Five speakers, five minutes each, then time to talk. Across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, IABC EMENA is building a professional network around what happens when communicators stop presenting and start comparing notes.
From Porsche's pilot projects to a new accelerator in Cyprus, Plug and Play sells access to the people who can put startup technology to work. The revealing number is how much makes it beyond the demo.
Its founders learned industry from the assembly line and the deal room. Now the firm is testing whether operational fluency can turn overlooked B2B manufacturers into stronger, more valuable businesses.

For nearly 40 years Odigo has quietly run the phone lines behind Air France, DHL and Allianz. Now the French CCaaS firm is betting that Europe's biggest brands would rather keep customer data on a sovereign cloud than hand it to Silicon Valley.
talent.io was a European recruitment marketplace that flipped traditional headhunting: pre-screened software engineers and tech freelancers were surfaced to companies, who then applied to candidates. Founded in Paris in 2015 by Amit Aharoni, Jonathan Azoulay and Nicolas Meunier, it scaled to ten European cities and 2,000+ employer clients before being acquired by Davidson Consulting out of judicial reorganization in March 2025.
Anas Biad is a Partner at Sequoia Capital based in London, where he invests in early-to-growth-stage companies across enterprise software, AI, SaaS, gaming, and fintech. A mathematics graduate of Ecole Polytechnique who grew up in Casablanca, he spent time at Bain & Company and Silver Lake before joining Sequoia in 2021 as one of its first European partners. He backs founders building enduring companies across Europe and is known for his passion for gaming, quantum computing, and his admiration for Richard Feynman.

Sonali De Rycker is a General Partner at Accel's London office, one of the most influential venture capitalists in Europe. Originally from Mumbai, India, she joined Accel in 2008 after stints at Goldman Sachs and Atlas Venture, and has since backed some of the continent's most defining tech companies — Spotify, Monzo, BeReal, Synthesia, and Speak among them. Ranked No. 2 on Forbes Midas List Europe in 2019 and consistently in the top 15, she is known for her founder-first investment philosophy, her global deal-sourcing across 45+ cities, and a sharp conviction that Europe's next chapter will be written in AI.