Anita Schjøll Brede

Artificial Intelligence, Entrepreneurship

Anita is the CEO and Co-Founder of Iris.ai; an artificial intelligence company announced by Fast Company to be one of the 10 Most Innovative Companies in AI in 2017. Iris.ai is an AI Science assistant, semi-automating the literature review process for academia and R&D today – and will grow up to be the world’s first AI Researcher. Iris.ai is a 500 startups and TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield alumni and the winner of SingularityU’s Grand Global Challenges Awards in Learning in 2017.

Anita was named by Forbes as among the Top 50 European females in Tech in 2018. She is a twice TEDx speaker, a startup mentor with the Katapult impact accelerator and the first Norwegian to attend Singularity University’s GSP.

She has never had what she refers to as "a real job" and Iris.ai is her fourth own startup. The past 10 years her career has spanned 9 industries including developing an e-learning tool in Silicon Valley, performing theatre for babies, reducing energy consumption in the process industry through heat exchanger network optimization, getting 30 (mainly middle-age male) engineers to dance to ABBA in front of their co-workers, facilitating solar light business creation in Kenya, being in the centre of several startups crashing and burning, organizing entrepreneurial conferences and trying to disrupt the recruitment industry. She also dropped by 6 universities on the way. And built a race car.