Our speakers

Baptiste Bellot-Gurlet is a Research Manager at Runway, where he works on the models behind the company's video generation and world simulation systems. Previously, he was CTO of Kinetix, building foundation models for human motion generation.

Lisa Smith is Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of Prewave, a TU Wien spin-off and supply chain intelligence platform headquartered in Vienna, with over 200 employees. Prewave is the only European provider among the global Top 10 in AI-powered supply chain intelligence, with customers including BMW, Hilti, Lufthansa and Ferrari. In her role as VP Public Sector she workss with the European Commission as well as Member States on supply chain resilience. Lisa holds a PhD in the application of AI for supply chain risk identification and since then leads Prewave's mission to make tomorrow’s supply chains more transparent, resilient and sustainable.

Anthony leads go-to-market at Black Forest Labs, the team behind FLUX. Fifteen years selling compute and its applications at every layer: Intel silicon, SoftBank robotics, AWS cloud, now frontier multimodal models. 

Elisa is the CEO and Co-founder of Saturn Dynamics, a research company building efficient world models for embodied intelligence and providing the rich generative simulation infrastructure needed to train and validate next-generation autonomous systems.

Before co-founding Saturn Dynamics, Elisa founded an AI company that worked with Fortune 500 companies and customers globally, scaling the team and leading its US growth in under three years. She first entered the industry at 18, as intern in a deeptech startup while still in high school, and later studied Computational Chemistry.

Alex Combessie is co-founder & co-CEO of Giskard, a testing & protection platform for AI agents.

Giskard helps AI and cybersecurity teams test & secure their agents against prompt injection, hallucinations and safety issues. Founded in Paris in 2021 with Jean-Marie John-Mathews (PhD), Giskard used by some of Europe's leading enterprises, including BNP Paribas, SG, Michelin and Doctolib, to control the operational risks of their AI agents.

Before Giskard, Alex spent 5 years at Dataiku developing systems for mission-critical AI deployments. That's where he experienced, up close as a Data Scientist and AI engineer, how AI systems tends to break once in production: silent regressions, hidden security vulnerabilities, evals that miss the failures users actually encounter. This is why he founded Giskard: to ensuring companies can deploy AI with trust.

Founder / CEO / Chief Scientist of Speridlabs, AI and cybersecurity researcher, hired at 17 by Telefonica as a researcher at IdeasLocas team, cybersecurity book author, and has been speaker at Europe most important Hacking CONs. Speridlabs is building foundational Spatial and 3D generative world models.

Andreas Geiger is currently the CEO of KE:SAI, a new frontier open-science lab with focus on physical AI. He is also a professor at the University of Tübingen and the Tübingen AI Center. Prior to 2018, he was a visiting professor at ETH Zürich and an independent W2 group leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen. He studied at KIT, EPFL and MIT, and received his PhD degree in 2013 from KIT. His research interests are at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, NLP and robotics. He has created some of the most influential benchmarks in computer vision, including KITTI and KITTI-360. He has popularized neural coordinate-based representations for 3D vision tasks. His team also won several self-driving challenges. He has been an ELLIS founding board member and created the ELLIS PhD and PostDoc program, the largest AI/ML network in Europe. His work has been recognized with the Longuet-Higgins Prize, the Mark Everingham Prize, the IEEE PAMI Young Investigator Award, the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize and the German Pattern Recognition Award. He received 7 best paper awards and 2 ERC grants.

Lucile Ritchie is Director of Product & Solutions at Entalpic, a French AI deep-tech company accelerating the discovery of next-generation materials for semiconductor manufacturing. With a background spanning business, data, and product strategy, she has spent the past eight years working at the intersection of technology and innovation in the French startup ecosystem.

At Entalpic, Lucile leads product strategy and customer programs, translating cutting-edge AI and computational chemistry into solutions for industrial R&D. She also oversees the company's positioning, marketing, and data strategy.

In her talk, Lucile will explore how advances in generative AI, machine learning, and quantum simulations are transforming materials discovery, and what it takes to bring these technologies from research to real-world industrial impact.

