OUR TOA24 partners
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Kindly supported by the Senate Department for Economic Affairs, Energy and Public Enterprises
Born in Berlin. Reimagined in Istanbul. Connecting Europe, MENA, Asia, and beyond.
Get in touchThe center of gravity in tech is shifting. From saturated markets to emerging power zones. Istanbul sits at the intersection of Europe, MENA, and Asia—not just geographically, but economically and culturally.
A city that has stood at the crossroads of East and West for three millennia understands better than anyone what it means to hold two worlds together. That is exactly what this moment demands.
Renowned tech leaders, thought-provoking academics, inspiring creatives, and exceptional founders.
Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision. As one of the forces behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations. Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher.
VP & CTO
Amazon
Allen is one of LinkedIn’s co-founders and is currently responsible for LinkedIn’s content, community and communications product initiatives, including products such as LinkedIn Today, Signal, Homepage, Groups, and Polls. Prior to Linkedin, Allen designed exploratory products and marketing programs at PayPal, and was part of the founding team at SocialNet.com, a first-generation social site supporting dating, recreational and professional activities.
Co-Founder
Gavin Wood is a British computer scientist and software engineer famous for being the co-founder of Ethereum, inventor of smart contract programming language Solidity, and creator of Polkadot. Before joining the blockchain industry, Wood studied at the University of York, where he earned a Master of Engineering degree in 2002 and a PhD in Music Visualization for Human Computer Interfacing in 2005.
Free-Trust Technologist and Founder
Ethereum, Polkadot, Kusama, Parity, Web3 Foundation
Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us. His books have sold 45 Million copies in 65 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002 and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2019, following the international success of his books, Yuval Noah Harari co-founded Sapienship with his husband and original agent, Itzik Yahav. Sapienship is a social impact company with projects in the fields of entertainment and education, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today.
Historian, Philosopher, Bestselling author of Sapiens
Steve is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, the “front page of the internet” and fourth most visited site in the U.S. He has led the company’s development of native image and video hosting, a new mobile app, and a full site redesign while growing the Reddit community to over 330 million monthly users. In addition to his work at Reddit, Steve is a mentor at Hackbright Academy, a San Francisco-based coding school for women.
Co-Founder & CEO
Slav Petrov is Vice President, Research at Google DeepMind. He is a co-lead on Gemini, Google's large models effort. His work has been recognized with multiple Best Paper Awards (ACL'11, NAACL'12, ACL'16, 10-year Test-of-Time Award at ACL'23) and provides better language capabilities to billions of users in a variety of Google products spanning Web Search, Assistant, Ads, Translate & Cloud. Slav is the recipient of the 2014 John Atanasoff Award by the President of Bulgaria and a World Champion at RoboCup 2004. For many years, Slav taught Statistical Natural Language Processing at New York University. He holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
Vice President, Research
Google DeepMind
Dorothee Gisela Renate Maria Bär is a German politician of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria who has been serving as a member of the German Bundestag since 2002. From 2014 to 2021, she served in various capacities in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Former Minister of State for Digitalisation
Member of the German Bundestag
Steven Bartlett is one of Europe’s most influential entrepreneurial voices and a relentless innovator across media and technology. After founding the social media agency Social Chain at 21 and taking it public at 27, Steven has transitioned into a global media mogul and prolific investor. He is the co-founder of the Web3 platform thirdweb and the founder of the Flight Fund, a $100M fund backing the next generation of European unicorns. Recognized on the TIME100 Most Influential Creators and the Powerlist 2026, Steven’s work focuses on the intersection of technology, human behavior, and high-performance mindset.
Founder & CEO
Steven.com
Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He currently is a partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Fred has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Fred is married with three children and lives in New York City. Fred is Chairman of the NYC Department of Education's CS4All Capital Campaign and is co-Chairman of Tech:NYC.
