Fourth speaker announcement
A big welcome to the speakers taking the stage May 14th and 15th!
Jóhann Páll Jóhannsson
↪ Minister of the Environment, Energy and Climate
Jóhann Páll Jóhannsson is Iceland’s Minister of the Environment, Energy and Climate. A member of the Social Democratic Alliance, he serves in the Althing for Reykjavík South and is committed to advancing climate action, clean energy, and environmental justice.
Logi Már Einarsson
↪ Minister of Culture, Innovation, and Higher Education
Logi Már Einarsson is Iceland's Minister of Culture, Innovation, and Higher Education. A member of the Social Democratic Alliance, he has represented the Northeast Constituency in the Althingi (Icelandic Parliament) since 2016. He served as the party's leader from 2016 to 2022 and has chaired its parliamentary group since 2022.
Guðbjörg Edda Eggertsdóttir
↪ Industry leader
Held various executive positions at Actavis Group and predecessors 1980-2014. Private investor. Serving on the board of several companies, including Bioeffect hf, Brunnur VC Fund, Brunnur II, Coripharma, Orf Genetics hf. Chairman of the Board and Council of Reykjavik University from 2022.
Katrín Jakobsdóttir
↪ Former Prime Minister of Iceland
Katrín Jakobsdóttir served as the Prime Minister of Iceland from November 2017 to April 2024. She served as Minister of Education, Science and Culture and Minister of Nordic Cooperation 2009-2013. Jakobsdóttir was the Chairman of the Left-Green Movement from 2013 to 2024, having served as Deputy Chairman 2003-2013. Jakobsdóttir was Member of Althingi for the Reykjavík North Constituency from 2007 to 2024. She was the Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders from 2020 to 2024. She now serves as a senior emissary for the Arctic Circle Assembly and as the chair of the Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health. She is the chair of the board of Reykjavík Art Festival and she is on the board of the University of Iceland.
Alma Möller
↪ Minister of Health
Alma Möller is Iceland’s Minister of Health and a respected medical doctor with decades of experience in healthcare leadership. Prior to her ministerial role, she served as the country’s Director of Health, becoming the first woman to hold that position. Alma is known for her strong focus on public health, patient safety, and innovation in healthcare.
Anna Søndergaard
↪ The Footprint Firm
Anna is the co-founder, partner and CEO of The Footprint Firm – a Copenhagen based company with a sole focus on sustainability built on a unique business model combining venture investment and advisory. Anna primarily focuses on advising PE and other investors on sustainability matters including M&A, as well as being actively involved as a board member, advisor and investor in a number of start-ups. Also, she is part of the investment committee of The Footprint Fund, an article 9 impact venture fund.
Anna has previously co-founded Danish fashion brand Becksöndergaard Copenhagen, which was exited to a private equity fund and has previously worked with McKinsey & Company and in the advertising industry.
Magnus Hardarson
↪ Nasdaq Iceland
Magnus is the President of Nasdaq Iceland, a position he has held since October 2019. He has been with Nasdaq since 2002, initially serving as the Head of Trading and later as the Head of Sales and Services. He had also served as Deputy CEO of Nasdaq Iceland from 2011. Before joining Nasdaq, Magnus worked as an economist at the National Economic Institute of Iceland and as an economic advisor.
Gudmundur Kristjansson (GK)
↪ Lucinity
Gudmundur Kristjansson (GK) is the Founder and CEO of Lucinity, an AI software company headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland. With over two decades of experience across the technology and compliance sectors, GK is widely recognized for his leadership in artificial intelligence and financial crime prevention.
GK’s passion for using technology to drive positive impact began early—at the age of 13, he developed software to support dyslexic children. He later applied AI to healthcare, contributing to research in sleep science through machine learning. Prior to founding Lucinity in 2018, GK held senior roles at Citigroup and NICE Systems, where he built compliance technologies for some of the world’s largest banks. These experiences shaped his vision of a more efficient and intelligent approach to fighting financial crime. Since its founding, Lucinity has grown into a globally recognized AI company, known for its market-leading case management platform and built-in agentic AI copilot, Luci. The platform is built with configurability at its core, enabling customers to achieve enterprise-grade compliance and scale globally. Lucinity holds patents in homomorphic encryption and federated learning, highlighting its innovations in privacy-preserving technology and secure AI.
Today, Lucinity’s solutions are trusted by a wide range of institutions—from tier-1 banks in the U.S. to fintech and payments companies across the Nordics. Notable clients include Visa Cross-Border Solutions, Finshark, Trustly, Arion Bank, and Kvika Bank.
Martin Soltau
↪ Space Solar
Martin is co-CEO and co-founder of Space Solar, an exciting space start-up developing space-based solar power to deliver affordable, reliable energy from space for the benefit of Earth. He is an entrepreneurial and highly experienced business and engineering leader in the Aerospace and Renewable Energy sectors.
He co-founded the Space Energy Initiative, a coalition between leading space an energy organisations promoting the advancement of this technology. Martin is a member of both the International Academy of Astronautics permanent committee on Space Solar Power, and International Astronautical Federation Space Power Committee. He is married with two children and loves motorcycling, playing keyboard for a local cover rock band, and pretends to enjoy running.
Adam Root
↪ Matter
Adam Root is the founder and CEO of Matter. With a technical background and a degree in mechanical engineering, Adam has held key roles at General Electric (GE), working on large industrial projects, and at Dyson, specializing in particle physics for new product development. He later transitioned into new product innovation, focusing on next-generation technology delivery. In 2017, Adam founded Matter to tackle one of humanity’s greatest challenges: micropollution. Using cradle-to-cradle design principles, Matter removes pollution from the technical sphere and creates value from waste. In 2023, Adam secured $10 million in Series A funding. Most recently, he launched an external microfibre filtration solution to the market in partnership with the global brand BSH, under the Bosch and Siemens labels.