AI everywhere: reinventing Spotify's core strategies

Hector is co-founder and CEO of SpiNNcloud Systems, a deep-tech company providing brain-inspired microchips and systems for the new-generation of sparse AI models. With a vision of disrupting computing via extreme scale, event-based communication, and programmable dynamics, Hector has contributed to the positioning of SpiNNcloud among the most relevant hardware startups in Germany, leading the company to deploy systems across major institutions in the US and Europe. Hector is a Fellow of the Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Embedded Composite Artificial Intelligence (SECAI). His B.Sc. degree is in Electronics Engineering, and he is a graduate of the MIT and Masdar Institute Cooperation Program from Abu Dhabi, where he obtained an M.Sc. degree in Microsystems after his research in AI hardware for EEG-based detection of emotions. At TU Dresden, his PhD studies focused on the chip design of AI-enabled Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) for automotive radars. He has held industrial positions as Senior Engineer of Instrumentation and Control in different countries and has been the recipient of international academical honors and awards. Hector has authored or co-authored more than 23+ archival articles, he is the inventor of a patent within the cognitive radar field, and has also been part of numerous press communications from prominent sources such as IEEE Spectrum, the BBC, Arm, EE Times, Sandia National Labs, eeNews Europe, Silicon Angle, the Human Brain Project, among others.

Juraj Janosik is Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at ESET. He joined ESET in 2008 as a Malware Analyst, currently leading the Automated Detection and Artificial Intelligence program responsible for applied research and incorporation of AI and ML into our products as well as backend pipelines with a high level of complexity, including data lakes, telemetry systems, and autonomous detection systems design. He was a member of several international working groups focused on botnet eradication and presented at several international private and public conferences including RSA, MWC, CARO and NATO events.

Agents that actually do the work: how autonomy changes the way we build

As Chief Operating Officer at Scaleway, Albane oversees the company’s global operations, including customer care, the supply and hardware chain across its 12 data centers in Europe, and all strategic operational projects. She drives major transformations to position Operations, Hardware, Customer Care, and Finance as key enablers of innovation and international growth.

Before joining Scaleway, Albane built her expertise at L'Oréal and LVMH, where she developed a strong sense of rigor and excellence. She is recognized as an inspiring leader, able to blend strategic vision, financial insight, and a collaborative approach.

A graduate of Kedge Business School, she leads by example and supports others as a mentor and advisor, notably through initiatives like Startup Weekend Women. At Scaleway, she also drives CSR projects aligned with the company’s commitment to responsible innovation.

Raffi Krikorian is Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, where he leads the push to make open source AI as capable and accessible as closed alternatives — so the future of AI is owned by the people who use it. He publishes Owners, Not Renters, a newsletter on open source AI. Previously he was CTO of Emerson Collective, the first CTO of the Democratic National Committee, director of Uber's self-driving car unit, and VP of Engineering at Twitter.

Pavan joined Nokia in Feb 2026 as CTO of Data Center and AI Networking. Pavan is responsible for driving Nokia's technology strategy and architecture for data centers, accelerate execution of IP/Optical integration, and ensure we’re delivering scalable, differentiated solutions to our customers aligned with our business priorities. 

Pavan brings over 26 years of deep expertise in end-to-end network architecture, and technology strategy, with a strong track record of shaping large scale, next-generation solutions for telcos, hyperscalers, and global enterprises.  Prior to Nokia, Pavan worked at  Juniper Networks in various leadership roles, including leading global team of Technical Solutions Architecture. His background includes extensive work spanning Networking for AI-DCs, large scale routing, cloud native networking, Telco cloud, AIOps, and advanced network security. Pavan has a master's degree in information and data science from UC Berkeley.

Sébastien Le Roy is a Partner at Serena, with deep expertise in AI, energy, physical infrastructure, and SaaS. He invests from seed to Series B, and has backed companies including Jimmy Energy, Formality, Lifen, and Underdog.

Sébastien has also authored several reference publications for the tech ecosystem. In 2020, he introduced the European SaaS Benchmark, a leading study on the financial performance metrics of SaaS companies in Europe. In 2026, he co-published the French AI Report 2026 with Galion and Chausson Partners, examining the key challenges, financing trends, and emerging champions of France's AI landscape. He's also the author of the Serena Ultimate VC List, a guide launched in 2016 for entrepreneurs seeking venture capital firms that align with their vision and needs.

