For the first instalment in our VC and Investment focused series, we are extremely excited to be joined by the awesome man that is, Hampus Monthan Nordenskjöld. Hampus is a Founding Partner at TrueSight Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in pre-seed and seed stage startups in Europe and the US, with a focus on the Nordics and UK markets. They invest in ambitious founders and teams going after large markets and solving important problems with technology. Truesight support founding teams by advising on strategic decisions, providing relevant industry contacts and helping to raise next rounds as they continue to scale.

Hampus' story is a very interesting one; he is very open about saying that when he was younger he had no idea that he would go on to co-found his own VC company. After originally following the professional sports route within Swedish football, Hampus went on to follow his burning passion for building companies before moving to Hawaii to study as an undergrad. This led him to move to New York, which led him into the crazy world of Wall Street, and then onto a number of years spent between Asia and Sweden whilst he studied for his MBA and ultimately, his move into Venture Capitalism.

Today, Hampus and his co-founders are involved in a number of the most exciting and high-potential tech businesses in Europe. They look, first and foremost, for the person that they can invest in. Whilst the business idea or the problem their partners are looking to build is important, nothing is more important than finding the right people to work with. As a dedicated team of 4, TrueSight are still relatively small but bring a huge amount of power and support to their partners. They love to be involved as much as possible to really help their startups grow and are on hand for any questions, big or small, that may be required.

TrueSight have seen great success very early in their life and have huge ambitions and plans for the future. They are looking to invest in more businesses all the time and have huge aspirations for where they want to be as a business.

Hampus would encourage anyone seeking investment to reach out to see how he and his team may be able to help. Securing funding is difficult, challenging and super invasive. But, once the partnership is right, in TrueSight you have the right partner that is by your side.

This is a super interesting episode for any leaders and founders going through this process right now. We hope you enjoy it!

Wow...do we have a special episode for you today! We were thrilled, delighted and excited to catch up with our most recent Leaders & Founders guest, Amanda Thomson. Not only is she an absolutely lovely and brilliant person, but a seriously successful entrepreneur with a passion for changing her industry for the better and delivering world-class products.

Amanda is CEO and Founder of Thomson & Scott, voted one of Business Insider’s Coolest People in Food & Drink 2019. She is leading the global shift to delicious alcohol-free drinking with her game-changing Noughty - the first top quality organic, vegan, halal non-alcoholic low sugar sparkling wine.

Following (and during) her very successful career as an Arts Broadcaster for the BBC, Thomson had the desire and vision to launch the business. But, that meant moving her young family to Paris, where she studied for her Diploma in Wine at the renowned Le Cordon Bleu School. Just another thing about Amanda is that she always succeeds; at Le Cordon Blue, she was Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 and became an EY Winning Woman.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Worldfavor are an exciting sustainability business based in Stockholm, Sweden on a mission to help founders and business leaders all over the world make more conscious and educated decisions when looking to improve their value and supply chain.

Through their digital sustainability hub, they harness the power of huge data sets to allow their partners a transparent, real-time view of their entire value chain and how the decisions they make may impact their chain and ultimately, the planet. From a tiny apartment in Stockholm to where they are today, Worldfavor help more than 20,000 users in more than 60 countries globally make hundreds of high-value and high-impact decisions on a daily basis that help transform the value chain all over the world.

Frida Emilsson is a Co-Founder and COO at Worldfavor. As long as she can remember, she wanted to do something that made a positive difference to the world. Although she and her co-founders didn't exactly know what that was, they quickly understood the huge impact - both positive and negative - that corporate businesses have on people, suppliers and other businesses all over the world. When WF is coupled with corporate decision makers who genuinely want to make positive change in their value chain, the Worldfavor platform empowers leaders to make decisions that genuinely help make the world a better place for so many people across the planet.

After years of incredibly hard work to gather data and study supply chains globally, what they have built is one of the most powerful digital hubs for supply and value chain the world has ever seen.

And they are just getting started!

