Andrea Carafa is an entrepreneur turned academic, venture builder, and angel investor based in Silicon Valley and interested in climate and deep tech addressing environmental and societal challenges. He currently serves as Director of the Blackstone Launchpad powered by Techstars, as well as QB3 Entrepreneur in Residence and Rachel Carson Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches Hacking for Oceans. He has been named a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, member of the Fast Company Impact Council, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Ambassador and Judge, member of the Review Committee for the America's Seed Fund of the National Science Foundation, member of the Partnership on AI, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and Delegate to the UN Science, Technology & Innovation Forum for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Previously, he served as Founding Emergence Fellow, Design Thinking Fellow, and Resident Entrepreneur at Stanford, and founded the sustainable food biotech startup Vita, the consumer tech startup ArtsUp, and the sustainability innovation studio GYE. He also conducted research and lectured about technology innovation, human-centered design, and entrepreneurship for sustainability and societal health at Stanford, the University of Milan Bicocca, CERN, the European Commission, Bocconi and more. Andrea chaired the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative at President Obama's Global Entrepreneurship Summit and advocated for the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals at the UN. He was an EU Marie Curie Fellow in emerging technology for sustainability and health, and helped shape Future Earth, a global sustainability research and innovation initiative announced at the UN Rio+20 Summit. He also co-created an EU Knowledge Alliance aimed at spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in European universities, and inspired CERN to launch CollSpotting, a data analytics platform helping science labs and companies to increase their technology transfer to society. He has been a speaker at institutions such as the World Economic Forum, European Commission, Expo, and UN, and his work and ideas have been featured by publications such as Reuters, Fortune, Huffington Post, and Fast Company.
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