European Social Innovation Competition

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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.

Jeremy Scholz is CTO and co-founder at US-based unicorn Diamond Foundry, the first certified carbon-neutral lab-produced diamond manufacturer. He has worked there since 2012, leading up to the company’s official establishment. Prior to this, Scholz co-founded startup consultancy Alicanto in 2011 and briefly worked at startup YottaQ as director of engineering. From 2006–2011, Scholz worked as an engineer and manager at the $640m solar power startup Nanosolar. Silicon Valley's first solar power technology startup financed by American venture capital, the firm was the highest-valued firm in the industry at the time. When Nanosolar closed due to cheaper competition from China, much of its technical expertise and experience were diverted to set up Diamond Foundry. Scholz graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering and started his career working at Boeing as a mechanical engineer from 2005–2006. 

Beyond Investing is a Geneva-based firm investing in early-stage venture capital and equity growth startups mainly in European developed markets. With average investments of €200,000, the firm’s core investment strategy focuses on sustainability with an investment period lasting 5–10 years.The impact investor targets innovative startups involved in vegan, cruelty-free and plant-based alternatives; biotechnologies, foodtech, new materials, clothing and lifestyle sectors. Successful portfolio foodtechs include Mosa Meat, BlueNalu and Shiok Meats.With a team of vegan finance professionals in the US and Europe, Beyond Investing listed the first US Vegan Climate ETF (VEGN) on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2019. The ETF tracks Beyond Investing’s US Vegan Climate Index which covers an index of 495 of the largest-capitalization companies in the US stock market. The ethical investment option aims to exclude stocks in companies with activities that are not aligned with its vegan-themed, cruelty-free and fossil-fuel-free investing ethos.

Set up in 2002 by Patrice Hoppenot 15 years after he founded European investment fund BC Partners, Investisseurs & Partenaires (I&P) is an impact investor seeking to help SMEs prosper in Africa and create sustainable jobs and income there. With about €210m raised to date, I&P finances SMEs, startups and regional investment funds in Africa through equity participation and loans, as well as through microfinance institutions. Its I&P Acceleration Technologies focuses on digital startups with €2.5m of funding to be invested in 10–15 startups in 2020–2023. To date, I&P has supported more than 100 capital-funded companies and 20 companies benefiting from subsidized acceleration programs. I&P has about 100 staff based in Paris, Washington D.C. and in seven African offices (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Madagascar, Niger and Senegal).

Founded in London in 1998, Kreos Capital is a pioneer growth debt provider. Kreos has completed over 630 deals worth over €3bn in pan-European countries and Israel. The Kreos Capital Group of companies and various funds are regulated by the Jersey Financial Services Commission.Kreos currently has 102 companies in its portfolio and has managed over 200 exits. Investee Riskified, an Israeli e-commerce fraud protection company, was listed on the NYSE at a $3.3bn valuation in August 2021. Kreos also joined recent investments in 2021 including the $54m Series B round of Austrian refurbished electronics goods marketplace Refurbed and the €9.5m round of Berlin-based HRtech expertlead.

Born in 1973, Li graduated from the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China in 1997. After graduating, he worked as an IT journalist for China Youth Daily, where he interviewed tech giants such as Jack Ma. In early 2003, Li became chief editor of the IT section of web portal Sohu and then joined web portal NetEase as chief editor of its IT section later that year. In 2005, he resigned from NetEase and founded gaming portal Duowan. In 2008, Li founded YY Inc., a live streaming social media platform that went public on Nasdaq in 2012.

Formerly known as hoopCHINA.com, Hupu is a sports news portal founded by Yang Bing and Cheng Hang at the end of 2003. Its business has expanded to include social networking, e-commerce and sports marketing. In June 2019, Hupu raised RMB1.26 billion in its pre-IPO funding round from ByteDance, TikTok's parent company. Hupu has incubated e-marketplace for trending sports gears Shihuo and sneakers resale platform Poizon. The latter became an independent business as a spin-off from Hupu in 2018. Poizon became a unicorn when its valuation exceeded US$1 billion in April 2019 due to a Series A funding round led by DST Global. 

Sabrina Mustopo is the founder and CEO of Krakakoa Chocolate, a "farmer-to-bar" social enterprise that works directly with smallholder cocoa farmers to produce chocolate. She is also an independent consultant with experience in strategy, project management, agriculture and sustainable development. Mustopo previously worked in Singapore as an associate and research analyst for international consultancy McKinsey & Co., where she focused on climate change and agricultural topics and served public sector clients in the Asia-Pacific region and East Africa. She graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a Bachelor of Science degree in International Agriculture and Rural Development.

