgium

Founders

Javier Colmenarejo

Co-founder, CEO of Sea Water Analytics

Javier Colmenarejo is the Spanish co-founder and CEO of Sea Water Analytics, a tourism-focused data aggregator with user app to measure seawater quality. The technology has been in development since 2017, though the company was formally launched in Madrid in April 2020. He has spent more than 15 years as a civil engineer, working in hydraulic and water treatment systems. He  currently works on smart city initiatives on the Adapting Cities to Change program in Madrid and he lectures in Big Data, IoT, Data Services and Business in two Madrid institutions. He works part-time at Sea Water Analytics' technical partner Talentum as a blockchain and IoT innovation manager.Colmenarejo holds four master's degrees: in Big Data and Business Analytics from Madrid's School of Industrial Organization (EIO); in Data Science and IoT from Madrid Institute of Things Institute; in Business Administration from The Power MBA; and in civil engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

Founders

Abdoulaye Maiga

CTO, co-founder of Teliman

Abdoulaye Maiga is CTO and co-founder at Teliman, Mali’s first on-demand mobility startup and one of francophone Africa’s first, where he has worked since its launch in 2018.  Before that, he was CTO and co-founder at French real estate startup Wemblee where he still works part-time from Mali, initially simultaneously working as a salesforce administrator and developer in chemical company SEPPIC.Maiga previously worked at Rakuten in Tokyo for one year as a research and development VR scientist and also completed a stint at Accenture in Paris as an information system consultant. He also completed short stints in engineering at BCS Group in New Zealand and in business development at EATOPS in the Netherlands. The Malian national obtained two master’s degrees in innovation economics from Universite Paris-Saclay (2017) and in computer science from Keio University in Tokyo (2015), after winning scholarships to study overseas. 

Founders

María Eugenia García

CEO of MenteLista

María Eugenia García founded her first business in 2013, dedicated to the import and export of education materials. After a stint in Hong Kong, she closed the business and focused on developing the MenteLista platform to follow her passion for neuroscience and how it can be used to enhance children's learning.She had previously managed the Andalusian Center of Technology and Innovation (CITIC) for 11 years. She had also worked as a senior consultant at BAE Systems. She has a computer science degree from Salamanca Pontifical University and a master's in Business Administration from San Telmo International Institute.

Founders

Pierre-Yves Paslier

Co-CEO and Co-founder of Notpla (formerly Skipping Rocks Lab)

Currently based in London, French national Pierre Yves Paslier completed a master’s in materials science and engineering from INSA in Lyon in 2010. In 2012, he went on to complete a master’s in industrial and product design at the Royal College of Art in London. He also studied innovation design engineering at Imperial College.After graduating in 2014, Paslier and university alumnus Rodrigo García González co-founded Skipping Rocks Lab that was pivoted as Notpla in 2019. Both are co-CEOs of the UK-based startup that develops compostable and edible packaging material made of seaweed and other plants.Before becoming an entrepreneur, Paslier worked as a packaging engineer for L’Oréal from 2010 to 2012. He has been invited to speak at TEDx conferences in Athens and Warwick to share his experience and innovative projects in packaging and product design. In 2020, he became an industrial advisory board member at Imperial College London Dyson School of Design Engineering. In 2019, he also became a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub.

Founders

Sixto Arias

CEO and co-founder of Capaball

Sixto Arias is a veteran entrepreneur based in Madrid. He graduated with a BA Communications degree from Complutense University in 1992.In 2001, he started his first venture as co-founder of Movilisto that was sold to London-based mobile value-added services group Itouch Plc in 2004. In 2007, he founded media planner Mobext that was sold to Havas Media six years later.He is an angel investor focusing on projects relating to AI, education, IoT and mobile. He was the managing partner of Conector Startup Accelerator in Madrid for over two years. He is also the founder of the Mobile Marketing Association in Spain.Arias currently runs two startups: digital innovation agency Made in Mobile that he founded in 2014 and edtech Capaball co-founded in 2018. As a digital marketing specialist and experienced lecturer, he also works as a professor at ESCP Europe in Madrid and University of Sergio Arboleda in Colombia.

Founders

Christopher Carstens

CTO and co-founder of Carbo Culture

US native Christopher Carstens graduated in mechanical engineering in 2002 at the University of California, Berkeley. He started his career as a technology analyst at The Spark Group in San Francisco.In 2004, the engineer co-founded Solid Gas Technologies to build a methane hydrate production system. Carstens also founded Homeland Fuels to construct a bioreactor using ethanol. He exited both companies in 2006 and went to work at World Waste Technologies in California as project manager and engineer. In 2012, he started working at Graphene Technologies as R&D engineer.In 2013, he joined an innovation accelerator program at Singularity University where he met Finnish participant Henrietta Moon. They co-founded Finnish startup Carbo Culture in 2016 with Carstens as CTO based at the California plant.The serial entrepreneur and inventor also founded Hydrate Dynamics as CTO in 2015 to develop gas storage and transportation facilities using clathrate hydrates technology. In 2018, he was appointed by the US Department of Energy to be a member of the Methane Hydrate Advisory Committee until January 2020.

Founders

Ryan Mario Yasin

CEO and founder of Petit Pli

Ryan Mario Yasin is an engineer, designer and sustainable fashion entrepreneur based in London. Originally from Reykjavik, Iceland, Yasin graduated in aeronautical engineering at Imperial College London and has a master’s in global innovation design from the Royal College of Art.  As a 23-year-old design student, Yasin founded materials technology startup Petit Pli, and developed the design for the company’s first product, a pleated garment that could expand up to seven sizes to last children through their first few years of life. Petit Pli now makes expandable pleated clothes for children and adults, using a fabric derived from recycled plastic and a structure inspired by origami, architecture and space satellites. Petit Pli products have won a number of prestigious awards, such as the UK James Dyson Award, Time Magazine’s best invention of 2020 and the Red Dot Product Design Award.Yasin has a strong interest in photography and in the interplay between art and engineering. In 2020, Yasin was included by Forbes in its 30 Under 30 list for Europe.

