Baltic founders meet in Riga

Nikolay used to be one of the most successful traders in Europe whereas now he is one of the most successful fintech entrepreneurs in the world. He founded Revolut after he realised how much in hidden fees he used to pay banks for exchanging currencies when travelling.
He searched for an easy-to-use multi-currency banking solution and couldn’t find any therefore decided to build one himself. After growing from 0 to more than 1 million customers in only two years and raising nearly $90 million of investments, Revolut has major expansion plans – and Nikolay is one of a very few people globally who are successfully turning these plans into reality.

Carol is the Co-Founder and Board Member of self-driving technology startup Drive.ai, where she ieads fundraising, product and business development. Carol has studied human-robot interaction extensively and has over 15 years of robotics experience in highly regulated industries, including surgical and underwater applications. Throughout her career, she has worked at both early-stage startups and large companies like Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and has held several roles in various stages of the product lifecycle, from R&D to validation and testing. Carol holds eight technical patents. In 2017, she was named to Inc. Magazine’s Most Innovative Women list and Forbes’ 20 Women Advancing AI Research list. Carol has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University, an M.S. in Computer Science, and five years in a PhD at Johns Hopkins University.

Martin is the co-founder of Taxify, fastest growing European ride-hailing platform operating in 28 cities and 20 countries across Europe and Africa, recent biggest launch in Paris. Taxify has over 5M+ clients and 120,000 drivers doing many millions of monthly rides. Taxify is growing 20-25% MoM with minimum investments, being at least 10x more efficiently than its competitors.
Martin has been an entrepreneur for 20 years, started 6 companies and worked at Skype, Fortumo and NASDAQ Tallinn Stock Exchange. He is an active member of the startup community, being the co-founder of Estonian Startup Leaders Club (90 founders) and Garage48 Foundation, organizing hackathons in Europe. Martin likes sports, travelling with family and weekend boating trips to Estonian smaller islands.

Craig Cannon is the Director of Marketing at Y Combinator. Twice a year YC invests a small amount of money ($120k) in a large number of startups. Since 2005, YC has funded over 1,400 startups with a combined valuation of over $80B. Prior to YC Craig cofounded Comedy Hack Day and did headswaps at The Onion, where he was used as a body double for Obama. He holds a cycling world record for most elevation climbed in 48 hours.

Y-Vonne Hutchinson is the founder of Ready Set, a diversity solutions firm based in Oakland, CA, and a co-founder/ advisor of Project Include. Prior to launching ReadySet she worked as an international labour and human rights lawyer for nearly a decade. She has worked with foreign national governments, the US Department of State, and the UN. She is a member of Harvard Law’s Institute for Global Law and Policy network and an expert on labour relations and diversity in the workplace. She’s presented on diversity, inclusion, and labour issues at Harvard Law, MIT Sloan, and UC Berkeley, as well as conferences around the globe. She holds a JD from Harvard Law School. She also serves on the Women of Color Council for the Anita Borg Institute and the board of the San Francisco New Leaders Council.

Chris was born in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, USA. He later lived in South Dakota and Washington State before graduating with degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Washington – Seattle. He received a Fulbright scholarship to study Cybersecurity and digital government in Estonia where he accidentally stayed 6 years. In Estonia he discovered his passion for startups, starting his career in QA at Fits.me: Virtual Fitting Room then moving on to software development at Shazam. He found nirvana at TransferWise where he has spent more than 3 years growing the revolution as a product engineer in AML & Compliance and later the North American team. He completed his Master’s Degree in Cybersecurity at the Tallinn University of Technology with the thesis topic “Security Analysis of the Euro 2.0 Digital Currency Prototype”, which subsequently sparked his interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. He currently lives in New York City to help grow TransferWise stateside and spends his free time running, traveling, and exploring the blockchain ecosystem.

David Roldán, Jr. is a connector, builder of ecosystems, and tech lover. He leads all investor and startup engagement, including the startup programme for all of Europe as part of the Google Cloud organisation. He’s based in London when he’s not traveling and geeking out about machine learning and collaborating with founders. His passion is building relationships within startup ecosystems to help people conquer challenges. His mission is to support startups in their pursuit of greatness and increase value to portfolio companies for VCs.
When he’s not wearing his Google ‘hat’ he’s happily enjoying time with family, traveling, sport, great food, and listening to music.

Onno is a serial technology entrepreneur who has spent his entire career building products that consumers love. His previous startup “Taptalk” raised two consecutive funding rounds and ended up moving to San Francisco. Right now he is passionate about accelerating rare disease research and is also a rare disease patient himself. Onno recently organized an artificial intelligence NF2 hackathon on his own genome, attracting over 300 diverse participants from the tech and medical industry.