Matter’s investors include S2G Ventures, SOUNDwaves, Leonardo DiCaprio-backed Consumer ClimateTech fund Regeneration.VC, and Katapult. Adam led Matter to achieve B Corp certification, and his journey in sustainable business continues. In 2018, he was selected to represent the UK at the G7 Summit in Canada. In both 2018 and 2019, Adam was named Innovate UK’s Young Innovator of the Year. He remains a thought leader and pioneer in micropollution filtration.
Ruth Daniels
↪ In Place of War
Ruth Daniel is a multi-award winning CEO and Artistic Director of international NGO, In Place of War, an organisation working with music, art and creativity in places of armed conflict, social injustice and affected by climate change. A former co-founder of ground-breaking alternative music industry event, Un-Convention; independent record label founder and boss and musician, playing with many bands, but most notably cult Manchester band, The Fall.
She has been a consultant at many international festivals, including Primavera Pro, Barcelona, Shoko Festival in Zimbabwe and DoaDoa in Uganda. She has also held the position of Interim AP Director, Education Skills Fitter, EIT Culture and Creativity.
Kristjan Gunnarsson
↪ ArcanaBio
Kristjan has worked at the intersection of technology and science for over 13 years. He currently leads ArcanaBio, a life science startup he founded in 2018 together with scientists from deCODE genetics and Microsoft.
While AI is beginning to shape the future of healthcare, its full potential depends on better, more accessible diagnostic data. Today’s health data is often fragmented, difficult to track over time, and costly to collect—making it challenging to shift from reactive care to prevention. ArcanaBio is working to change this by developing a next-generation proteomics platform that can monitor a wealth of health related biomarker data from proteins over the long-term. Using non-invasive saliva testing as well as from other liquid biopsies, the platform combines nanophotonics and
AI in a reagent-free, highly multiplexed system designed to make real-time biomarker monitoring scalable, simple—and most importantly, affordable. The company recently received funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s, BioInnovation Institute and is based in Copenhagen, Reykjavik and Seattle. This early support is helping accelerate development of our first-generation platform and lay the foundation for long-term impact. ArcanaBio’s goal is to support a more proactive approach to health—helping individuals stay engaged with their wellbeing and giving clinicians earlier insights that can improve outcomes and reduceoverall healthcare costs.
Bob Crimmins
↪ Startup Haven
Bob Crimmins is a venture-capital veteran with over 25 years experience as a startup founder, investor, mentor, advisor, writer, speaker, and organizer. He founded Startup Haven as a passion project in 2006 to help founders and investors build meaningful relationships. Now with more than 2,500 vetted venture-scale founder and investor members across the U.S., Startup Haven has grown into the largest founder and investor community of its kind. In 2020, Startup Haven launched its first pre-seed startup accelerator and venture fund.
Bob’s entrepreneurial journey began at age 9, as employee number one in his parents' livestock business. Over the next decade, Bob repeated his employee-number-one role in his family's next three (startup) businesses, spanning manufacturing, retail and media. As a career software engineer, Bob’s journey in technology startups began in 1999 as co-founder and CTO of his first startup... sidetracking his PhD in philosophy. Over the years, Bob has co-founded four venture-backed startups and held leadership roles as CEO, CTO, CMO, and CRO. He has also been a highly-regarded mentor for numerous accelerator programs, guiding hundreds of startups. Bob’s deep and diverse experience have made him a respected figure in the entrepreneurial community and led him to develop GroundWork, a decision-making framework designed to help company founders systematically improve their probability of success. The GroundWork framework serves as the curriculum for the Startup Haven Accelerator and is the basis for selecting and supporting companies for the Startup Haven fund.
Linda Malm
↪ NVIDIA
Linda has worked many years in the Tech industry and has spent the last years at NVIDIA focusing on AI. Passionate to support the Nordic market, customers and partners to stay on top of innovation by embracing new technology. Her focus is to drive awareness, enablement and help create a future where AI can benefit companies and individuals.
Hjörtur Pálmi Pálsson
↪ Defend Iceland
Hjörtur is a cybersecurity professional with extensive experience across offensive and defensive security disciplines. His expertise includes penetration testing, purple teaming, threat detection and engineering, incident response, and more. Throughout his career as a security consultant, Hjörtur has worked closely with organizations in Europe and Asia—including Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and China—to help them build stronger defenses against evolving cyber threats. Currently, Hjörtur serves as Head of Community and Cybersecurity at Defend Iceland, where he leads nationwide initiatives in crowdsourced vulnerability hunting. In this role, he actively supports public and private organizations, helping them improve their security capabilities through practical guidance and collaboration within the cybersecurity community.
Clive Eley
↪ Rock Flour Company
Clive Eley is born and raised in the global south, Clive has always had a deep passion for planetary health. After studying a PhD in chemistry at Oxford focused on next-generation solar materials, Clive gained commercial experience as a McKinsey consultant before becoming a startup builder and investor for several family offices. Clive is now the CEO and co-founder of Rock Flour Company that he incubated while working for 2degrees, a Danish climate-focused family office. Rock Flour Company is pioneering the development of a vast, naturally-occurring, climate-positive mineral called "glacial rock flour" that permanently captures carbon while sustainably providing plant nutrients. With exclusive access to billion tonne deposits in south-western Greenland, we are on a mission to bring the amazing benefits of glacial rock flour to the world.