Team

Alex Smola, CEO and co-founder of Boson AI, earned his physics degree from the University of Technology in Munich and his PhD from the University of Technology in Berlin. He held positions at various institutions including AT&T Research, the Institute of Software Engineering and Computer Architecture in Berlin, Australian National University, NICTA, Yahoo Research, Google Strategic Technologies, Marianas Labs, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Additionally, he spent 7 years at Amazon Web Services as VP and Distinguished Scientist before founding Boson AI. He has published over 250 papers and authored multiple books.

As the CTO of mobility start-up FINN, Andreas is an expert when it comes to building massive tech ventures in a mission-based manner. With his e-commerce experience from Westwing, he brings significant experience in software product development and engineering for Web and Native.

Andreas graduated from KIT with a Master of Science in Computer Science and has a strong background in Physics and Distributed Data Structures from IBM R&D.

As SVP of Sales at fintech unicorn Bill.com, Andy's team grew revenue from $30 million to $200 million and a successful IPO. Prior to Bill.com Andy founded and sold Caring.com, and is an angel investor and advisor to dozens of start-ups in the fintech and senior care space.

Annika is an HR Executive with a wide range of experience in Strategy Consulting focusing on Private Equity, HR Strategy & Tech Consulting and experience in operational HR Leadership in the scale-up, digital and tech ecosystem. As a Director People & Organization at ABOUT YOU and SCAYLE she has led the people function through phases of hypergrowth, pre- and post- IPO and throughout current macro-crisis phase. Since 2024, Annika is Chief People Officer (CHRO) at Statista, one of the leading data and business intelligence platforms.

Annika is based in Hamburg, holds an M.Sc in Psychology and an M.Sc in International Business and has studied in Bochum, Maastricht, Reutlingen and Reims.

As the co-founder of construction tech start-up Alasco and e-commerce company Stylight, Anselm is an expert when it comes to building organizations and setting up the right structure for a company’s most important asset - its people. Besides Alasco, Anselm is a founding investor in companies such as HR-tech venture Personio or health-tech venture TeleClinic.

Anselm graduated with a diploma in Media Informatics from LMU Munich and with an Honours Degree in Technology Management from the CDTM.

Axel Cateland is leading the banking team at French fintech unicorn Spendesk. In this role, he has created the team that built and operates the Payment Institution subsidiary of Spendesk: Spendesk Financial Services.
Prior to Spendesk, Axel led major initiatives at MasterCard, like the Google Pay and Samsung Pay projects, and the deployment of the different mobile wallets globally. He also managed a Digital Transformation team at the second largest bank in France, BPCE.

Chirag Patel is the VP and General Manager of Payments, Risk and Checkout at Etsy.

He is an international payments executive who has launched & grown consumer-facing and B2B payments products & services including alternative payment methods, prepaid, card payments, and remittance.

Before Etsy, Chirag worked for Paysafe, Santander Group and as Head of Payments, Europe and International Expansion at Amazon. Before Amazon, he held senior executive roles in payments and financial services for financial institutions including Softcard (acquired by Google), American Express Services Europe Limited and Merchant Services Group Int.

Damian undertook medical training at Cambridge & Oxford, specialising in neurology. He combined clinical work with academic leadership of a dementia-focused research group at Cambridge. With increasing focus on therapeutic application, he joined AstraZeneca Neuroscience and worked for six years developing small molecule, biologic and new modality therapies for dementias. Having caught the entrepreneurial bug at AZ, he has worked as Entrepreneur in Residence at Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital & the Dementia Discovery Fund. Damian’s scientific passion is to understand and then exploit for therapeutic benefit, the science of protein aggregation as it pertains to inflammation and neurodegeneration. Whether it be working for big biopharma or helping to launch ambitious new life-science and biotech start-ups, the goals are always the same: benefits for patients and returns for founders and investors.

Diego is the founder of Facily, the leading Social Commerce platform in Latin America. Diego focused on a number of areas, including product management, operations, corporate finance, growth and fundraising. Facily became one of the fastest growing online retailers of food in the world, successfully fundraising more than 500M USD.

Diego's previous roles include Vice-President for Facebook Latin America, and President for SAP Latin America. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and graduated in Accounting at Universidad de Belgrano.

