Gianluca Mauro

I got a Master in energy engineering in Rome. During my Master, I went to study in Belgium for 6 months as part of the Erasmus exchange program. There I followed a course named "Dare to Start", that had the goal of encouraging students to found startups.

As part of the course, I had to come up with a business idea and pitch it to potential customers. People seemed to love my idea, so I applied for a local accelerator, got a seed investment of €25k, and founded GreenItApp.

The project didn't go anywhere, but it taught me a lot and led me to win a Fulbright Scholarship to go study in Silicon Valley for 6 months.

There I followed and intensive 3 months program on Entrepreneurship and Business Management, and internet at an Innovation Advisory Firm named Mind The Bridge.

But the most important thing I got from my stay in Silicon Valley is that I fell in love with AI.

At the time, AI was booming. They were years were tech companies were realizing the immense potential of this technology, while the rest of the world was mostly sleeping.

It was also incredibly easy to get access to high quality information. I remember going to Stanford and listening to Google's head of research Peter Norvig for 2 hours, for free.

In Silicon Valley I also met my co-founder and good friend Nicolò Valigi, who helped me get started in programming.

When I came back to Italy, I spent most of my time studying and doing small workshops where I taught people the wonders of AI I'd just seen in Silicon Valley.

People seemed to like my teaching style, so I turned these workshops into an actual company named AI Academy.

With AI Academy I kept teaching workshops, but also did tons of technical consulting for the companies that were interested in applying what they had learnt from me.