Michaela Villaroman

Seedstars was founded in 2012 by Pierre-Alain Masson and Michael Weber, two friends from Geneva who connected over their passion for entrepreneurship and building companies from scratch. Some time after, Alisée de Tonnac, joined the team and together they launched Seedstars World, a global pitch competition to discover the most promising early-stage high-growth ventures, in order to build the largest entrepreneurial community in emerging markets. Benjamin Benaim was later added to the team to drive forward the company building activities of Seedstars.

In the following years, investment specialist, Charlie Graham-Brown, began the branch of Seedstars focused on investing in ventures with high-growth potential and supplying the portfolio with socially dedicated businesses from various industry sectors and geographical locations, which perfectly complemented the purpose of the Seedstars World Competition.

Seedstars continued growing with the creation of our Seedspaces, dedicated entrepreneurship hubs where ventures can have a physical space for coworking, networking and learning. In fact, many of the entrepreneurial programs that Seedstars and our partners run, take place at the Seedspaces in Lima, Mexico City, Abidjan, Lagos, Cairo, Dar es Salaam Nur Sultan or Yangon.

Today Seedstars has grown into a global community that believes in the innovative potential of emerging markets. We aim to contribute by running the Seedstars World Competition, Seedspace hubs, various acceleration and growth programs and, at the same time, investing in high-growth companies from Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central and South Asia.

In 2020, Seedstars has reimagined several of its physical activities into new online formats. In this way we continue to enable entrepreneurs in emerging markets through virtual programs, events and competitions, by connecting them with expert mentors and investors without geographical barriers. For this purpose we also launched a storytelling hub called Seedstars Life, where we bring the spotlight to the change-makers who too often go unnoticed.