5th speaker announcement
Speaker announcement nr. what? We really don’t care because they’re sooo amazing!
Rakel Eva Sævarsdóttir
Founder, Trail Advisory, Sustainability Advisor
Rakel Eva specialises advising companies on value creation based on sustainability. Her experience spans a wide range within the field of sustainability, from establishing the sustainability consulting services at Deloitte Iceland to creating and leading the sustainability journey of Play airlines. Further she has built a comprehensive experience within the carbon market from her time at Aspiration, an American investment company based in California. Rakel sits on several boards, Alor, a start-up company working towards speeding up the energy transition by providing green energy solutions. Festa - sustainability center, a non-profit organisation and she is the chairman at Laufid, a software solution that manages sustainability for SME's in an accessible and measurable way. Rakel was also one of the founders of Fortuna Invest.
Casper Bjarnason
Investor at byFounders
Casper is an investor at byFounders focusing on finding the next globally ambitious & impact-aware founders of the New Nordics. He personally spends most of his time trying to find the next unicorn founders across Denmark and Iceland and has a keen interest on Climate and Fintech companies.
Sebastien Toupy
Chief Community Officer at Uniborn
Community builder, storyteller & strategist. I have a real passion for startups, technology, and social impact. I currently dedicate my time to designing programs & events that help startup founders to build successful, inclusive & sustainable ventures.
Jacob Key
Co-founder and general partner of Luminar Ventures
Jacob Key is co-founder and general partner of Luminar Ventures. Luminar Ventures is a leading Nordic seed fund based in Stockholm. Jacob has led deals in companies like Insurely, Greenely, Hiberworld, &frankly, and before setting up Luminar, Jacob has been an active angel investor since 2008. He has also a background within Global Business Development at Warner Music Group, where he was paramount in the transformation of the music industry through strategic partnerships with companies such as Spotify, Soundcloud, Tidal and others. Jacob is a serial entrepreneur who founded Mediatude and Globalmouth, two mobile technology companies. Jacob holds a Master in Industrial Engineering and Management at University of Technology Chalmers.
Helga Ósk Hlynsdóttir
Co-founder & Spiritual Leader at SERIOUS.BUSINESS
Helga Ósk Hlynsdóttir is the co-founder and spiritual leader of SERIOUS.BUSINESS, specializing in head-turning strategised branding and jaw-dropping websites. With a dedicated team of 20, she has supported over 100 companies in their journey to market leadership, transforming chaos into clarity and earning international design awards for exceptional digital design. Helga champions authenticity in business and is passionate about fostering team culture and purpose-driven entrepreneurship. Excited to discuss branding and innovation at IIW!
Eyrún Jónsdóttir
VP of Publishing CCP Games
Eyrún joined CCP in 2015 as Senior Brand Director for EVE Online, leading brand and marketing teams through EVE Onlineʼs transition to a free-to-play game. She played a key role in rapidly and successfully unifying the purpose and direction of all brand and marketing teams for EVE Online, spearheading the implementation of new brand pillars, internal marketing and customer-facing strategy.Prior to joining CCP Games, Eyrún was Project Manager at the award winning children’s entertainment property ‘Lazy Town’, working on brand and project management, production of TV content, dubbing and syndication, asset management and licensing. She then went on to a Brand Management Coordinator role at Turner Broadcasting and a Sales Manager position at popular Icelandic childrenswear brand iglo+indi
Max Rivera
Angel Investor / Executive @ Snapchat
Max is an active angel investor and advisor for early stage tech companies, lending his expertise across commercial strategy, product marketing and globalization. He is passionate about supporting the next generation of underrepresented founders and innovators across the globe. With a background in global advertising, Max joined Snapchat at an early stage to launch international business expansion and contributed to the company’s growth through its pre-IPO stage to its current stage as a public company. Today, his team leads Snap’s largest corporate partnerships and works with the world’s biggest brands and agencies to drive monetization of emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other advertising solutions.
Troels Prahl
CEO at Swan Neck Bio
Troels Prahl is a microbiologist with more than 20 years of experience in fermentation science. The bulk of his career has been focussed on alcoholic fermentation and brewer’s yeast propagation, both as an entrepreneur, lecturer and advisor. Since 2014 Prahl has been CEO of White Labs Copenhagen - a leading starter culture manufacturer servicing various food and alcohol producers with organically certified yeast cultures for direct inoculation.
In the later years Prahl has been dedicated to helping startups as well as large companies deploy various methods of fermentation in developing the foods of the future. Especially, the integration of biodiversity and basic principles of ecological symbiosis in commercial fermentation, has become a passion. A passion that culminated in 2023 with the birth of Swan Neck Bio. Swan Neck Bio, named after Louis Pasteur’s groundbreaking Swan Neck Flask experiment from 1861, is a White Labs spin-out enabling impact driven businesses reaching their goals through biosolutions using White Labs’ proprietary FlexCell bioreactor technology. Troels Prahl has since 2019 served as an advisor to Europe’s largest Food/Ag Tech VC fund Astanor.
Trine Young
Founder & CEO Rodinia Generation
Trine Young is the founder and driving force behind Rodinia Generation, an ambitious hardtech-fashion start-up. With her leadership, the company has developed cutting-edge production technology set to solve the low-tech and unsustainable production methods of the global fashion industry, steering it towards tech-driven progress. Rodinia’s patent-pending microfactory is showcased in Copenhagen, and hints at the plans for global expansion.
Trine's journey began with her training as a clothing designer at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts & Design, and an MA in Design & Technology from the London College of Fashion. Her time in the traditional fashion industry sparked her interest for technology as driver for sustainability, motivating her to seek innovative solutions to the industry’s outdated production and supply chain dilemmas.