Calluna Pharma is an Oslo-based clinical-stage biotech building first-in-class antibodies that switch off the upstream signals driving inflammation and fibrosis. Formed in 2024 from the merger of Oxitope Pharma and Arxx Therapeutics and backed by a EUR 75 million Series A, the company targets damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) such as S100A4 to halt diseases like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis at their root rather than managing symptoms.
SafetyWing builds a global social safety net for remote workers, digital nomads, and distributed teams - subscription health and travel insurance that works across borders, plus benefits infrastructure for remote-first companies.
Thomas C. Holst is a Norwegian-American business architect, investor, and entrepreneur who built Huddly - a Norwegian deep tech computer vision company - from a four-person startup into a publicly listed global enterprise with offices in Oslo, Palo Alto, London, Austin, Washington, and Bangalore. With a career spanning management consulting (A.T. Kearney), private equity (Reiten & Co, Orkla Finance), and deep tech venture building, he has collaborated with Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. After departing Huddly, he co-founded Northscaler - a B2B tech venture firm connecting Nordic startups with global corporations - and became a Partner at ICON Asset Management AG in 2024.
Sondre Rasch is the Norwegian co-founder and CEO of SafetyWing, a Y Combinator-backed insurtech building a global social safety net for remote workers and digital nomads. Starting from a teenage web hosting business run through an online video game community, he studied economics at NHH Bergen, served as a sniper in the Norwegian Army, advised the Norwegian government on social policy, and co-founded Superside before launching SafetyWing in 2018. SafetyWing has raised $46.6M (including a $35M Series B in 2022) and generates over $34M in annual revenue serving tens of thousands of customers across 180+ countries. His ultimate ambition is to build 'a country on the internet' - a software-based welfare system and digital nation called Plumia.
Dilawar Mahmood is a machine learning engineer at ZeroEntropy (YC W25) in San Francisco, best known for four years at Apple where he optimized on-device models for Siri and Spotlight - work he once presented directly to Tim Cook at the Steve Jobs Theater. A Norwegian-educated engineer who left a comfortable career track to attend the Recurse Center and rediscover what programming actually feels like, he builds distributed ML frameworks in his spare time and is on record hating vibe coding.