Impact Shakers at Untold Stories Budapest
Building a successful business and tackling a social or environmental problem at the same time is no longer fiction.
With climate change looming, our democracies in decline and a global pandemic wreaking havoc, our world is turning upside down at an unprecedented speed. We urgently need visionary entrepreneurs reimagining entire sectors and industries as we know them. Impact can no longer be a ‘nice-to-have’ in corporate CSR strategies. We need to make impact the very foundation of the businesses we are building right now.
In partnership with Untold Stories Budapest, we want to highlight some of the trailblazing companies combining profit with impact for a better tomorrow. We want to inspire startup entrepreneurs to use their business as a vehicle for change. We want to showcase that it is not only possible but our best survival strategy for the future.
In this impact track, we will feature some of Europe’s most intriguing pioneers pushing the boundaries in their fields.
Register here to attend: https://hopin.to/events/untold-stories-budapest-online-edition
Powered by Impact Shakers, a global impact entrepreneurship ecosystem tackling complex societal challenges through inclusive entrepreneurship.
Financing for a sustainable future
As an impact entrepreneur, venture capital is often not your idea of a sustainable investor. Blitzscaling and hustle porn might create different mental images than what they intend to describe in the unicorn lingo. Fortunately, there are actually many alternatives at your disposal. Alternative models to financing hold the key to a more sustainable future where impact companies can get the funding they need to create impact at scale.
In this talk, we will explore alternatives that have been around for a while as well as brand new ones offering a more inclusive and sustainable narrative of investment and company growth.
Join the discussion with Yonca Braeckman (Impact Shakers), Melanie Aronson (Panion), Nuno Brito Jorge (GoParity) & Kristof Bardos (Green Fox Academy) at UNTOLD Stories Budapest, focusing on how green businesses can find alternatives for venture capital.
Speakers:
Melanie Aronson, Founder & CEO of Panion
Melanie Aronson is the founder and CEO of Panion, a community management platform and app for meeting like-minded people through common interests. She has a bachelors in anthropology from Columbia University and a masters in documentary filmmaking from the School of Visuals Arts in NYC. She is also a Fulbright recipient. Melanie worked in sales for Apple for almost 3 years and for more than 10 years as a freelance filmmaker, photographer and designer. Melanie has lived an international life, residing in NYC, Barcelona, Florence, Malmö and now in Lisbon.
Panion: Panion is a community engagement platform for building global communities that values shared experience and impactful connection. Panion improves the way people connect through the internet and provides a kinder more respectful alternative to finding and building meaningful connections online.
Nuno Brito Jorge, Founder & CEO of GoParity
Nuno Brito Jorge is an environmental engineer and an innovation and sustainability enthusiast. He has worked in the European Parliament in Belgium, in innovation consulting in Spain and as a project manager for large renewable energy projects in Portugal before becoming a dedicated entrepreneur. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of GoParity, a crowdlending platform for sustainability projects and the president of the board of Coopérnico, Portugal’s first renewable energy cooperative.
GoParity: GoParity is an investment platform promoting sustainable projects by facilitating access to new ethical opportunities while sharing its benefits with everybody.
Kristos Bardos, CEO of Green Fox Academy
Kristof Bardos is a socially sensitive tech entrepreneur. As the CEO of Green Fox Academy, he leads a university-size education centre with campuses in Budapest and Prague with an ambitious team teaching future proof skills for the tech-driven labour market. He believes in experimental leadership models including non(less) hierarchical structures, de-centralised social collaboration and distributed, employee ownership models.
Earlier, he spent over a decade in the tech startup scene, while he founded startups and also worked for SMEs and corporations spanning three continents through his product development agency. He is the co-founder of an accelerator to connect CEE startups with global markets. In recent years, he has turned his attention towards mentorship, project-based education and the social impact of the ventures.
Green Fox Academy: Green Fox Academy is a coding bootcamp based in downtown Budapest. Their professional team can help you become a junior software developer. Moreover, once you have successfully graduated, they help you find your first job with placement guarantee. You can choose from online and on-campus, and from also full-time and part-time courses.
Moderator:
Yonca Braeckman, Founder & CEO of Impact Shakers
Yonca is the founder & CEO of Impact Shakers, a global impact ecosystem tackling complex societal challenges through inclusive entrepreneurship. She is a mission-driven entrepreneur and investor in underrepresented founders. She helped build the Belgian and European tech startup ecosystems and as a mentor at SXSW, Slush Tokyo, General Assembly, Village Capital, Shapers Impact Capital and startup programs across the globe, she guided many startups on their first steps abroad. She built a new smart city hub in Ghent, Belgium, with an in-house acceleration program called Watt Factory. She serves on the board of different non-profits and is the curator of TEDxGhent and the Techstars Startup Digest Reading List on Impact Entrepreneurship. Most recently she initiated the Horasis Young Visionaries for the Global Vision Community Horasis to add to her mission of lifting diverse social entrepreneurs.
