Innovation Nest

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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.

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.

Founded in 2017 in Hong Kong, Happiness Capital invests in seed to growth stage companies in the US, Europe, Israel, and China, with a focus on issues affecting global happiness within the areas of citizen trust, food, health, climate change, and reduced inequalities. It hosts its own annual contest, the Super Happiness Challenge , a global open innovation contest to fund individuals and startups with ideas and new products or services that tapped into unmet needs to achieve happiness, with a possible $1m in total investment on offer. The VC currently has 37 startups in its portfolio, around half of which are in foodtech and agtech. Its most recent investments include leading the $4.7m July 2021 seed funding round of NovoNutrients, the US-based biotech producer of alt-protein from fermentation using CO2 and other emissions, and co-leading the $29m February 2021 Series A round of Israeli 3D printed alt-meat startup Redefine Meat.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Led by billionaire investors includings Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Michael Bloomberg and Richard Branson, US-based Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) is an energy tech innovation fund for highly-scalable tech with the potential to help cut net greenhouse gas emissions to zero. Since its founding in 2016, it has launched several funds, including the $1bn Breakthrough Energy Ventures initial fund and a $100m European fund. The entity employs scientists and has a model available to startups to identify sustainability opportunities in the US grid. It currently has 30 startups in its portfolio across technologies and geographies. Among its most recent investments in early 2021 are the $11.5m Series A round of US low-emission hydrogen producer C-Zero and in the $50m Series B round of US sustainable metal producer Boston Metals. In January 2021, BEV also closed a new round of another $1 billion to invest in up to 50 startups. The round saw the addition participation of several new investors including Abigail Johnson, CEO of  Fidelity Investments, Shopify founder Tobias Lütke, property developer John Sobrato,  of CEO of hedge fund Baupost Group Seth Klarman,  founder of Tableau Software Chris Stolte and Walmart heir Sam Walton. 

InnovationRCA is the Royal College of Art’s center for entrepreneurship and commercialization. It supports RCA students, alumni and employees looking to turn their ideas into new businesses. The center was established in 2004 and is based in London.The centre’s activities include providing startup incubation and acceleration services to potential RCA spin-offs. This includes coaching and business mentoring based on RCA’s design-led, user-centric approach, as well as intellectual property advice and support. In addition, the center offers access to office and workshop space, as well as funding. InnovationRCA runs its own angel investor network, AngelClubRCA. It has also partnered with a UK-based VC, Venrex Investment Management, to improve RCA startups’ access to private funding. In addition, the centre conducts programmes for external entrepreneurs and organisations looking to promote innovation and entrepreneurship worldwide.McKinsey has called InnovationRCA a “world-class spinout incubator", praising its work as a "significant driver of entrepreneurial growth” along with its ”impressive results". In July 2019, the UK Business Angels Association also named InnovationRCA its Accelerator of the Year. 

H&M Foundation is a non-profit foundation established in 2013. It is privately funded by the Stefan Persson family, the founders and major shareholders of the H&M Group, who have donated SEK 1.5 billion to it to date. The foundation aims to help accelerate progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030, by developing, funding and sharing solutions to address the world’s most urgent issues. It has a particular focus on promoting a planet-positive fashion industry and on building inclusive societies.Tackling mostly challenges associated with the fast fashion industry and its supply chain, H&M Foundation advocates for more sustainable practices across the fashion value chain and more inclusive business practices. The foundation is also actively involved in providing emergency relief for natural disasters or pandemics. It also aims to encourage innovation that promotes social change and sustainability. To this end, it provides startups support in accelerating and scale new technologies. It also runs the Global Change Award. Dubbed the Nobel Prize of fashion, this aims to recognise disruptive innovations that have the potential to make fashion more sustainable, and transform the way garments are designed, produced, shipped, bought, used and recycled. 

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.

Argentinian native Nicolas Araujo Müller is co-CEO and co-founder at Psquared, Spain’s first flexible workplace management and design company for hybrid workspaces. He has worked there since its foundation in April 2018, originally as part of startup hub CoBuilder, and is now its CFO.  He is also a part-time advisor and investor at startup development agency We Are Grit, since its launch in 2020.Earlier, Araujo was CFO and co-founder at digital talent agency Bandit, for two years, until 2017. Before that, he held the same roles at his previous Barcelona-based startup, Nubelo, another tech recruitment agency for freelancers, between 2012 and 2016, when it was acquired by Freelancer.com.  In 2016, Araujo was a visiting professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona on digital economy.His first startup was Work At Home in Argentina, where he was a co-founder for two years from 2011–13, for which he won local innovation prizes. Prior to this, Araujo held various management consultancy roles, working in business analysis and research at Ernst & Young, Standard & Poor’s and Accenture, from 2008–2012, and completed a stint at the US embassy in Buenos Aires. He is also a founding member of Argentina’s entrepreneur organization, ASEA, established in 2013. Araujo holds a degree in economics from CEMA University, Buenos Aires and a qualification from Harvard University in negotiation. In 2017 and 2013, Araujo was named in Forbes Argentina’s 30 Promesas list of young entrepreneurs. 

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