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Erik Bakstad
Erik Bakstad is the CEO and co-founder of Ardoq, an Oslo-based SaaS company reinventing enterprise architecture for the digital enterprise. A developer and software architect by training, he spent the company's first six years as CTO before moving into product leadership and, in February 2021, the CEO seat. Under his watch Ardoq raised a $125 million Series D, earned repeat placement in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and now serves global brands such as ExxonMobil, MUFG, and Primark. A self-described former hockey player turned geek, Bakstad is a recognized voice on the intersection of enterprise architecture and AI.
Kieran Harney
Kieran Harney is the CEO of sensiBel, an Oslo-based semiconductor company that builds the world's first studio-quality optical MEMS microphone. A three-decade veteran of the MEMS industry, he founded the MEMS microphone business at Analog Devices in 2005, which was acquired by InvenSense in 2013 and later became part of TDK. He joined sensiBel in 2022, rose from COO to Chief Commercial Officer, and took over as CEO in September 2025 with a mandate to scale the company's optical microphone technology from evaluation kits to mass-market production.
Mark Gaffney
Mark Gaffney is the Chief Executive Officer and Board member of Calluna Pharma, an Oslo-based clinical-stage biopharma chasing inflammatory and fibrotic disease by tuning the body's innate immune system. A mechanical engineer turned lawyer turned dealmaker, he spent two decades building and selling biotechs - Oxular went to Regeneron, Vedere Bio to Novartis - before taking the helm of a company born from the merger of Oxitope Pharma and Arxx Therapeutics and freshly backed by a 75 million euro Series A.
Thomas C. Holst
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.
Robin Wigglesworth
Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of FT Alphaville, the Financial Times' irreverent and free-to-read finance blog, which he runs from Oslo, Norway. A former Bloomberg Nordic economics correspondent turned Gulf war reporter turned global finance authority, Wigglesworth has carved out a rare niche: making the most technically forbidding corners of finance genuinely fun to read. His 2021 book Trillions - a definitive history of the index fund - became one of the FT's best books of the year, and his forthcoming A Fabulous Debt (September 2026) promises a sweeping history of the bond market. He is equal parts serious financial scholar and gleeful financial provocateur.