Speakers
Andy Clayton
Laure Craeye
Zayd Lakhi
Line Kloster Pedersen
Sarah McMullen
Session
Come and hear from some of the most exciting startups building in this space as they walk us through their achievements, and how they will change the landscape.
Laure Craeye is a biochemical engineer and entrepreneur focused on translating sustainable innovation to market-ready solutions. She started her academic journey at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, where she built a strong foundation in biotechnology and life sciences. To complement her scientific expertise with business acumen, Laure pursued General Management studies at Vlerick Business School and completed an additional course in commercial and corporate law. This interdisciplinary background equipped her with skills in management, strategy, and entrepreneurship enabling her to bridge the gap between research and real-world impact.
Building on this foundation, Laure co-founded W’Ice, a Belgian startup developing eco-friendly antifreeze solutions, with a primary application in agriculture to protect fruit crops from spring frost. W’Ice aims to provide growers with a preventive, sprayable and biological alternative to existing frost protection methods. The long term vision of the company is to expand its sustainable antifreeze solutions toward industrial applications beyond agriculture. As CEO, Laure leads business development and fundraising.
With a strong commitment to sustainability, innovation, and tangible impact, Laure combines scientific rigor and entrepreneurial vision to address climate-related challenges in agriculture, delivering solutions that are both technologically advanced and environmentally responsible.
The company was founded by Line Kloster Pedersen. Line's inspiration to start Visibuilt came during one of her runs around the lakes of Copenhagen, where she reflected on how fungi play a crucial role in the soil ecosystem in nature, and wondered whether the same logic could be applied to creating road surfaces in our cities.
When she began researching the asphalt industry, she was shocked to discover that the current asphalt market is still dependent on oil-based binders, similar to those used a hundred years ago, with few or no alternatives available. This realization sparked her imagination and led her to consider the possibility of a natural, mycelium-based binder, inspired by nature’s own solutions.
This became the foundation for Visibuilt’s solution, visiBINDER, a technology aimed at reducing our infrastructure’s dependence on fossil-based binders and contributing to the global development of groundbreaking climate technologies for pavement materials.
The team behind Visibuilt has since expanded to 19 employees, and brings together diverse expertise spanning science, marketing, finance, entrepreneurship, and engineering. Based near Copenhagen, we are positioned at the heart of Europe’s biotechnology innovation hub.
Sarah McMullen is Co-Founder and CEO of RemePhy, an Imperial College London spinout developing plant–microbe systems to clean contaminated soil in a faster, cheaper and less disruptive way. The company’s biological approach enables plants to grow in heavily contaminated soils and extract metals as they grow, allowing remediation to take place in situ while creating additional value through the recycling of metals recovered from the biomass.
Sarah brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in global investment management. Most recently she served as CEO of PGIM UK and Head of EMEA at PGIM Fixed Income, where she led an $86bn regional business spanning multiple countries and regulatory jurisdictions.
At RemePhy, Sarah focuses on commercial strategy, fundraising, partnerships and translating breakthrough science into scalable real-world solutions. She is particularly interested in building category-defining companies at the intersection of climate, biology and deep tech.
Sarah is a CFA charterholder and holds a BSc in Physiology from the University of Edinburgh.
Vjera is an experienced leader with 20 +years of experience in innovation and translation of bio-based research spanning academia, SMEs, UK and EU governments and corporates in BioPharma, MedTech, Nutrition, Energy, FMCG. At Kew, Vjera leads a new department with a focus on delivery of biodiversity-based innovation for novel solutions across policy and bioeconomy both nationally and internationally.
Prior to joining Kew, Vjera was at Imperial College for 11 years as Director of Industrial Partnerships and Commercialisation for the healthcare portfolio. This included industrial research partnerships, IP management, licensing, and spin-out creation. Previously Vjera co-founded Lux Assure, an industrial biotech providing bio-based technology solutions across several industries. She acted as CBO, leading on all commercial aspects of the business. In addition, Vjera acts as an assessor and advisor for European Commission Innovation and Research Councils (EIC and ERC) across programmes since 2012 and La Caixa foundation since 2023. Vjera is passionate about entrepreneurial systems building and developing entrepreneurial mindsets. To this end she teaches on innovation across a number of Imperial College Masters programmes and has authored a chapter on the topic of healthcare innovation for Oxford University Press Handbook, published in 2025.