Founder & Partner
Union Square Ventures
Colin is the Chief Architect at OpenAI, where he pushes the bounds of what OpenAI’s models can do with their strategic customers using both ChatGPT and the API. He has a product and data engineering background, and worked at top-tier machine learning consultancies prior to OpenAI. Colin lives in Glasgow.
Chief Architect
OpenAI
Jutta Steiner is a Co-founder & CEO of Parity tech. Currently, Jutta is a Co-founder & CEO of Parity Technologies and Grid Singularity. In addition, she serves as a COO at Ethcore and Manager Security Audit and Integration at Ethereum. Jutta started her career in 2011, being an intern at Deutsche Post DHL. In 2011-2012, she was a Researcher at École Polytechnique. From 2013 to 2014, Jutta was an Associate at McKinsey & Company. In 2015, Jutta served as a COO at Project Provenance.
Co-Founder & CEO
Parity Technologies
Alex is the co-inventor of zkSync and currently serves as the co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs. At Matter Labs, he leads a talented team focused on addressing blockchain scalability challenges using zero-knowledge proofs. Alex's passion lies in using technology to advance personal freedom, self-ownership, and decentralisation.
CEO & co-inventor
Matter Labs (zkSync Era)
Juergen Mueller is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, leading the Technology and Innovation board area. As Chief Technology Officer (CTO), he oversees SAP’s platform and technology development. In addition, he is responsible for innovation efforts related to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as well as new technologies.
CTO
SAP
Adam D'Angelo (born August 21, 1984) is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, based in Mountain View, California. He was chief technology officer of Facebook, and also served as its vice president of engineering, until 2008. In June 2009, he started Quora. He invested $20 million of his own money into Quora as part of their Series B round of financing. He is a member of the board of directors of OpenAI.
Co-Founder & CEO
Quora
Jess is the CEO of WalletConnect, the Web3 communications protocol enabling interoperability between wallets and dapps across chains. Having been integrated by over 500 wallets and 6,000 apps, it facilitates millions of end-user connections each month. Today, it is also empowering developers to build engaging web3 experiences with a suite of SDKs: Web3Modal, Web3Wallet, and the recently launched Web3Inbox app that facilitates human-readable message delivery between apps and users.
CEO
WalletConnect
Claudius Senst is the CEO of BILD Group. In 2013, Senst joined Axel Springer as a junior executive. Most recently, he was Senior Vice President of Business Development before moving to Springer's Insider in New York where he held varius positions. In 2021, he became CEO of the BILD Group at Springer.
CEO
BILD Group
Scott Croyle is a Director at Apple. Croyle worked on Android products for over a decade before moving to Apple. He oversaw devices like the HTC One M7 and M8 before moving on to Nextbit, where he worked on the cloud-focused Nextbit Robin smartphone. Several months after Razer bought Nextbit, Croyle departed for a studio called Attic, where he stayed for almost three years. He joined Apple as a director in April 2020.
Director
Apple
Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
Architect
OMA
Chema Alonso is Chief Digital Officer of Telefónica, CEO of Telefónica Innovación Digital and member of Telefonica S.A. Executive Committee since 2016. He oversees Innovation, Data, Platforms and Digital Product & Services leading the strategy for the digitalisation of sales processes and customer communication channels of the company. He holds a PhD in Computer Security and a Technical Engineering degree in Computer Systems from Universidad Politécnica Madrid. The latter institution named him Honorary Ambassador of the University School of Information Technology in 2012. Chema was also recognized during 14 years as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).
Chief Digital Officer
Telefónica
George M. Church, PhD ’84, is professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, a founding member of the Wyss Institute, and director of PersonalGenomes.org, the world’s only open-access information on human genomic, environmental, and trait data. His team invented CRISPR for human stem cell genome editing and other synthetic biology technologies and applications.
Geneticist / CRISPR Inventor
Harvard MIT
Sebastian Siemiatkowski (born 1981) is CEO & co-founder of the Stockholm-based payments company Klarna. While studying at the Stockholm School of Economics he was inspired to think about what kind of payment solution for e-commerce would make it possible to separate the fun experience of buying from the tedious process of paying. Convinced that the solution to this dilemma would truly add value for both buyers and sellers, the idea to introduce after-delivery payment as a service was born.