Frida talks us through some of the highs and lows that Founders experience, the good and the bad and also, just what it means to be a successful Leader and Founder. She gives a very open and honest view on what startup life can be like, what to look for when choosing the right investors and as always, so amazing parting advice to founders and startups just getting started with their journey!

Fredrik Ulvenholm is the CEO of Vilja Solutions, an exciting and leading Swedish-based FinTech organisation that help their clients and customers build beautiful cloud-based core banking platforms that get them to market extremely quickly and reliably.

Their future-proof platform ensures compliance, automates internal flows and offers a high level of customer service. It has the shortest time-to-market for launching new products and services, which enables banks and credit institutions to quickly and easily launch new revenue streams while focusing on creating the best banking experience for their customers.

Vilja was formed in 2007 by a group of IT Banking experts who were tired of the legacy environments they had become so accustomed to. So they set to work and started building. They then successfully designed a brand-new cutting-edge banking platform, completely free from legacy debt and knew they had something unique to market. They quickly started to build products for their clients and firmly believe that their core values are: to be innovative, to be committed and to be trustworthy.

Fred personally joined Vilja Solutions in 2016 after a successful career in IT and Senior Leadership across Stockholm, Jakarta and San Francisco. In the US, he was recently the CEO of Ice House, a software development incubator that designs and develops apps for a range of innovative startups and market-leading tech firms. He has always had a very strong understanding of how to grow IT businesses, how to scale teams and also, how to quickly improve sales figures and grow revenue streams. He has a wealth of experience within FinTech and is a true leader in the Swedish FinTech revolution.

His approach is very much about true partnership with their clients and Fredrik speaks at length about the care he holds for their partners and that, when you partner with Vilja, they are very much a part of your family and do all that they can for you. They are also working with customers all over Europe as well, so if you are in any European (or global) city and want to speak to Vilja, I urge you to do so!

What a great guy, I hope you enjoy it!

This episode is part of season 2 and the 1st in a mini series around Artificial Intelligence.  In this episode we welcome Dr Sindhu Joseph, Founder and CEO of CogniCor.

CogniCor are a Cognitive Virtual Assistant Platform, recently named IDC Innovator in conversational AI Platforms 2018, the company has deployed its solution in leading banks, wealth managers, and insurance firms across the globe. 

Sindhu was a fascinating woman to speak with, she has a Ph.D in AI, was a finalist for Google's Anita Borg Women in Technology Award, and is the inventor of 6 US Patents in AI.

A hugely impressive person, Sindhu talks through how the idea for CogniCor came about and her desire to find a solution for better service within the business industry using AI. 

Thank you for listening and enjoy the podcast.

Tom/Adam - Gathered & Found 

On this episode of Leaders & Founders, we're bringing you the story of an incredible Swedish-based FoodTech company tackling the huge issue of food waste at food retailers and supermarkets: Whywaste.

Whywaste was founded with the singular vision to eliminate the food waste at food retailers. To do this, they develop software solutions to improve in-store processes for grocery retailers. They launched our first solution, Semafor, in December 2015 and have had amazing success in the proceeding years that followed. Semafor is an advanced date-management solution which helps shop workers accurately record and manage sell-by dates.

Since this initial launch, their portfolio has grown too and now includes solutions for Deli, Bread, Fresh departments and an incredibly powerful back-office analytics tool. Today, their products are being used with stores of all sizes from more than 30 retail chains across 15 markets across the world.

Whywaste have also formed a food waste coalition with two of our previous guests, Karma and OLIO. They aim to tackle the food waste issue at scale and to help provide new opportunities for their friends and partners at all levels of the value chain. True founder and startup grit and passion!

For this episode, we were joined by Kristoffer Hagstedt, Whywaste's CEO & Co-Founder and Ben Holden, Head of International Sales and Marketing.

We hope you enjoy!

OLIO are fast becoming one of the UK's most well-known brands and a huge driving force in driving down food waste across the planet. So, we were more than excited when we got the chance to sit down with Tessa Clarke to understand more about OLIO and the story of her business for our FoodTech & Sustainability series!