How should we build products that change an entire industry?
Join this discussion with Nathan Williams (Minespider), Cinzia Silvestri (Bi/ond) & Jasna Rokegem (JasnaRok) discussing the future of food, fashion, & the raw material supply chain.
The Future of Health
Personalized medicine, genome engineering or synthetic biology are gaining traction at a breakneck speed in recent years. The future of health is an exciting area combining different disciplines to empower medical and health services. We invited a pioneer in the field, Bi/ond which was founded to empower biological innovations through the use of engineered microchips. Through advanced and customizable solutions, BI/OND reproduces dynamic cell culture environments for biologists and provides them with hardware solutions for cell-based assays. This way, biologists can predict with higher accuracy what happens inside the human body in the first phases of drug testing. A pioneer in the industry, Cinzia Silvestri, founder of Bi/ond will join us to discuss how innovative products can change the game.
Cinzia Silvestri, founder of Bi/ond
Cinzia believes that as every person is unique, our medicine should reflect that as well.
She is a resilient and creative entrepreneur who brings real and inclusive innovation to society by applying her passion and knowledge in microelectronics. She is the founder and CEO of Bi/ond, a deep-tech company that empowers diversity in biological studies by engineering microchips. Before going “Bi/ond”, she did her Ph.D. in microelectronics at the prestigious Technical University of Delft. During her academic experience, she realized that her mission is to shorten the distance between academics and industry. Cinzia strongly believes that entrepreneurial role models are needed. She built up a diverse and multidisciplinary team to address the significant challenges in the Organ-on-Chip field.
In 2018, she was named one of the 50 most inspiring women in Italy’s technology sector (InspiringFifty — Italy). Thanks to her vision, Bi/ond has been included in the Fund Right Initiative both as a women-lead company and diversity in the team.
The Future of Supply Chain
In today’s interconnected world supply chain is part of everything that we do. From the food you are eating through the clothes you are wearing to the gadgets you are using every day — they are all part of the big machinery of global supply chains. Unfortunately, not all of the materials used in production are sourced in an ethical way. In the case of mining the minerals for your phones or laptops, the situation is exceptionally perilous. Yet tracing back if the materials were sourced ethically can be a herculean task. A challenger, Nathan Williams from Minespider, attempts to make sourcing of critical minerals more transparent by using blockchain. He’ll join us and share his vision about the ethical future of supply chains.
Nathan Williams, Founder & CEO of Minespider
Nathan Williams is the Founder and CEO of Minespider, a blockchain system for tracking responsibly-sourced materials along the supply chain, with ongoing projects with Fortune 100 companies such as Volkswagen and Google. Nathan has facilitated blockchain workshops as a visiting expert for the UNECE and the World Economic Forum. He has been featured in Bloomberg, Forbes, Huffington Post, and Wired Germany.
The Future of Fashion
Can you imagine having one unique garment which becomes a living organism on its own acting as an extension of your body? The future of fashion is far beyond just clothes. A tech-infused garment can create a new way of human communication that reshapes our responses to our innermost feelings constructing a brand new dimension of interaction. Our speaker, Jasna Rokegem is fascinated by this idea and will join us to share her view on how visionary ideas can change the fashion industry.
Jasna Rokegem, Founder JasnaRok
Jasna Rokegem is an award-winning pioneer combining innovative fashion and cutting-edge technology. She founded JasnaRok, the first FashionTech design lab in Belgium, which was created to reconcile advanced technologies with interactive fashion and does so by collaborating with technology partners globally. Her visionary thinking helps decisionmakers in different industries imagine how to come up with more sustainable solutions.
Jasna is fascinated by space and the idea of having one unique garment which becomes a living organism on its own, an extension of our bodies which creates a new way of human communication that reshapes our responses to our innermost feelings, a brand new dimension of interaction.
Untold Stories Budapest is an annual event with a mission to create a learning and networking opportunity for startups. With a special focus on the CEE region, it connects founders from all over the world with tech professionals and VCs.
Speakers share their untold stories through talks, fireside chats, and breakout sessions, which are designed to be crisp, hands-on and 100% bullshit free.
This year in collaboration with Impact Shakers, Untold Stories will also bring you some sustainability and social entrepreneurship-related sessions.
You can register for the event for free on the link below:
https://hopin.to/events/untold-stories-budapest-online-edition
