RVC as a public development agency realizing the program of globalization of domestic innovation and technological industry provides information partner support to the Slush event, which accelerates establishing direct contacts, exchange of experience and best practices between investors, startups and mass media both from Russia and Northern Europe.
Сколковский десант на крупнейшем стартап-событии в Северной Европе - Slush 2012
Marko is responsible for user experience and industrial design at Nokia and a member of the Nokia Leadership Team. Before re-joining Nokia, Marko was the CEO and co-founder of Dopplr and the Head of Brand & Design at Blyk.
Marc Dillon is the co-founder and CEO at Jolla, the recently founded smartphone company from Finland. Jolla believes that MeeGo is far from dead, having landed their first manufacturing partners in China already in summer 2012. Jolla will launch it’s first MeeGo-based mobile OS at Slush 2012.
Vasily Belov is the Executive Director of the Energy Efficiency Cluster at Skolkovo and specializes in national policy in energy saving and energy efficiency, investments, innovations, public-private partnership. Thus cluster helps to support innovative development in breakthrough technological solutions and currently has some 180 companies in the oil and gas, metallurgic and energy sectors residing in the cluster.
Serguei Belussov is a self-made serial entrepreneur with over 20 years’ track record in business development. He is a Senior Founding Partner at Runa Capital, a recently launched investment firm focused on sub-3M seed round investments in Internet, Software and Mobile companies. Belussov also has a PhD from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
John Lindfors is a Partner of Digital Sky Technology (DST) and Managing Director of the Asian office in Hong Kong. He joined DST in 2010. Prior to joining DST, he was the Partner in charge of the European Technology and Media department for Goldman Sachs. He joined Goldman Sachs in London in 1993 and worked in London and New York during his 17 years at the firm focusing on the technology and media sectors. John has a M.Sc. (Econ) from the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki.
Aydin Senkut has been named one of the world’s leading tech angels by Businessweek. He’s the founder of Felicis Ventures, a venture fund whose portfolio includes highly impressive companies like Dropcam, Imageshack and Rovio. Before Felicis Ventures, Aydin was a product manager at Google, following the company’s growth as its 37th employee.
Thomas Madsen Mygdal is an angel investor and a serial entrepreneur working behind companies like 23, Podio, SocialSquare and Reboot. He describes himself as a guy who helps setting vision, getting product right, designing commercial model, getting right people on board and getting to market.
Leonid is the Managing Partner at Projector Ventures, startup adviser at Yandex, Russia’s leading Internet search engine and a Venture Partner at the early stage VD fund, Runa Capital. Leonid’s specialty is in software, with a PhD in computer science from Ural University and a long-spanning career and various leadership positions at Kontor, he’s now devoted to early-stage startups.
Karri Ojanen has worked as an interaction designer, user experience lead, and concept as well as visual designer in Finland, the Middle East, Canada and the US. Currently, he is the Director of Interaction Design at the Toronto-based software startup Influitive. He is also an avid world traveller, an electronic musician, and a long distance runner who has spoken at user experience conferences in Europe and Canada.
Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist at TechCrunch who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal, as well as in startups. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture financing.
Kristian Segerstrale is a serial entrepreneur who founded his first company in 2001. He is known as the CEO and co-founder of Playfish, a company which took social gaming to a new level with a simple idea: playing, with cards or computer, is always more fun with friends. Electronic Arts bought Playfish for USD 400 million in 2009, and Kristian now leads EA’s unprecedented and aggressive process to take over the Internet.
Peter is best known as The Mighty Eagle of Rovio Entertainment (Angry Birds), but has a whole lot else under his belt. The co-founder of Slush has taken an active role in the Finnish startup scene, and has founded ConnectedDay, Some Bazaar and co-founded Mobile Monday. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also a Member of the Board at Star Wreck Studios. The self-described “Mobility Mastermind” is highly experienced in branding, mobile e-services ecosystem building and enablement, mobile e-services ontology.
