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TechChill 2022

wed27aprAll Dayfri29TechChill 2022The main tech and startup event in the Baltics bridging the gaps in knowledge, skills and network!

TechChill 2022

Event Details

Why join and what to expect at TechChill 2022?

27-29 Apr 2022 | Riga, Latvia & Online

Physical events and real meetings – that is definitely the one reason why to attend TechChill 2022. And the other one is amazing content. And, of course, an opportunity to meet unicorns face to face. Here’s a sneak peek into this year’s agenda. 

There are three main pillars that all the agenda is built on. The first one is sustainability where we will talk also about survivalists. The second pillar is neo humans and everything around human and technology interaction. This is where we also will focus on health tech, edtech, gaming. And the last but not least – outliers and everything around startups building their products, selling and growing as well as investors investing in them.

The hottest unicorns from the region

TechChill is a boutique event where you can meet and greet everyone – be it a startup, investor, speaker, or media representative. Or even a unicorn. By the way, we will have some of the hottest unicorn representatives taking part in the event this year.

The local startup scene is going to be represented by currently the one and only unicorn in Latvia Printful. We will welcome CEO of the company Davis Siksnans on the stage. The big Estonian unicorn family will be represented by Bolt, Veriff, and Pipedrive. Lithuanians – by their unicorn Vinted.

Bolt, Veriff and Vinted representatives will join the panel and will discuss the journey to 10 billion and beyond. The case study of Vinted is going to be explored in detail by two investors Julian von Eckartsberg and John Greger from Burda Principal Investments. They will try to identify what was important for the company in the process of becoming a unicorn.

Web3 and NFT

This is hot. And we are going to have local as well as international stars of the future talking about the topic. Meet Arturs Kirtovskis who is the co-founder of the company Sigle. He recently announced that he successfully raised 500 000 EUR for his startup via NFT. “I think that the best explanation of web3 is the internet that belongs to users and not tech companies. If existing web infrastructures are oriented toward creating profit for tech companies then web3 is going to be all about users and their ability to generate profit for themselves. It is not a utopia anymore. It is reality. And NFT is part of this reality. I’ll share our story in TechChill on how we raised money through NFT and how this model is different from other traditional investment models,” says Arturs.

TechChill 2022 organized an event on this topic at Twitter Spaces where Arturs was joined by Ethan Pierse and you will have an opportunity to meet him in person at TechChill 2022. He is the Founding Partner of Borderless Ventures, director of The CryptoAssets Institute, evangelizing the Business of Blockchain and the Tokenized Economy. Ethan is also the host of the Blockchain Economy newsletter and podcast at cryptoassets.substack.com with more than 20 000 subscribers.

Sustainability and diversity

These two topics have been on a startup agenda for some time now. We will dig deeper into them by discussing, for example, how to reduce the gender gap in VC funding, how not to forget about sustainability while investing, and what is impact investing.

One of the hottest startups fighting for sustainability in the region is Single.Earth from Estonia that last year raised $7.9 million seed round. Startup tokenizes the world’s nature to protect it. Single.Earth creates financial incentives for landowners to keep their forests growing and other natural resources intact. “At TechChill I am going to talk about building a nature-backed economy, and how our nature-backed currency will enable the transformation to a fully sustainable future. I’d love to meet other entrepreneurs tackling some of the biggest challenges humans are facing today – like climate change, biodiversity loss, health, and others. TechChill is a unique opportunity to meet with other entrepreneurs, investors, and players in the space, build new relationships and catch up with old friends,” says Co-founder and CEO Merit Valdsalu.

Both topics are relevant to the startup community as well as corporations so we have invited both parties to talk about it. Circle K Latvia, the service station chain, will share their experience in cooperation with the Latvian startup Koffeco. They together are recycling coffee waste to produce fuel in the form of coffee briquettes. Whereas Michael Haase Founder and CEO of Plant Jammer will share his experience while working with the retail store chain RIMI. Plant Jammer educates and inspires people to eat sustainably in their homes while helping food brands, retailers, veggie box players, and influencers activate their tribes.

One more speaker that we would like to emphasize under these topics is Sebastian Greiss. He has 8+ years of experience in innovation and corporate venturing in large organizations as well as experience in next47 – a global venture firm with $1bn funding. Based on that vast knowledge, he relaunched StationX at Siemens Mobility towards a venture collaboration service to bridge the world between entrepreneurs and corporates to create game-changing partnerships.

Edtech

At this year’s TechChill 2022 let’s talk more about our future – namely education technologies. Ayaz Karimov is a doctoral researcher and product manager in edtech. In his speech, he will talk about gamification elements in education. Martin Sjöstrand will represent his company Lexplore, which has developed the first fully objective reading assessment, which by combining the latest in AI and eye-tracking technology, can analyse a child’s skills across key reading components, determine their attainment, and highlight specific difficulties in a matter of minutes.

Despite the recent shocking events in Ukraine, the team of TechChill is working on the program. Every week new speakers approve that they are willing to attend so stay tuned and let’s meet in person very soon!

SPEAKERS

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. 

