Paolo has 20+ years of experience in Innovation & Startup Ecosystem development, as well as investment in early stage Startup where he deployed more than €20M across +350 Startups, screening +7000 cases across +50 countries. Currently, Paolo is Managing Partner of VITA Accelerator, the digital health acceleration program based in Italy and supported by the Italian Innovation Fund CDP and Accelerace from Demnark (now part of BII in Denmark). Paolo has lived around 20 year in Finland and held such positions as Director of AppCampus at the Aalto University-Microsoft-Nokia program with a 21M€ fund. He was the co-founder & Board Member of Vertical, an Open Innovation company focused on the Nordics and Baltics region. Recent activities of Paolo also include building up a food & agritech accelerator program for VTT and helping European Investment Bank with investment advisory. Paolo holds the Order of the Star of Italy for special merit in startup ecosystem development. The award of Knighthood was assigned to Paolo by the President of Italy for helping develop the cooperation between the Italian and Finnish ecosystems.