Founders

Pia Henrietta Moon

CEO and co-founder of Carbo Culture

Finnish native Pia Henrietta Moon, has been a scout leader since 2003. Her first job was in event management and tourism operations in India for Sunset Getaways & Insta tourism in 2007. While studying at the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, she met American engineer Christopher Carstens in 2013 at a global solutions innovation program organized by Singularity University in California. She left university in 2014 and co-founded Carbo Culture as CEO in 2016 with Carstens as CTO.In 2016, Moon also joined the electronics company Yleiselektroniikka as a board member, the youngest person in Finland to hold such a position in a listed company. Moon also founded edtech startup Mehackit in 2013 and became its chairwoman for four years.  She exited both companies in 2018 to focus on running Carbo Culture.While at university, Moon also worked for over two years at Rails Girls, a not-for-profit for women in tech. In Finland, she joined the student entrepreneurship society in 2011 and completed an internship in 2010 at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. In 2015, she joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers youth community initiative in Helsinki.

Founders

Daan Luining

Co-founder, CTO of Meatable

Daan Luining is the Dutch co-founder and CTO at cell-based meat startup Meatable, the first to claim a highly scalable culture technology, where he has worked since 2018.  He is also a research director at the Cellular Agriculture Society in Leiden, a joint initiative for cell-based startups to share knowledge and to collaborate on projects to further scale the sector. Luining is also on the board of directors at the not-for-profit Cultured Meat Foundation that promotes sector innovation. His past posts have all been in the area of research, either as a researcher or a technician, and at the same time as completing studies. His last job was as a research strategist at New York-based New Harvest, a callular food rsearch funding body, where he worked for a year and met Dr. Kotter, the inventor of Meatable’s cellular technology. His research positions from 2009–15 were in the area of cell culture,  mass spectrometry and DNA sequencing at the Maastricht University, University Medical Center Amsterdam, Utrecht University and Leiden University. Luining holds a master’s in biological sciences from Leiden University in the Netherlands. 

Investors

Zhongguancun Longmen Investment

Investing in hi-tech IT, advanced manufacturing and biotechnology sectors – key pillars of China’s innovation-focused economy since 2017 – the Beijing government-backed Beijing Zhongguancun Longmen Investment manages about RMB 10bn via its first fund of the same name. The firm is founded and led by Xu Jinghong, former Chairman of Tsinghua Holdings, the investment and tech/R&D transfer arm of China’s most prestigious science and research university, whose R&D capacity was ranked in the third place of China’s top 500 enterprises in 2018. The LPs of the fund include social security funds, Beijing’s municipal government and the Haidian District government. Its portfolio enterprises are generally ranked in the top three of their respective industries. Among them, Qi An Xin Technology, which is listed in Shanghai and one of China’s biggest cybersecurity companies; Joy Wing Mao, one of China’s major fruits supply chain companies. In October of 2020, it invested RMB 100m into Beijing Immunochina Pharmaceutical, which develops innovative gene and cell therapies for curing malignant tumors. Longmen also provides mentoring and other expertise and support to its investee startups, especially those that plan to seek public listing.

• China

Founders

Dr. Mark Kotter

Co-founder of Meatable

Mark Kotter is the Austrian co-founder at Dutch cell-based meat startup Meatable, the first to use pluripotent stem cells and claim a highly scalable culture technology, which was developed by Kotter prior to founding the startup in 2018. He is also founder at his biotech startup, bit.bio, which is based in Cambridge, UK, since 2016, where he applies his cellular technological innovation to human stem cell research and has raised investments totaling $42m. His main full-time position is at the University of Cambridge, where he has worked since 2009. He has spent more than five years as a clinician-scientist in stem cell research and was previously a lecturer in neurosurgery. Kotter also lectures at Paris Descartes University and is a team leader at the UK’s National Institute for Health Research’s Brain Injury MedTech Co-operative. He also founded Myelopathy.org to raise awareness of cervical myelopathy. His past positions were as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine for one year, and for two years spent at the Medical University of Vienna. Kotter holds two doctorates; one in philosophy from the University of Cambridge and the other in medicine from the University of Graz in Austria. Kotter also holds a master’s in philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

Founders

Mehak Mumtaz

COO and co-founder of iLoF

Mehak Mumtaz grew up in Pakistan and decided to study biochemistry when she saw her brother suffering from an unknown learning disability. Her parents, both medical doctors, could not get an accurate diagnosis for their son.  In her search to understand the molecular mechanisms behind diseases, she applied to study at the University of Oxford. In 2008, she was granted the Reach Oxford Scholarship and graduated with a master’s in biochemistry in 2012. In 2015, the St Hilda’s alumna worked as an undergraduate tutor at Oxford while completing a PhD in pathology, specializing in oncology and cancer biology.In 2018, she worked on a rare cancer project as EIT Health Business Innovation fellow for a year. She left academia and joined a three-month bioentrepreneur bootcamp in Munich and a one-month Lev8 Woman Program at her alma mater’s Oxford Foundry. She joined EY-Parthenon in London as a strategy consultant in April 2019.In 2019, Mumtaz also met the iLoF co-founding team at the EIT Health Wild Card venture-building program. iLoF is a medtech startup that focuses on personalized medicine through the use of AI and photonics to create optical fingerprints in a cloud-based library to gather and manages disease biomarkers and biological profiles.She joined iLoF as COO and co-founder in December 2019 and left her full-time consultancy role at EY in March 2020.