Victoria is a senior editor at Wired, where she is responsible for culture coverage online and in print. She also edits the Work Smarter section of the magazine on productivity, entrepreneurship, and startups. She was previously technology editor at New Scientist and UK editor of Motherboard, Vice’s tech, and science channel.

Ramzi Rizk is co-founder and CTO of EyeEm, a photography company building computer vision technology to understand images. At EyeEm, Ramzi leads a team developing EyeEm Vision, the company’s image recognition technology that keywords, captions and ranks photos based on their aesthetic value. Before founding EyeEm, Ramzi spent years researching privacy in Social Media, and leading engineering teams focused on mobile and web. Ramzi is a passionate software architect, photographer and pianist. Ramzi loves product, scalable architecture, and the magical space where product, engineering and business meet.

Ralph Echemendia is a world-renowned cyber security expert, known internationally by his alter ego “The Ethical Hacker.” For over 20 years, Ralph has delivered training on hacking and other security information to corporations including the US Marine Corps, NASA, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, AMEX, Intel, Boeing, Symantec, and IBM.
His portfolio of work and reputation as a leading professional across several industries has landed him the credibility to make appearances on CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and Forbes, to name a few. Ralph has worked with award-winning Director Oliver Stone as a technical supervisor on films such as “Savages”  and “Snowden” as well as other projects such as the film “Nerve” and award-winning TV series Mr. Robot.

Peter Gelardi Mikkelsen is the founder of the Nordic Blockchain Association and is a partner in the Blockchain Technologies Corporation, one of the world’s oldest blockchain development firms where he is leading the Business Development.  He is an advisor to the Zap foundation and leads the blockchain departments of the Nordic IT Association and the European RegTech Association. Peter has been in the Blockchain space since the beginning of the NYC Bitcoin Center and guest lectures at the IT Department of the Copenhagen Business School.

Stewart Rogers has over 25 years experience in sales, marketing, managing, and mentoring in the software and IT industries. He is currently Analyst-at-Large VentureBeat, where he analyzes and studies marketing technology, artificial intelligence, blockchain technologies, and virtual/mixed reality. He is also a journalist for VentureBeat, reporting the news on those same topics. Prior to VentureBeat, Rogers ran a number of successful software companies and held global roles in sales and marketing for businesses in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. He has contributed to several sales and marketing publications and is regularly invited to speak at major tech events across the globe.

Viola Llewellyn is the co-founder and President of award-winning Ovamba Solutions, Inc., Africa’s first FinTech company to create technologies to serve African SMEs with innovative Sharia-compliant finance products, eCommerce, and logistics services. Ovamba’s technology gives global accredited and institutional investors the opportunity to invest in the fast-growing African private sector.
Ms. Llewellyn has served as an honorary member of the board of trustees for the “International Women’s Think Tank” since 2014 where she guides IWTT on STEM issues, gender diversity and globalization and was listed in the 2016 “Digital Undivided Report” as one of only a handful Black or African American women in the USA who have ever raised more than $1 million for a tech company. She is amongst the top 200 “Women in FinTech Power list” a global list of female industry leaders published by Innovate Finance in 2016, and placed 13th on “The Innov8tiv’s Top 50 Visionary Women in Tech To Watch in 2017”.

Elias Aalto is an Apple Design Award winning mobile entrepreneur. His career started with creating early successes on the App Store and founding Qvik – a seventy plus person strong digital consultancy. For the past three years, he’s worked as co-founder and product lead at Wolt – a fast-growing startup concentrating on digitalization of restaurants.

Felix Petersen is a serial entrepreneur and investor from Berlin, Germany. He is currently VP and Managing Director Europe at the Samsung NEXT fund, heading early stage investment and M&A.
Previously he co-founded plazes.com, one of the pioneering start-ups in the context and location-based services area. Founded in 2005 it has been sold to Nokia in 2008. In 2011 he was on to company number two, Amen, which he sold to Tape.tv in 2013.
He’s been a motor for the Berlin startup and tech scene since it’s humble beginnings and has been credited widely for helping to put Berlin on the map.
He is an active angel investor and advisor to companies like Soundcloud, and Dataminr and Partner at Faber Ventures in Lisbon.
Petersen has had numerous appearances in publications like Wired, the New York Times and many others as well as being a frequent speaker at conferences.
Born and raised in Berlin, Petersen has been busy with remote data transmissions since the late eighties and has been building things on the Internet since 1996.