TechChill 2022

Dr. Melissa Sassi

Chief Penguin, IBM Z - IBM

Dr. Sassi is IBM Z’s Chief Penguin, heading up Student & Entrepreneur Experience worldwide within the Z division of IBM. Dr. Sassi is also the Founder of the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator, an early-stage startup program helping founders to build & scale through business & technical enablement. She has 100 startups in her portfolio. Dr. Sassi is the Founder & CEO of MentorNations, a youth-led nonprofit venture that has enabled tens of thousands of young people to code in twelve countries. Her research for her doctorate focuses on the digital inclusion of underserved & underrepresented communities & its ties to enabling economic empowerment, quality education & healthcare outcomes. 

Merit Valdsalu

CEO & Co-Founder

Merit is the CEO & Co-Founder of Single.Earth, an Estonian startup tokenizing the world’s nature to save it. She was one of the early employees at Pipedrive as the Head of Localization and is now combining two of her biggest passions – innovative tech and the environment – at Single.Earth.

Ethan Pierse

Director

Ethan wears many hats. Currently, he is the Director at The CryptoAssets Institute, Partner at Borderless Ventures as well as has his own $ETHAN social token on Rally.io. Ethan is a serial entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience in digital marketing strategy, advising Coca-Cola, HP, BP, large banks, airlines, and governments.

Daniel Tonsen

CEO & founder

Daniel is the number one LinkedIn expert and the founder of Elite Advertising. Being one of the first Certified LinkedIn agencies in the world, Elite Advertising has become known for being the leading LinkedIn advertising agency in the Nordics. Daniel loves scaling B2B companies!

Gultan Asgarli

Business Analyst | Inskillz & Co-founder

Gultan is a Business Analyst at Financial Crime Intelligence, Investigation & Analytics department at Nordea, the largest financial services group in the Nordic region and one of the biggest banks in Europe. Also, she is the co-founder of Inskillz, a community that supports game-based learning in various areas, and creates educational board games on different topics, starting from gender equality and ending with very niche games for product managers, marketers, UX/UI designers, etc.

Artūrs Kirtovskis

Co-founder at Sigle

Arturs is a professional poker player turned software engineer turned startup founder.

Jose Iglesias

Senior Director of Community

Jose leads Community at Techstars, a globally distributed team, supporting grassroots community and ecosystem engagement in over 130 countries, helping to deliver entrepreneurial education and awareness in every corner of the world.

Ahana Banerjee

Co-Founder and CEO

Ahana Banerjee is the co-founder and CEO of Clear, which she recently took through Y Combinator. Having been accepted to Y Combinator during the final year of her Physics degree at Imperial College London, Ahana decided to turn down her graduate jobs in finance, leave her degree, and work to innovate in the skincare space with her startup, Clear. Clear is the integrated social commerce app for skincare.