Currently the CEO and co-founder of Microtask, Wili is a serial entrepreneur and computer programmer as well as the co-founder and CTO of Hybrid Graphics, a graphics technology company acquired by NVIDIA in 2006. Wili is also a founding partner at Lots accelerator.
Jason is the Director of Amazon GameCircle, and a product-centric executive seasoned in developing games as services and managing online economies. Previously, Jason has been a Partner at Vanedge Capital as well as held management positions at Electronic Arts and Xbox.
Roberto is a Partner at Balderton Capital. A senior strategic thinker and operating executive with a successful track record of growing revenues, launching new products and build winning teams, Roberto has raised many rounds of funding involving both Venture Capitalists and Private Equity firms.
Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch as well as the co-founder and shareholder of TechHub. A long time journalist Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman.
Sami is the creative director and one of the founding partners at the Helsinki based award winning design firm Nordkapp. He also lectures design at Aalto University School of Business, and is a frequent speaker at design related events in Finland and all over Europe.
David Gardner is a hardcore gaming industry veteran with over 23 years of experience from Electronic Arts, where he last served as its Chief Operating Officer. After leaving EA, David served as the CEO of Atari, while he’s currently best known as a co-founder and General Partner at London Venture Partners. David is an investor in Unity, Supercell and Applifier, among others.
Eric Wahlforss is the co-founder & CTO at SoundCloud. Originally from Sweden, Eric is currently based in Berlin – a city which he believes is a big startup itself, always changing and under construction. SoundCloud, described as Twitter “only for ears”, has over 10 million registered users to date.
Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers tech policy, media, and China.Until early 2012, he was a freelancer, writing features for the Listener, New Zealand’s leading current affairs and arts magazine, and the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language newspaper.
Monty Widenius is the main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database, the world’s most popular open source database. Monty is also the Founder and CEO at Monty Program Ab that is developing MariaDB, the new community-developed branch of MySQL, and a co-founder and investor at Open Ocean Capital.
Joe Robins is a community evangelist and a developer at Unity Technologies with experience in 3D art. Joe currently undertakes a lot of traveling and presenting Unity at events and conferences, but hopes to eventually return to game making.
Kristina works at GrabCAD, the Estonian-American 3D community and “Github for mechanical engineering designs”. Kristina’s job is to come up with new features for the GrabCAD community as well as to make sure the development of GrabCAD is as smooth as possible and the engineers happy.
Uldis is co-Founder and CEO at infogr.am, the web-based infographic creator. Headquartered in Riga, Latvia and launched on February 2012, company has grown to become the largest data visualization community in world.
Jiri is the Co-Founder of Rocket Pack, a gaming studio that became a part of Disney Interactive Media Group in March 2011. Rocket Pack makes the Rocket Engine HTML5 cloud game development platform. Throughout his career Jiri has been keenly interested in web technologies and game development, successfully bridging the two as the CEO of Rocket Pack.
Ilkka is a Serial Entrepreneur and Investor, and currently heads Supercell, a collection of highly energetic gaming professionals who’ve set out to change the industry. Ilkka’s previous career includes running Digital Chocolate, and investing in companies like Microtask and Uplause.
Sitar is a venture capitalist with over seven years of experience in early-stage investments and portfolio management, having previously been an investment manager at Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. Sitar focuses on product-led consumer internet and mobile sector, portfolio companies include SoundCloud, MegaZebra and Handmade Mobile.
Veera Sylvius is the Managing Director of Space Systems Finland (SSF). SSF’s main business revolves around system and software design in technology areas like nuclear industry, GPS technology, machinery and space. Little known fact: SSF played a crucial role in Galileo satellites and the GOCE mission, so Veera will surely have challenging stories to share.
Feodor is a Partner at Cleantech Invest. Before joining Cleantech Invest Feodor has been a full time angle investor. Feodor has a portfolio of six start-ups, chairing the boards in half of them and working for some years as acting CEO for one of them. Feodor is also an advisor to Ultranat whose invention solves the global challenge in energy production: how to process ash into valuable end products.