Vinod Kumar originally founded Samrat Wears clothing company in India in 1993 and went on to graduate in mechanical engineering in 1997 at BMS College of Engineering in India.In 2000, he completed a master’s in supply chain management, industrial and manufacturing systems engineering at Ohio University in the US. He started his career at Bell Labs as a product engineer. In 2000, he worked at telco Alcatel-Lucent that later became part of Nokia. In 2008, he held various senior roles and became senior director at tech company Juniper Networks in Silicon Valley. In 2013, he joined his wife Ezhil Subbian to set up String Bio in India. He became a full-time managing director of the company in 2015. In 2019, he became a fellow member at Unreasonable, an investment fund and organization for supporting innovative entrepreneurs to solve social and environmental issues worldwide.

Tessa Clarke is the British CEO and co-founder of food-sharing app OLIO that was inspired by her experience of having to throw away perfectly good unused food when she was packing up to move from Switzerland back to the UK in 2014.After graduating with a first-class degree in social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge in UK in 1997, she worked for three years at the Boston Consulting Group as a junior associate. She joined an MBA program at Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2002 and met Saasha Celestial-One, who was also studying for an MBA at Stanford. In 2015, Clarke and Celestial-One decided to use their savings to create a food-sharing app OLIO after successfully testing the idea as a private WhatsApp group in North London.Before becoming an entrepreneur in 2015, Clarke has held various senior management roles since completing her MBA in 2004. She worked for global business publisher EMAP from 2005 until 2009, when she joined Dyson Inc as e-commerce managing director (MD). In 2013, she left Dyson to become MD of fintech PayLater based in Switzerland run by the Wonga payday loan company. Known then as Tessa Cook, she later became Wonga’s MD for eight months when she was tasked with “cleaning up” the tarnished reputation of the high interest loan company. From 2013 to 2021, she was also chair of the management board of St George’s Palace, a boutique apart-hotel and spa complex in Bansko, Bulgaria.In 2018, she became a fellow at Unreasonable, an organization that supports social and environmental entrepreneurship. For two years until 2021, Clarke was ambassador for the Meaningful Business 100 global event that advocates the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. She was also a board member for six years at Contentive, a global B2B media and information company. In 2021, her busy schedule now includes becoming a business mentor for not-for-profit Virgin Startup.

Kyle Gazay is a co-founder of Diamond Foundry, the US-based unicorn that makes lab-grown diamonds and which is also the world’s first diamond producer to be certified carbon neutral. He has worked at Diamond Foundry since its launch, and held several roles there, including being COO as well as president of productionCurrently, Gazay oversees all diamond production at the company. Gazay’s expertise is in engineering and production. He has a decade’s track record in working with any equipment to obtain a robust and repeatable baseline output.Like the other co-founders of Diamond Foundry, Gazay previously worked at Nanosolar, a $640m US-based solar power technology provider, which later folded due to pressure from cheaper competition in China. At Nanosolar, Gazay led the development of its production line, and oversaw the translation of the company’s research into development and baseline production output. Upon the closure of Nanosolar, Gazay joined former Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen and former Nanosolar engineer Jeremy Scholz in pivoting to work on lab-grown diamonds, and in establishing Diamond Foundry.

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.

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.

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.

P101, which stands for Programma 101, the first PC ever made in history, is an Italian VC focused on early-stage investments founded and headed by Managing Partner Andrea Di Camillo. As of January 2021, the firm has between €70m and €100m available for investments. The fund is backed by The European Investment Fund, the Italian Investment Fund SGR, and Azimut, an Italian asset manager operating since 1989 and parent company of Azimut Holding, listed on the Milan Stock Exchange (AZM.IM).Headquartered in Milan, P101 has invested in international startups through its two funds, P101 and P102. It usually co-invests maintaining a lead investor role. According to Di Camillo, the P102 fund has a higher investment ticket, ranging between €2m–5m, with the possibility of increasing to up to €10m in a single company. The firm also manages Ita500, a €40m fund established in partnership with Azimut in January 2020. With a 10-year term, Ita500 will co-invest with P101’s first and second funds in startups with revenues of up to €5m and SMEs with a turnover range of €5m–50m.

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