Exponential Technologies
Anita Schjøll Brede
Co-Founder & CEO, Iris AI
Anita does things she doesn’t know how to do.
She is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Iris AI – an Artificial Intelligence that will read all of the world’s science and help us connect the dots. She is also a board member of Ulstein Group.
The past 10 years her career has spanned 9 industries including developing an e-learning tool in Silicon Valley, performing theatre for babies, reducing energy consumption in the process industry through heat exchanger network optimization, getting 30 (mainly middle-age male) engineers to dance to ABBA in front of their co-workers, facilitating solar light business creation in Kenya, being in the centre of several startups crashing and burning, organizing entrepreneurial conferences and trying to disrupt the recruitment industry. She also dropped by 6 universities on the way. And built a race car.
Summer 2015 she was admitted to the amazing Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University, and her outlook on life, innovation, technology, the world and our future has not been the same since. Ask her to talk about AI, self-driving cars, genomics, robots, colonization of mars, personalized medicine and the general craziness of the future – and how we can use this craziness to make the world better – and you’ll make her very happy!
She has a passion for entrepreneurship and creating ventures, and it is the process in itself – starting from a vague idea and moving towards building something real that makes a difference in people’s lives – that inspires her. Another passion of hers is presentations and any kind of public speaking.
She is decently nomadic, though Norway is where most of her physical belongings are, and where she oddly feel somewhat at home.