Ash Pournouri

Kwara is a Nairobi and Berlin based startup turning credit unions into modern digital banks. Founded in 2018 in Kenya, our mission is to enable the worlds 3 billion underserved to become financially healthy. Backed by Breega, Softbank, Norrsken, FINCA Ventures, Finxparx and many more, today Kwara serves over 200,000 end clients.

Triller Inc. owns Triller, an AI-powered music video app that allows users to create professional-looking video in a matter of seconds: Amplify.ai, a leading customer engagement and messaging platform; Triller TV, a premier global PPV, AVOD, and SVOD streaming site; and Thuzio, a leader in B2B premium influencer events and experiences. Pairing music culture with sports, fashion, entertainment, and influencers through a 360-degree view of content and technology, Triller Inc. encourages its influencers to post the content created on the app across different social media platforms and uses proprietary AI technology to push and track their content virally to affiliated and non-affiliated sites and networks, enabling them to reach millions of additional users.

Foodiq is a unique food manufacturer that can both develop and produce plant-based products. Foodiq supports brands to accelerate the shift to plant-based eating. Our unique manufacturing processes provide clients healthier and better-tasting products in any category.

MindMed is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel products to treat brain health disorders, with a particular focus on psychiatry, addiction, pain and neurology. Our mission is to be the global leader in the development and delivery of treatments that unlock new opportunities to improve patient outcomes. We are developing a pipeline of innovative drug candidates, with and without acute perceptual effects, targeting the serotonin, dopamine and acetylcholine systems. MindMed trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol MNMD and on the Canadian NEO Exchange under the symbol MMED.

Akash Systems, Inc. is a venture-backed, late-stage, Bay Area company that makes and sells Diamond Cooled GPU-based servers to AI companies, Cloud Service Providers, and data centers worldwide. The deep tech company pioneered Diamond Cooling® technology wherein the world’s most thermally conductive material, lab-grown diamond, is brought into intimate contact with GPUs – the densest heat source chip in a modern high compute server. The resulting Akash server is one that exhibits more compute in FLOPS (>50%) and FLOPS per Watt (by 2x) than any other server in the market today. Akash’s Diamond Cooled servers also reduce the energy cost of cooling the entire data center since the servers can operate in an ambient temperature of up to 120oF. The company’s lead investors include Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. Akash Systems recently deployed its Diamond Cooling® technology in space, where many Akash satellite radios are now in operation.

Black Lines simplifies the process of building trusted relationships with talent and eliminates the hurdles of traditional talent outreach by streamlining collaboration opportunities into a curated in-app feed for Members. By creating unique offerings for Members to opt into, Brands and Collaborators can spark authentic collaborations directly with talent.

Mos is on a mission to tear down financial barriers to opportunity. Billions in financial aid goes unclaimed every year--we connect students with that money to graduate debt free. We’re shipping fast, growing rapidly, and backed on our quest by world-class investors like Sequoia, Lux Capital, Stephen Curry, and more.

Audius​ mission is to create a fully decentralized community of artists, developers, and listeners collaborating to share and defend the world’s music. To find out more, please visit: https://audius.org and https://audius.co Artists Deserve More.

Household name retailers use Bolts leading commerce platform to convert, retain, and delight more shoppers—all within the merchants existing tech stack and brand identity. Learn how it works here: https://www.bolt.com/bolt-ignite Apply to join us here: https://www.bolt.com/careers/

The Flex Co. is the top-selling sustainable period care brand known for creating a more comfortable period for everyone. Our product portfolio, including Flex Disc™, Flex Cup™, Flex Reusable Disc™, Softdisc®, and Softcup®, is sold in over 30,000 retailers in the United States. Based in Venice, California, The Flex Co. is FDA-registered and is the sole designer of its products which are manufactured in the United States and Canada.

Indify enables promising artists to get the funding they need to grow their careers without a traditional record deal. Launched in 2015 as an artist-discovery platform for music industry talent scouts, indify is built around a proprietary discovery algorithm that identifies artists poised for breakout success. Today this same technology allows us to find artists likely to succeed with direct investment. Equity and ownership are central to indify’s work. Every deal struck through our platform is governed by three principles, designed to avoid unfair business arrangements: *Artists own their masters: They made the music. They own it. *Fair deals only: Artists always get 50% or more of profits post-recoupment *Artists keep creative control: It’s their career. They call the shots. Founded in 2015 by Shav Garg, Connor Lawrence, and Matt Pavia, indify’s mission is to build the infrastructure for a new music business. Indify is headquartered in New York City and built by a distributed team. Learn more at indify.io

Bonfire Studios is an independent game studio in Costa Mesa, California. Our purpose is to build friendships by creating legendary experiences that bring players closer together - united in a sense of adventure, exploration and fellowship.

At CONVENDUM, your success is our success. By providing you and your organization with flawless service, the latest technical solutions, and luxurious interiors we make it our mission to create the right conditions for your business to grow and reach its full potential.

Soundverse is a music creation platform that leverages GenAI to democratize music production, empowering aspiring musicians to create high-quality music with minimal effort. Through its revolutionary conversational design paradigm, users can talk to the AI to create music while having full control over the arrangement. Soundverse believes in unlocking creative potential, enabling users to share their stories through music and transforming the way people connect and communicate through music.

We work with world-class researchers and scientists to industrialise, commercialize and scale innovations that can fundamentally transform the future for people and the planet. Launcher offers access to impact capital, world-class recruitments and scalable growth structure.

Kwara is a Nairobi and Berlin based startup turning credit unions into modern digital banks. Founded in 2018 in Kenya, our mission is to enable the worlds 3 billion underserved to become financially healthy. Backed by Breega, Softbank, Norrsken, FINCA Ventures, Finxparx and many more, today Kwara serves over 200,000 end clients.

Nordic Angels is an initiative looking to unite the angels in the Nordic startup ecosystem to increase both bandwidth and leverage. The definition of an angel is any business angel who is contributing to the startup ecosystem as either an investor, board member, advisor, and/or in any other way invests time, capital, or effort to help the startup scene thrive. The Nordic Angels platform includes events, data collection, data sharing, networking tools, and other digital products to help generate powerful connections, insights, and efficiency within the community. Nordic Angels was created by Ash Pournouri and Andreas Grape in the year of the pandemic, in August of 2020, as the need for community and collaboration became more apparent than ever. As the world took a giant leap into digitalisation, there was a clear need to do the same for the startup community with no competent solution in sight. The vision stems from a necessity to build a stronger presence and position for capital, competence, and community in local startup ecosystems, rather than seeing the Nordic region being disfavoured for larger financial markets.