This year at Slush, I arrived with a simple intention: meet as many founders as I possibly could. I focused on Light Eagle’s core themes of food, energy and climate, while also giving myself the freedom to explore unexpected corners—AI-native dental clinics, agentic AI investing, gamified consumer apps, and of course a handful of Turkish startups I always seek out to support.
And if you ask me what I sensed behind the conversations this year—the smell in the air—it was confusion. The kind that appears right before something fundamental shifts. The AI hype cycle is distorting everyone’s internal compass. Startups, funds, and investors alike are struggling to understand whether they’re doing well or “well enough.” I met two fund managers who had successful AI exits, and even they weren’t sure if their deals were great… or if they had left 10x on the table.
Valuations feel unanchored, progress feels incomparable, and AI has become such a meta-theme that everything else—food, energy, climate, deeptech—risks being treated as “other.” And when the world becomes this noisy, we are invited to lean more deeply into our inner navigation system: who we are, what we stand for, and what kind of future we want to co-create.
For me, these meetings at Slush are never transactional. I am not here to extract the “best deals in the room,” but to engage in an honest exchange, to learn, to support, to connect, and to share from my own founder journey. Slush is a founder-centered gathering, and even though my badge says “Investor,” I always remember I am a founder first.
Below is the full list of founders and teams I met across November 19–20.
If any resonate with you, feel free to reach out, I’d be more than glad to make an introduction.
19th of November
1. Climate Leaders Fast Track
What they do: A climate-focused investment platform backing high-growth software companies decarbonizing major industries.
Authentic thought: Their clarity of focus and discipline in founder support is rare—hands-on capital at its best.
2. Toasty
What they do: A gamified sustainable shopping app built on social engagement and personalised discovery.
Authentic thought: Appreciated the interdisciplinary, gamified, community-building aspect of the. product
3. Laukansaari Giants
What they do: Uses robotics and automation to scale high-quality seedling and tree propagation for forestry and agriculture.
Authentic thought: Technology can scale nature-based restoration automating what already exists to regenerate forests at meaningful speed.
4. Homemade
What they do: Food-sharing platform that connects people who cook at home with neighbors who want to buy homemade meals.
Authentic thought: An example of how creativity and cultural expression continue to shape the food ecosystems of tomorrow.
5. Planet A
What they do: Berlin-based climate-tech VC fund investing in early-stage companies across six climate-critical verticals—agriculture, manufacturing, buildings, energy, mobility, and waste—with an in-house scientific team that measures real environmental impact using consequential life-cycle assessment.
Authentic thought: An investment team that understands climate impact not as measurable, systemic change.
6. Astracite
What they do: Astracite develops next-generation anode materials for lithium-ion batteries by converting CO₂ and silicon into a graphite–silicon composite, enabling significantly higher energy density, and by upcycling graphite from end-of-life batteries into high-performance, cost-competitive material—supporting Europe’s need for sovereign, clean, and scalable battery supply.
Authentic thought: Rare combination of deep science and strategic relevance—taking CO₂, waste graphite, and European sovereignty challenges, and turning them into a cleaner, higher-performance battery future.
7. Guul Games
What they do: Web-based “games-as-a-service” platform that helps remote and hybrid teams, communities and apps drive engagement through social games, live tournaments, puzzles, and gamified events.
Authentic thought: Building culture in a distributed world can shift from checkboxes to play. By turning connection into fun, you accelerate engagement in ways traditional tools miss.
8. Mistikist
What they do: Neuroscience-based mental wellness app offering binaural beats, kaleidoscopic visuals, and personalized brain-wave entrainment sessions—designed to help users relax, focus, sleep better, and improve cognitive performance.
Authentic thought: Mistikist’s science is compelling, yet it also made me reflect on how easily our inner balance can become outsourced to devices—a tension I’m still exploring.
9. Seedscope.ai
What they do: AI-powered startup evaluation platform where founders upload their pitch decks to receive valuation analysis
Authentic thought: A glimpse into the future of investing—structured, data-driven, and fast—offering a powerful complement to our own work on AI-driven founder interviews and portfolio insight.
10. &Volume
What they do: AI-powered autonomous trading agents that manage digital asset portfolios
Authentic thought: A glimpse of how AI will reshape investing — turning sophisticated hedge-fund strategies into automated agents for ordinary users, while raising important questions about speed, risk, and what ‘making money’ will even mean in the next decade.
20th of November
1. Gyre Energy
What they do: Uses thermal energy storage combined with AI optimisation to reduce cooling-related electricity consumption in cold storage environments, simply turning existing refrigeration infrastructure into intelligent energy storage capable of shifting load, lowering peak demand, and cutting energy costs by up to 40%.
Authentic thought: Making invisible systems intelligent feels like one of the biggest untapped climate opportunities.
2. Heldin
What they do: A talent-development platform empowering women in the Global South to become AI-native software engineers.
Authentic thought: Their mission brings both empowerment and dignity, education tied directly to economic agency.
3. AgriSolutions
What they do: A farm-to-industry data platform connecting farmers, processors, and suppliers through regenerative-focused farm management.
Authentic thought: A systems-level approach to industrial agriculture.
4. NatureRe
What they do: Develops large-scale, science-driven nature restoration projects across Latin America and emerging regions—restoring degraded ecosystems
Authentic thought: Restoring ecosystems at planetary scale is both urgent and possible.
5. WastePresso
What they do: Transforms coffee waste into biodegradable plastics and consumer products.
Authentic thought: Their tenacity and traction show how circularity becomes real when storytelling and product innovation meet.
6. Jan Ameri
What they do: Building a gamified global platform for food discovery, taste exploration, and consumer engagement.
Authentic thought: The passion and imagination behind this concept reminded me how culture, joy, and food belong in the future we create.
7. FlexiPower
What they do: Converts buildings with heat pumps into virtual batteries, enabling grid-balancing and passive revenue for property owners.
Authentic thought: A beautifully simple “use what is already there” approach, practical climate tech with global potential.
8. DentView AI Clinic
What they do: AI-powered diagnostics and workflow tools for dental clinics.
Authentic thought: A practical, grounded application of AI improving everyday healthcare quality.
Leaving Slush this year, I felt clearer about one thing: in a moment when AI hype is clouding everyone’s sense of direction, genuine founder conversations are the anchor. Each meeting across food, energy, climate, and everything in between reminded me why I come here: for perspective.
As the ecosystem navigates this confusing cycle, staying grounded in who we are and what we stand for matters more than ever.
If any of the teams in this list resonate with you, feel free to reach out.