The MIT Startup Exchange Lightning Talks and Startup Exhibit listed below are part of the full agenda for 2022 MIT-Aalto Symposium in Finland, running from 8:00 AM - 4:10 PM, EST.
Finland has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2035. Helsinki’s pledge is set for 2030. Most organizations and states have made pledges that materialize decades away. Finland is therefore leading the way in these important commitments, crucial to fight the existential threat of climate change. Constant innovation, coupled with rapid commercialization, are key to the success of these ambitious goals. Great challenges abound, and these are coupled with numerous opportunities for profitable business outcomes for Finnish companies – opportunities that are not limited to Finland but applicable around the globe.
The MIT Industrial Liaison Program and the MIT Startup Exchange, in collaboration with Aalto University, are conducting a one-day symposium at the Dipoli center in the heart of the university campus. MIT and Aalto University faculty and startups, as well as representatives from Finnish industry, will discuss the business and technology challenges needed to further accelerate sustainable innovation. Launching and commercializing these innovations quickly will ensure that Finnish companies and institutions establish a leadership role in the crucial decades ahead.
As our keynote presentation, Prof. Carlo Ratti will discuss his team’s project, Helsinki’s Hot Heart, award winner of the 2021 Helsinki Energy Challenge. The project is an innovative and transformative energy storage system to provide district heating to the city. The MIT-Aalto Symposium will be an opportunity for the Finnish business community to interact directly with Prof. Ratti on this venture, intimately linked to life in Helsinki. Participants from the business community will also be able to engage with other faculty presenters, startups and with each other, an unusual occurrence in the past two years.
MIT Professional Education and Aalto Executive Education will also offer opportunities for continued engagement and learning for the Finnish corporate community.
Jan is a quantum physicist and co-founding CEO of IQM, building next-generation quantum computers. IQM has assembled an exceptional team of international quantum experts developing on-premises systems for HPC and special applications. IQM has raised more than EUR 71 million in funding, including the largest seed investment round in Finnish history. Jan did his doctorate on superconducting quantum circuits at TU Munich and worked as a Marie-Curie Fellow in Helsinki at Aalto University, where he holds the title of docent. In 2020, Capital magazine selected him as one of 40 under 40 in Germany and he received the prestigious entrepreneurship award from the KAUTE Foundation. Jan is in the Board of the European Innovation Council EIC, the European Quantum Industry Consortium QuIC, and member of the German Federal Economic Senate (Bundeswirtschaftssenat).
Dario Forneris is the Business Design and Sustainability Lead at Nordic Bioproducts Group, a start-up with its roots at Aalto University. In Nordic Bioproducts Group, Dario is developing circular business concepts with design thinking and eco-design toolkits. He is working constantly to build a design-driven culture within the company’s R&D team and to define innovative methodologies during product development.
George leads Product & Partnerships at Gradient. He brings over 20 years of product management and engineering experience from the networking, processor, and semiconductor markets. He held senior executive and marketing positions at Qualtre, Bluespec, and others where he led product teams, and engineering positions at LSI Logic and IBM, where he developed microprocessors and operating system software. He has a BSEE and MSEE in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard University.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with a minor in Mathematics, I worked for ExxonMobil for almost 9 years in various roles across commercial shipping, refining, and logistics. My headquarters experience included optimizing regional marine fleets to move crude oil & refined products most efficiently, global digital project design and implementation, and managing regional inventory levels and supply chains for all North America specialty refined products. While at the Baton Rouge refinery, I led several projects at the intersection of manufacturing and logistics that developed new products, increased sales, and improved the customer experience without sacrificing refinery throughput or cost in the specialty refined products & asphalt markets. I have been the Business Development Lead at Amogy since December 2021, where my role is to establish, develop, and maintain connections with industry partners as well as to develop our strategy and lead some of our maritime projects.
Jordan is the CEO and Founder of Mobilus Labs. As an Inventor, Engineer, and Entrepreneur he has focused his career on developing intelligent systems to operate in extreme environments. His experience in this field includes working with MIT, Lockheed Martin, and Co-Directing the NASA Frontier Development Lab. He’s a member of the Royal Academy of Engineers, former TEDx speaker and enjoys working with underrepresented youth in STEM fields. Jordan received his degrees from MIT and Stanford University in Aeronautical / Astronautical Engineering with a focus on Ocean and Space Robotics.
Henry is the driving force behind the core Leela AI software. He worked on common-sense AI learning and computer vision systems at the MIT AI Lab, and developed distributed location-based services together with a wearable sensor network architecture at NTT DoCoMo. Most recently he worked on scalable cloud sensor-data analysis at Google Nest Labs. He is a graduate of MIT (SB, MSc).
Disclaimer: MIT Startup Exchange can make introductions that ideally provide open ended discussions in order to share mutual interests and potentially create common ground that incite the parties to collaborate. MIT Startup Exchange introductions may eventually lead to mutual partnerships, but that is not in any way guaranteed by MIT, MIT Corporate Relations, MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) or MIT Startup Exchange, which takes no responsibility for these outcomes and no formal part in such discussions following our introduction. MIT Startup Exchange and its activities and events are not for purposes of soliciting investment or offering securities.