Co-founder and COO at Vinted, a social marketplace for pre-loved clothing, that has taken the spot as Lithuania’s first tech unicorn. He is an angel investor to many other Lithuanian tech startups like Trafi, Interactio, Pixevia and Qoorio, and has previously served as Founding Partner at Practica Capital.

Agate is a General Partner at Norrsken VC, Europe’s largest impact venture capital fund focused on investing in rapidly scaling early stage start-ups that use technology to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges while building highly profitable businesses. She started her career in finance working in investment banking and private equity at Citigroup and Morgan Stanley in London and New York. She then started her start-up journey and was one of the first employees at BrickVest, a London based fintech start-up. In her free time she is most passionate about education and co-founded Bright Mentors, an edtech charity in London.

Originally from Belfast and now based in Barcelona, Patricia has a real passion for how shared ideas across communities and cultures can bring new initiatives and innovations for the future.

Rytis is a partner at Lightspeed. Joining in 2019 to help build out the firm’s European presence and global platform. He’s been part of the European tech scene as either entrepreneur, venture or angel investor for over a decade.

Martin Tajur is an angel investor with B2B SaaS business experience. He cares about how products look, feel and talk. Form and function are equally important, one defines the other. He worked at Skype between 2005—2008 both as a designer and as web front-end engineer. In 2010, he co-founded Pipedrive and helped form its product design, then worked in development and software architecture on a senior level as the CTO. Since 2016, he has been doing angel investing and helping 30+ startups get off the ground and grow 🚀

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.

Davis Siksnans is the CEO and co-founder of Printful, one of the industry’s largest print-on-demand drop shipping businesses with more than 1,800 employees and ten in-house fulfillment centers around the world. The company has fulfilled more than 40 million items since it launched in 2013.

Rodrigo is a serial entrepreneur and investor, having founded or co-founded 5 companies. Currently, he is a Founding Partner at Expon Capital (HQ in Luxembourg) and President at Sepulveda Capital (HQ in Paris), focused on impact investing at growth-stage. He’s been involved with 70+ transactions.

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.

Tuomas has almost 15 years of experience in venture capital and a long career already before joining Inventure in its early days in 2007. He has a deep understanding of the legal and financial aspects of building a business. He’s a big picture thinker who’s determined and driven to win, and always available for his portfolio companies.

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 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.

Nina Shariati is a sustainability strategist, UN expert in transparency and circular economy and lecturer.
She has over 17 years of work experience within retail, and has held leading global positions in production and manufacturing, strategic buying and assortment development, corporate sustainability, business development, innovation and startup scouting and implementation, new venture development, always with a focus on growth and operation optimization.

Nina Shariati has lived and worked in countries such as Bangladesh, China and South Korea – an exciting blend of industry knowledge and experience of living and working in different parts of the world.

A common thread during her career has been her ability to identify, anchor and implement new strategic business areas with strong links to sustainability in complex organizations.

One of her most recent contributions was the transparency layer on all H&M and H&M Homes own products. Today you can see on H&M’s site where a garment has been manufactured, right down to which factory and its address. This and other transparency initiatives that she has led have put the H&M group in a leading position in the industry. Her work on these issues has received considerable attention, including by the New York Times.

She has also worked on getting the company to implement strategies linked to recycled materials, which resulted in H&M 2016 being the world’s second largest buyer of recycled polyester.

Nina Shariati is currently working with business development and acceleration of strategic areas at the intersection of sustainability, technology and the business itself.

One of such areas are Smart & Connected Products with purpose of enabling Circular Economy.

Timmu Tõke is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ready Player Me. The company is building a cross-game avatar platform for the metaverse, used by 1500+ companies.

She is also the co-founder of the Greentech Alliance, a community of 1000+ startups which are connected to over 500+ advisors from VC, media and business.

Prior to Plan A, she worked in investment banking, venture capital and fintech in Asia and Europe. She was recently announced as Marshall Fund Fellow for 2021, 100 Top Women in Germany 2020 (Focus Magazin), Top 50 Women in Tech in Germany 2021 (Handelsblatt).

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

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.

Mirella joined Seedcamp in November 2021 as Network & Community Manager. Her role is to support Seedcamp’s founders post investment by understanding their needs and how best to support them; and to further accelerate the power of the Seedcamp Nation through their mentor network. Before Seedcamp, Mirella spent two years building the Platform offering post-investment support for LAUNCHub Ventures, working hands-on with founders from Central Eastern Europe. Her career started as the Community Engagement Manager at Google for Startups in London.

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.

Will joined Northzone three years ago as Chief of Staff to one of the Partners, PJ Parson. He is now a VP in the investment team and invests across Consumer, Gaming, Web3, and Fintech.

Kristine Nagle is the Founder and Sustainability advisor of Impact House. Impact House is helping fast-growing tech companies launch and scale sustainability. Her experience includes managing accelerator programs at Startup Wise Guys, gaining a global network as the CEO of TechChill, and recently building a sustainability strategy for the first Latvian unicorn, Printful. 

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Time

april 27 (Wednesday) - 29 (Friday)(GMT-11:00)

Location

Hanzas Perons

Hanzas iela 16A, Vidzemes priekšpilsēta, Rīga, LV-1045, Latvia