Dustin was most recently the COO at Betterment, an online financial advisory platform. Joining as the VP of Engineering as employee number 23, then filling the CTO and COO roles over an 8 year period of time, he has expertise in product and technology leadership and scaling, general company building, and launching new lines of business alongside existing ones.

He graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a degree in Biomedical Engineering.

As Co-founder and COO, Himanshu spends his time leading diverse strategic, operational, functional, company building and scaling roles within WeRize, a full-stack growth stage profitable FinTech platform based out of India. One of his key responsibilities is to develop Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning based credit and risk underwriting models for businesses and salaried employees. Those AI / ML models have underwritten billions of worth of loans over the last few years.

Himanshu graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and completed his MSc from Delft University (Netherlands) and Chalmers University (Sweden). He is also an Erasmus Mundus Scholar.

Dr. Christopher Oster is the founder and former CEO of CLARK which sells insurance products to consumers via a mobile application and is one of the largest insurance distributors in Europe. The company partners with 250 insurance carriers as product providers, services 2 million customers across five countries, and is backed by top tier international investors valuing the company at over EUR 1bn, making it one of the few insuretech unicorns in Europe.

Prior to founding CLARK, he served as COO of Wimdu, a vacation rental marketplace, and as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group.

Dr. Ignacio Pérez Hallerbach is the Global Head of Partners & Platform at NavVis, where he is globally responsible for strategic partnerships and the partner and platform ecosystem. Ignacio is also a Digital Strategy Advisor for Ashoka, working on the concept of the "Impact Brain", and a Cambridge Digital Innovation Fellow, focusing on Digital Twins & AI. Previously, he worked at McKinsey & Company where he led digital transformation projects for large global corporations and strategy studies in the high-tech sector.

Ignacio holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and Masters degrees from the University of Cambridge, the University of Warwick and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.

As the CEO and cofounder of Prometa.AI, Gorkem helps companies in leveraging analytics capabilities for realizing impactful, sustainable business model transformations.  Prometa solutions include hyperpersonalized marketing, optimizing marketing spend effectiveness, improving transactional fraud management, and use of virtual agents in Human resources management.  Prior to Prometa, Gorkem was the Group CTO at ING, and the first Chief Analytics Officer of ING between 2017 and 2020.  Gorkem also acted as the member of European Commissions advisory committee for EU AI Act, representing the banking sector.  Prior to ING, Gorkem worked for 12 years at McKinsey, leading large digital transformations across Europe and the Middle East

Gorkem has a degree in Computer Engineering from Bogazici University, and in Management from TSM Business School in University of Twente.

A global tech executive whose career spans advisory work for HSBC, Tesla and News Corp, Jean-Marie is a former founder, who sold his business in 2010 before taking on various roles as CTO and Managing Director of various entities.

Today, Jean-Marie is a director of engineering at Facebook, and helps Picus on areas such as cloud infrastructure, devOps, and data products.

Kerstin is the Managing Partner of L2 Point, an investment firm focused on structured financing solutions for growth companies. Prior to founding L2 Point, Kerstin led the structured equity strategy for Sixth Street Partners, a $50+ billion special situations platform. Over the course of her career, Kerstin has worked across the capital structure and across the company lifecycle, from early stage to IPO. Kerstin started her career in the Special Situations Group at Goldman Sachs, where she was a founding member of the Private Capital Investing group.

Over 15 years in payment, fintech, e-commerce & loyalty make Kilian an expert when it comes to product, strategy and business development issues. After being Director Solutions for the Swiss Post, he joined RatePay as CPO and was global CPO of PAYMILL until 2014. Following his role as Global EVP Productmanagement at Wirecard, Kilian is now responsible for the business unit merchant solutions at Deutsche Bank. Kilian also works as an advisor for banks, PSPs, risk providers & merchants, invests in startups as a business angel and acts as an advisor for start-ups in different networks.

Kilian completed the Advanced Management Program at University of St. Gallen and holds an MBA in Business Integration from Julius Maximilian University Würzburg.