Kim Pessala is the Chief Investment Officer at Evli Bank, an investment bank that provides wealth management, equity and derivatives brokerage, investment research and corporate finance services to private individuals, entrepreneurs and institutions. The operations are based on 27 years of experience and strong expertise of the employees to seek out solutions that provide added value for clients.
Jori Lallo is the co-founder and developer of Kippt. Jori loves to build and design products and he has an healthy obsession over coffee and APIs. Before Kippt, Jori worked on communication platform Grove.io and co-founded Aalto Entrepreneurship Society.
Andreas Ehn is the co-founder & CTO of Wrapp, a mobile gift card service. Before founding Wrapp, Andreas was the CTO of Spotify, where he was responsible for building the technology behind the service. Andreas has described himself as a man who can get interested in almost anything as long as he feels it’s important. Not surprisingly, he is also an angel investor.
Karri is a web product designer and developer. Currently he’s the co-founder of Kippt, social knowledge management platform and a recent Y Combinator graduate. Amongst other things, Karri has co-founded startup media company ArcticStartup and Rails Girls, a global movement to help learn technology and build ideas.
Ulla-Maaria Engestrom is the founder and CEO of ThingLink. Ulla is a social media entrepreneur with an interest in design and lifestyle media, object navigation, image interaction, and the long tail markets as well as runs an alternative web-based travel agency promoting sustainable, short-distance tourism.
Nikolaj is a serial technology entrepreneur and investor. He has founded four pioneering technology startups and is now a partner at the early-stage venture capital investor, Sunstone Capital.
Timo, Founding Partner at Lifeline Ventures, is a serial entrepreneur and investor with track record in product creation, sales, marketing and fund raising in health and disruptive tech. He was the founding CEO of CRF Health, the global leader in eDiaries for clinical trials. As Blyk’s Head of Strategy, Timo was responsible for its ad business, country expansion and funding. Timo’s free time flies with family, in Lapland and with various sports. Currently investor in companies like ArcDia, Oncos Therapeutics, Valkee and ZenRobotics.
Nenad is the Founder and Managing Partner of DN Capital which is a media and technology early stage and growth capital investor with offices in London and Palo Alto. His investments include Apsmart, Datanomic -acquired by Oracle-, Eyeka, Mister Spex, Shazam Entertainment, Tbricks, Windeln, OLX -Sold shares to Naspers- and JacobsRimell -acquired by Amdocs).
Duncan Lamb is a designer and entrepreneur based in Helsinki and San Francisco. Formerly a Creative Director at Nokia, Duncan led the design team behind the N9?s Swipe user interface, a fresh and natural way to create an all-screen device and a huge leap forward for user experience design at the company. Before Nokia, Duncan was Head of Product Design at Skype finding new and simple ways to help hundreds of millions of people all over the world to feel closer.
Dr. Gang Lu – Founder & Chief-Editor of bilingual tech blog TechNode.com, one of the most influential tech bloggers in China and worldwide, initiator of the most respectable annual startup-focus ChinaBang. Co-founder of OpenWeb Asia Workgroup and co-founder of kuukie.com, he is also prolific keynote speaker having been to e.g. TechCrunch Disrupt, APEC SME Summit and SXSW Technology Summit. He has MSc, PhD in wireless communications from the University of Sheffield, UK.
Olli Rajala is the Lead TD and co-founder of Anima Vitae Ltd. which has been the driving force in Finnish animation for over 12 years. Armed with a BA in Media Arts and a naturally technical mind Olli has been working on such things as Look Dev, Pipelines, Rendering, Tools and Plugins Dev, Problem Solving and other tasks needing a creative technical solution.
Timo is the CEO of BT Wood, specializing in development and marketing of novel wood treatment chemicals. Timo has extensive experience from international business and management of sales & marketing. He has worked in key positions of global life science companies for more than 20 years.