Khaled Maalej is a French entrepreneur and engineer, a graduate of École Polytechnique and Télécom Paris. He built his expertise across several leading semiconductor companies, before founding DiBcom, which was later successfully acquired. Driven by a relentless focus on pushing the boundaries of chip design, he then joined forces with a team of seasoned semiconductor engineers to found Vsora, a Paris-based deep-tech company competing in the global AI semiconductor race. VSORA designs high-performance AI inference chips for next-generation AI infrastructure.

Anaïs is a Venture Principal on IRIS's early-stage team. She invests in ambitious early-stage French start-ups with a focus on AI, developer tools, data infrastructure, automation, industrial tech, and proptech. She also owns AI tooling internally at IRIS and codes herself.

She joined IRIS in 2023 and backed Adaptive ML, Hopia, Qovery, and Weefin. Adaptive ML, a reinforcement learning platform for enterprise AI, was acquired by Datadog in June 2026.

Lars Maaløe is the Co-Founder and CTO of Corti, a pioneering AI company building infrastructure and foundation models for healthcare developers. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the Technical University of Denmark and serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Machine Learning at DTU, with research focused on understanding complex data sources like audio and images through deep neural networks. After building his technical expertise at companies including Apple and Issuu, Lars co-founded Corti to bring machine learning to the moment it matters most in healthcare. Today, Lars leads Corti's technical vision, building the specialized infrastructure and foundation models that power real-time clinical support across the U.S. and Europe. 

Beyond Air Cooling: new frontiers in AI hardware design

Hugo Mercier is the co-founder and CEO of Twin, the platform where people vibe code an entire business: agents that find customers, produce the deliverables, and run the back office. Six months after its public launch, Twin powers thousands of paying businesses — agencies, realtors, contractors, recruiters — with over 100,000 users and 3 millions of agent tasks executed. Before Twin, Hugo co-founded Dreem, the neurotechnology company he scaled to 150 people and $60M raised through exit. He studied engineering at École Polytechnique and UC Berkeley, and was named to MIT Technology Review's 35 Under 35 Europe. 

Vincent Molina is Co-founder of pyannoteAI, the speaker intelligence platform behind 200+ production Voice AI products, including Descript, Synthesia, and Abridge. 

With 8+ years of product leadership, Vincent has managed international product and engineering teams of 300+ people across France, Vienna, and Tel Aviv, scaling products globally. Before product, he spent 6+ years in strategy and operational consulting, giving him a sharp lens on how to turn deep research into commercial impact.

Steeve is the founder of ZML, an AI engineering lab building the fastest, easiest and most universal inference software on the planet. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at Zenly (acq. by Snap in 2017).

In June 2019, Philippe Notton launched SiPearl, the European fabless designer of high-performance, energy-efficient CPUs for sovereign supercomputing, artificial intelligence, data centre end defence, with the support of the European Union. Its first-generation CPU, Rhea1, will be available at the end of the year. In particular, it will equip JUPITER, Europe's most powerful supercomputer which is operated by Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany) and owned by EuroHPC JU.

Before founding SiPearl, Philippe held senior management positions at Thomson, Canal+, LSI Logic, STMicroelectronics, Atos and a successful Taiwanese start-up (MStar Semiconductor, sold to MediaTek in 2012 for $4 billion) where he was Vice-President of Marketing.

Philippe holds a engineering degree from Supélec and an Executive MBA from ESSEC and Manheim.

Co-founder and CEO of Karavela - a company focusing on acquiring large-scale brain activity recordings - PhD in mathematics applied to neuroscience from CEA & Inria & Sorbonne Université, computer science and applied maths major from École polytechnique and ENS Paris-Saclay, ex Meta, Palantir, Arkhn.

Neil Zeghidour is the co-founder and CEO of Gradium. Neil founded Gradium after a decade of building and leading frontier generative audio teams at Meta and Google DeepMind. Being frustrated by slow and brittle voice assistants , he built the engineering teams that developed the first neural audio codecs  and introduced the first audio LLMs, such as AudioLM, at Google. He later created Kyutai to launch Moshi, the world's first real-time, full-duplex conversational AI , and Hibiki, the first simultaneous speech-to-speech translation system. Today, Gradium is focused on helping developers build natural, real-time voice agents by providing ultra-low latency streaming APIs that transition these breakthroughs from the research lab to production.