Co-Founder & CEO
Klarna
Mathias Döpfner is Chairman and CEO of Axel Springer AG in Berlin. He has been with Axel Springer AG since 1998, initially as Editor-in-Chief of Die Welt and since 2000 as Member of the Management Board. During his career he has held different positions in media companies. Among others he was Editor-in-Chief of the newspapers Wochenpost and Hamburger Morgenpost.
Chairman & CEO
Axel Springer SE
Paola Antonelli is senior curator in the department of architecture and design of the Museum of Modern Art, where she has worked since 1994. She has lectured worldwide in settings ranging from peer conferences to global interdisciplinary gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has served on several international architecture and design juries. From 1991 to 1993, she was a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Senior Curator
MoMA
Niklas Östberg is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Delivery Hero. Niklas worked for five years as a corporate consultant for Oliver Wyman before co-founding Pizza.nu (later OnlinePizza.se), where he served as chairman. In 2011, he founded Delivery Hero with some collaborators from the Berlin start-up scene in order to roll out the business globally from Germany. The company so far has achieved from 1 to 30,000 employees and 1 million drivers across 50 countries in 4 continents, 1 to 9,000,000 orders delivered every day and a billion dollar IPO.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO
Delivery Hero SE
Qasar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, currently valued at $6B after its Series E. Before that, Younis was a Partner and COO of Y Combinator. Younis founded a technology firm, which was later acquired by Google, and worked as an automotive engineer at General Motors and Bosch.
CEO
Applied Intuition
Chris Burniske is a partner at Placeholder, a New York venture firm that invests in decentralized information networks. Prior to Placeholder, he co-authored the best-seller, Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond, and spearheaded ARK Invest’s crypto efforts, including its 2015 bitcoin investment. His commentary has been featured on international media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, and Bloomberg. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BS from Stanford University. Twitter @cburniske.
Partner
Placeholder
Helene is Co-Founder & CEO at The Exploration Company, a space tech startup whose mission is to democratize space exploration, making it affordable, sustainable, and open. The Exploration Company develops, manufactures, and operates spaceships that serve the logistic needs of the space stations around the Earth and the Moon, a market forecasted to grow by 400% in the next 8 years. The startup was co-founded in July 2021 by an experienced team coming from Airbus and ArianeGroup who worked already together on major programs (Orion-ESM, ATV, etc.). Today, The Exploration Company gathers 50 people, +500 years of space experience, has raised 50 million USD and mixes space veterans’ and young aerospace engineers’ profiles. The first capsule vehicle flight is planned for 2023.
CEO
The Exploration Company
12 years in Berlin.
Now entering a new era.
At TOA, tech founders, investors & industry leaders meet to accelerate their businesses and careers. Join us on our mission to help people and organizations become future-proof.
Access to underpriced, high-growth markets.
Capital beyond Silicon Valley.
Entry to next-gen ecosystems.
We are living through the most important technological shift in human history. Not because AI is powerful — but because it is beginning to make decisions.
This is no longer a conversation about tools.
It is a conversation about values.
AI will shape how we think, work, create, and govern.
The question is not what it can do.
The question is: who it serves, and at what cost.
Today, the world is moving faster than its ability to reflect.
Builders are accelerating. Society is reacting.
Very few spaces exist where both can meet — honestly, and in public.
TOA Istanbul exists to create that space.
At the crossroads of continents, cultures, and ideas, we bring together founders, investors, scientists, policymakers, and thinkers to confront the defining tension of our time:
Progress vs. Responsibility
Intelligence vs. Humanity
Speed vs. Wisdom.
This is not another tech conference.
This is where the people building the future
and the people questioning it sit in the same room.We don’t claim to have the answers.
But we believe the right questions must be asked — now.
Because the decisions made in the next few years will shape the relationship between humans and AI for decades.
TOA Istanbul is where that conversation begins.
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