Lasse is a creative thinker and a game industry veteran with over 20 years experience in game development. Having contributed to a great number of game titles on console, mobile, and social platforms, Lasse now works at Supercell as the Product Lead of the Clash of Clans – one of the most successful top grossing apps in App Store this year.
Antti Laiho is from SIGGRAPH, the organization behind SyysGraph. He is a lecturer at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Antti familiarizes students to 3D and manages various projects. Antti is also Co-Founder of Dyyni, Advertising agency located in Helsinki.
Borgar is the CEO of FXI Technologies, and a serial entrepreneur with several patents under his belt. FXI Tech is a Norway-based hardware/software company with any screen microcomputer development platform called Cotton Candy. Past life for Borgar includes working as a sheep farmer; utilizing tech to make shepherding a less physical activity for sheep farmers pushed him to study technology in the first place.
Nick Rosa is the co-founder and MD of Sandbox Industries and the founding partner of Healthbox. Healthbox is a healthcare startups’ accelerator program that supports healthcare innovation by partnering with promising entrepreneurs and industry leaders.
Ike Lee is the CEO of Lee Technology Consulting. Originally from South Korea, Ike has made a long career as an angel investor, venture capitalist, advisor and an entrepreneur in the US. One of his 7 IPOs to date, NetScreen (NSCN), that went public in December 2001, was named IPO of the Year by Goldman Sachs.
Juha has an over a decade of professional work experience in Software Engineering in the roles of Software Architect, Software Engineer, and Project Manager. In for Agile Methodologies and Open Source without lacking business nor common sense perspective.
Julien is the CEO of Scarlet Motors, and a former Rovionite and Nokian. Still heavily in stealth, Scarlet Motors is an electric sports car for the next generation. Julien describes himself as a digital native, and a social and tech-savvy French, who loves to make things happen.
Ivan Nechaev is the CEO and co-founder of Russian Navigation Technologies. Founded in 2005, the firm has become the first Russian “idea to IPO” high tech success story. The company works in development, production and installation of GPS/GLONASS-based telematics system AutoTracker for transport monitoring and fleet management. Ivan is also Member of the Management Board of the Russian Venture Company Seed Fund.
Pekka is CEO of Valkee, a private health care technology startup company that develops and markets portable medical therapy devices for treating mood disorders and other light-dependent diseases. Pekka has an over 20-year global track record of transformational leadership roles at Nokia, Zed and Coca-Cola.
Tuomas is the CTO of Uplause, whose mission is to connect the brands and the crowd – the world’s biggest joystick – and facilitate the fun. He has a strong background in software development, software architecture and gaming.
Michael is an entrepreneur and a networker with more than ten years of experience in the media industry. Formerly the CEO Rutube, better known as “the YouTube of Russia”, he’s currently a co-founder & strategist at Surfingbird. Michail has a heavy background in creating and distributing content for TV, mobile and WEB platforms.
Esther is a leading angel investor and entrepreneur with a special focus on health technologies, online services and air and space. Some of her better known investments include Flicr, del.icio.us and the Finnish S.A.D killer Valkee. Besides a technologist, Esther is also a trained space tourist!
Pyry is the CTO at drawElements where he is leading the technology development team. drawElements is a company creating tools for improving the quality of GPUs. Pyry has years of experience working in all levels of the modern 3D graphics stack from hardware to game engines and applications.
Jaakko is a Media Technology Professor at Aalto University, holding Finland’s first-ever computer graphics focused professorship. Coming from the world renowned Finnish demoscene, Jaakko’s past and continuous experience include NVIDIA, MIT and the Max Payne franchise.
Jufo is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of ZenRobotics, a Finnish high-tech company specializing in robotic recycling technology. Previously a successful marketing professional with a number of international awards under his black belt, Jufo is a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple successful companies, including Hybrid Graphics Ltd, later acquired by NVIDIA.
Ari Ketola is the CEO of Ductor, a Finnish biotechnology company with a solid portfolio of proprietary and patented technology for biologically producing ammonia and phosphates from recycled materials. In addition to being the co-founder and early-stage financier as well as CEO and Chairman, Ari is also the inventor of Ductor technology.