Marie is an PR & Comms executive with more than 20 years of experience in Public Relations, and a decade-long experience in the tech ecosystem working for top tier international VC firms, as a Partner and other leadership roles. Marie is the co-founder and co-CEO of Cosmyc Partners, a consulting firm focusing on all things Comms, PR, IR and branding for VCs, startups and tech companies.

Based in Berlin, Marie has worked with some of the most renowned European founders, tech unicorns and market leaders. Marie studied Business and Communications, graduated from Freie Universität Berlin and Sciences Po Paris.

Miguel is a Senior Business Advisor on Energy & Digital Transition at Boston Consulting Group, where he actively engages in utilities, energy networks, transition, and digital topics. Prior to this role, Miguel gathered 25 years of experience at SAP, where he served as the Head of the Industry Business Unit (IBU) Utilities, holding global executive accountability for shaping and implementing SAP's strategy for the utilities sector.

Miguel holds an Engineering degree from Instituto Superior Técnico and recently completed an executive program at INSEAD. Additionally, he holds an MBA from Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics.

Olaf has more than 25 years of C-level experience in the Automation Industry (industrial robots, CNC controls, production machinery), including FANUC (Japan & Europe) and MIDEA / KUKA (China) where he was responsible for driving industrial, logistics, mobile and collaborative robotics business by organic growth, strategic alliances, and M&A.

In 2019, Olaf co-founded Coboworx, set out to disrupt the market by providing affordable “Do-It-Yourself” robot technology for every SME fuelled by a unique digital and E2E customer experience.

As the VP Sales at HR-tech unicorn Personio, Oliver is an expert when it comes to sales and marketing in the B2B space. His expertise lies in defining sales strategies, scaling sales organizations, and optimizing sales funnels throughout the entire customer sales journey. Throughout his career in B2B SaaS he has scaled GTM organizations targeting SME’s as well as enterprise customers.

Philipp is an expert in product management, being VP product at log-tech unicorn forto most recently. Philipp's expertise is on scaling technology & tech-teams, driving product strategy and developing B2B software effectively. He is passionate about talent development. Previous to forto Philipp founded Amoviom, organizing luxury honeymoons in Europe for Chinese travellers and worked as a consultant.

Philipp holds a Master of Science in strategic management from the Rotterdam School of Management and a Bachelor from the university of Mannheim.

Riccardo Basile is currently CEO and co-founder of AGORA, a social commerce platform that aims to disrupt the beauty industry. Prior to this, he spent six years in South-East Asia where he co-founded the Lazada Group, the leading commerce in the region, acquired by the Alibaba Group in 2016. At Lazada, Riccardo had several leadership roles, namely Chief Mobile Officer, Chief Commercial Officer (in charge of category management, brand/merchant relations and retail business) and Chief Executive Officer of Lazada Thailand.

Riccardo holds a Bachelor Degree of Economics from Bocconi University and an MBA Degree from the NYU-Stern School of Business in New York City.

Ron has in-depth experience at high-growth tech companies in SaaS, social networking, ecommerce, and fintech. He led pre-IPO engineering teams at Twitter, Salesforce, and BigCommerce. Most recently he was VP Engineering at Carta, where he was responsible for their flagship product: Equity Plan Management.

Ron has a Master of Science from the University of Texas at Arlington, a Bachelor of Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also an advisor and investor in early-stage startups.

As the co-founder and CTO of construction tech start-up Alasco and e-commerce company Stylight, Sebastian has a proven track record in building tech ventures. He is an expert when it comes to software product development and tech engineering. In addition to his position at Alasco, Sebastian is chairman at deep-learning startup Luminovo and a former board member at HR-tech start-up Personio.

Sebastian graduated from Stanford University with a Master of Science in Computer Science, with a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, and with an Honours Degree in Technology Management from the CDTM.

In his role as Chief Security Officer Central Europe at Palo Alto Networks, Sergej develops the regional cybersecurity strategy and is overseeing cybersecurity operations and threat intelligence across the region. Prior to this, he worked at Deutsche Bank for over nine years, where he built and led international cyber defense & investigations teams focusing on cybercrime, malware, supply chain, data loss, insider threat, and fraud.

Sergej studied at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, where he is now an executive lecturer for cybersecurity.