After a very successful CxO career in a number of industries, Tessa knew that she wanted to make a bigger impact to people's lives. After struggling to give away perfectly good - great even - product when she moved house, she was amazed that there wasn't an app for such a thing. After pitching the idea to Saasha, her Co-Founder and friends and family, they knew they were onto something.

So, they decided to take the plunge and make it happen. They started to conduct market research and spoke with focus groups and were quickly shocked by the real facts and figures behind food waste and sustainability and the damage it causes to the planet.

Here are some of the facts that they found:

- £15Bn of household food is wasted each year

OLIO is a free to use app that allows neighbours and local residents to share food for free via the app on your mobile. The user interface and experience is on point and is extremely easy to use and the adoption for the product is becoming very exciting. After trying to hold back the app to other geographies until it was more mature, they couldn't stop the requests anymore, so are now helping millions of people in countries all over the world through their app.

OLIO are also a huge force in helping those that are less fortunate and living in poverty through their food waste and community hero schemes. By signing up with OLIO as a volunteer, you can play an active role in helping get food which would literally just be destroyed, to those that really need it. What an amazing company!

They are growing quickly and have since made some amazing partnerships with the likes of Tesco to really drive their expansion to drive down food waste and change the way that we all live and we cannot wait to see some of the amazing things they go on to achieve!

We loved speaking with Tessa, what an incredible lady and an incredible company. Please enjoy!

Oh yeah - and go and download OLIO!

As part of our FoodTech & Sustainability series, we recently had the opportunity to catch up with a global leader in the world of AgriTech and a true flag-bearer for food sustainability and improvement, Matija Zulj, CEO & Founder of Agrivi.

But, it is not without its' challenges. The average age of farmers is 50+ years old, with 1/3 of farmers globally being >65 years of age, so the audience with which they work are often cautious to change the way they have worked for decades. The adoption of their product however, has been inspiring, with so many great farmers and producers eager to improve the way they work for the better.

For the second episode of our FoodTech & Sustainability series, we were delighted to be joined by Mo Khodadadi.

Mo is the CEO & Founder of SATIS.AI., a sophisticated AI-driven tech company that help restaurants and food chains to make better decisions in food supply chain. Through a series of computer-vision based models and machine learning technology, they help businesses to become more efficient, safer and a more enjoyable place to work. They are also on a mission to - in his own words - feed the world in the next 10 years. Amazing!

Satis.AI were born at the start of 2020 and have some huge plans and ambitions for their journey over the next few months and years. They have already taken some huge strides in their quest to improve the food supply chain and we personally can't wait to hear about their future success and what is to come!

We hope you enjoy this episode, thanks for listening in!

Yuri Misnik is a highly experienced senior technology and thought leader in the world of banking, cloud, data and is a passionate technologist. and innovator at heart.

Yuri moved to Abu Dhabi at the backend of 2019, where he took a position as Group Technology Officer and Member of the Group Executive Committee at First Abu Dhabi Bank. In this position, he aims to help FAB continue to evolve and develop their service offering to their customers, whilst also innovating the technology landscape at the bank and improving their platform services and technical capability.

Yuri is also an Executive Technology Advisor for KKR & Co. and sits on the CIO Advisory Committee at Amazon Web Services. Prior to joining FAB, Yuri was the CIO at National Australia Bank and was the Digital CIO at HSBC, where he led a team of around 5,000 technologists globally.

It goes without saying that Yuri knows first hand how to lead global organisations and brings his passion for technology and innovation with him everywhere that he goes. In this episode, we get an introduction into Yuri's incredible story so far and also, start to hear some of his thoughts around banking, innovation in FS and learn some of the initiatives and projects he is working on with FAB.

One hour unfortunately wasn’t anywhere near enough time to really get under the hood of the man himself, so we are excited to announce that we are hosting another episode with Yuri where we will go more into the realm of open data and real innovation within banking.

We hope you enjoy the episode!