Pekka has made a career out of facilitating the communication between business executives and technical teams, before at Tieto International and most recently at Skolkovo. Writing a bestseller on leadership and earning the nickname “Bulldozer” on the way, Pekka has extensive knowledge of the Russian market, and currently serves as a special advisor to Skolkovo Foundation’s President.
Sami Inkinen co-founded Trulia in 2005 and served as the company’s COO til March 2012. Trulia has grown into one of the largest real-estate sites in the US serving over 20 million unique monthly visitors. Sami is also a triathlete ranked second on the planet among amateurs in his age group.
Niklas Hed is the co-founder of Rovio Entertainment, which he started with fellow computer science classmates in 2004. Niklas leads Rovio’s Research and Development efforts on new technologies, platforms and ventures. And don’t worry, you’re not seeing double, Niklas is in fact the cousin to Mikael Hed, the CEO.
Ami Rubinstein is the CEO of Optomeditech, a Finnish medtech startup with patent pending technology in the field of intravenous catheters and blood sampling. With Optomedtech’s breakthrough IV-line technology, he aims to make the process faster, more reliable and less damaging to the vein. Ami has a wide range of global experience in different industries as an entrepreneur, a consultant and a manager, both in small business and large corporate environments.
Lasse’s one of the Co-Founders of CatchBox, a throwable microphone intended for audience engagement. Catchbox is a soft wireless microphone that you can throw into audiences to kickstart a discussion. Lasse is experienced in running product development projects with software and embedded technologies.
Julius Tuomisto is the CEO and founder of Delicode Ltd and acting COB for Studio Lumikuu. He is an experienced project manager, media producer and an advocator for all things open. His current projects include the volunteer computing based rendering service Renderfarm.fi, real-time motion capture and sound control software NI mate and the interactive children’s storybook concept Kinected Stories. In his spare time he VJ’s for the Finnish electronic duo Phantom.
Tomas is the CEO of 3D Render. 3D Render offers visualisation solutions such as pictures, animations or D real time models, especially in the construction industry especially in building the most sought-after residential areas, high quality offices and desirable living environments in the European and Asian sphere.
Jussi is the Creative Director at Uplause with an extensive comprehension on visual arts as well as technological procedures. Uplause gamifies live events through social crowd games acting as a sponsorship activation tool for brands.
Janne Karhu is a partner and Lead Developer for Delicode Ltd as well as one of the co-founders of Studio Lumikuu. Holding a Master of Physics degree from the University of Turku, Janne has contributed large amounts of code to Blender – the world’s most popular open source 3D suite – since joining the project in 2005. Since joining Delicode in early 2010, Janne has focused entirely on developing software and algorithms for depth cameras.
Joonas Hjelt, a serial entrepreneur is currently the co-founder and CEO of Blaast, a cloud-based developer and application ecosystem for feature phones with a humble goal of connecting the next billion phone users online.
Anssi Vanjoki is a Finnish angel investor who did a long career at Nokia. He started at Nokia in 1991 and lead Markets unit, multimedia industry group and Nokia Mobile Phones, moving the focus from hardware to software. After leaving Nokia in 2010, Vanjoki became an angel investor and has recently shared quite a bit of insights and ideas on the future of technology.
Christopher Thur is co-founder and CEO of Ovelin, a startup founded in Tampere, Finland in 2010. Ovelin created WildChords, a guitar-learning game for iPad, which was chosen the Best European Learning Game 2011. Chris’ Ovelin also won the 2011 Slush 100 pitching competition. Chris tells that he himself is a total beginner at playing guitar.
Tuomas J. Lukka, Founder, Chief Scientist, ZenRobotics. Lukka got his PhD in quantum chemistry at the tender age of 20 from University of Helsinki, and continued his studies at Harvard as a Junior Fellowship recipient. Prior to ZenRobotics, Lukka has led a research group at the University of Jyvaskyla, commercialized OpenGL at Hybrid Graphics Ltd.