Team
Gregg D. Bauer
Gregg has spent most of his career as a startup entrepreneur having been involved in founding numerous technology startups. He is currently the Managing Partner of Spinnaker Venture Partners in Boston. Gregg is an electrical engineer from Ohio University and has an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is passionate about helping startup entrepreneurs to succeed and has mentored for the Hult Prize in Social Entrepreneuring for 9 years.
Gregg is also a commercial pilot and volunteers for Angel Flights who transports seriously ill people for medical treatment. He has actually lived in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as he spends his summers at the Hult Accelerator in London in the Ashridge Castle where Harry Potter was filmed.
Mark Roth
Mark is co-founder and Managing Director of Spinnaker Venture Partners, serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience as founder of venture based start-ups creating value for stakeholders, providing leadership on new product development, innovation management, and business origination.
Mark has held leadership R&D positions in Rockwell International, Honeywell, and Engelhard Minerals and Chemicals and has provided management consulting on corporate and business development issues to emerging technology businesses. Internationally, he has led the establishment of R&D operations in Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as coordinating globally distributed development operations on three continents. Mark has served as a board member and director of numerous manufacturing industry and technology consortia including the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, the Microelectronics Computer Consortium, the Software Engineering Institute and the Software Productivity Consortium. He has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology and has affiliations with the Tuck School of Business and the Czech Technical University.
Andrea Ridi
Andrea is a serial high-tech entrepreneur, a certified business coach and a mentor for international startups, he is an entrepreneur with strong
managerial skills and a clear vision of the future of Artificial Intelligence and the value of data.
He is also a strong believer in the “giving back”
philosophy, bringing Italian innovation and technological excellence to the USA. Andrea has an EMBA, a Master in Physics, and 4 years of
qualify research.
Michele Angelo Verna
Michele is an entrepreneur in the automation and robotics sector. He has held various senior executive roles at global companies such as Walgreens Boots Alliance (Senior Vice President Global Human Resources), Salvatore Ferragamo (Chief HR, Organization and Strategy), Techint Group (Executive Board Member and Group Chief Human Resources), and Vodafone (Board Member and CEO at Vodafone Germany). From 2013 to 2017, he has been the general director of Assolombarda, leading the start up and innovation management sector.
Michele was previously the Professor of Business Creativity and Communication at IULM University of Milan, Board Member of several international companies, and author of many articles and papers on Organization Development, Management, Enterprise Communication, Customer Management, and Human Resources topics.
Ester Pescio
As a senior executive with over 20 years of experience in creating and growing high tech startups in Europe and in the USA, Ester brings a strong technical background in IT, software and AI.
Her passion is to develop cohesive, diverse, multicultural teams able to deliver operational excellence and innovation at a global level from the very early stage of a company’s life.
Giorgio Mariano
Giorgio is a marketing and strategy manager leading open innovation initiatives with top US engineering universities and product design consulting firms in Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Internet of Things.
Giorgio is also active in the startup community as venture architect, angel investor and mentor.
He has previously held positions in corporate finance and investment banking in Europe.
Giorgio holds a B.A in Economics and a M.S. in Finance from Bocconi University, an M.B.A. from IE Business School and a M.A.M. from Yale School of Management.
Federico Salvitti
Federico is Marketing & Sales leader and investor. He has been described as a “market maker” for large enterprises and successfully exited start-ups internationally.
Voted in the Top 100 CMOs from the IRG, he worked his way up the ranks from sales, sales management and sales training, moving on taking Brand, Lead Gen and Marketing strategy and execution into his own hands. He has formed over 13 marketing teams, sold over $250M of products and services and has an unparalleled network in large enterprises.
Faculty in Marketing, Business Management and Data Modelling at NYU, Federico is also CMO ambassador for United Nations Global Compact activities. He is currently invested in sectors such as Ecommerce Technology, FinTech, PropTech, Automotive & Transportation and the Education industry.
Marco Massini
Marco has over twenty years of experience in accelerating value creation through private equity investment and management consulting for small to mid-market companies across sectors (technology, manufacturing, consumer & luxury goods) with a particular focus on local players ready to exploit untapped global opportunities.
He is known for helping high-potential local companies navigate internationalization, business optimization and capital raising challenges by leveraging a deep private equity and management consulting expertise that transforms companies and unlocks value.
He is an active investor through Mercurio Capital Partners, a firm specializing in private equity club deals which he co-founded in 2006. Marco also provides strategic management support, as a Board Member and through his Company MCP Advisors Inc, and operations support, including bookkeeping, accounting, financial control, tax preparation & filing, through his Company Gallant Corporate Services LLC.
Gregory Geehan
Greg is an early-stage technology startup consultant and advisor with a focus on digital health and international startups. He is currently a co-founder of AccelHUB Venture Partners, ScaleUp LatAm, and Accelerate Italy, is a Founding Venture Partner with NextGen Venture Partners and advises multiple healthcare technology startups. He received an MBA from Bentley University.
With a background in building and leading implementation, product consulting and operations teams, Greg has extensive experience in creating internal positions and processes, managing client software implementations, and developing client relationships. He has over twenty years of business-to-business relationship management at the corporate level, operations leadership and product consulting in digital health and technology start-ups.
Oliver G. Sanchez Montes de Oca
Oliver is managing partner at AccelHUB and AccelHUB Venture Partners. AccelHUB supports technology entrepreneurs from Latin America looking to scale their company in the US through resources and capital. AccelHUB Venture Partners is an Angel Investment Group that invests seed capital in technology ventures from Latin America with demonstrated growth and US market potential.
He is also co-founder and CEO of Extrasense Technologies Inc. Extrasense is a software company that leverages artificial intelligence to identify pests. Extrasense is transforming the way people “consume” pest control. Previously, Oliver co-founded Plug Cambridge. Plug Cambridge was a coworking office focused on helping immigrant entrepreneurs “plug” to the local ecosystem. Plug Cambridge was acquired by German coworking operator, Rent24 GMBH.
He holds an MBA from Boston University and has been selected as one of the Top 50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs in the United States by Entrepreneur Magazine in 2017.
Marco Cello
Marco is a digital transformation driver able to guide strategic technical vision, to business leaders, C-levels and senior management stakeholders.
He is a servant leader of technological innovator teams. He early adopts and incubates IT and cloud native projects like K8s and serverless. Having almost 10 years of research experience, Marco uses the same research-oriented mindset in the companies he works for: design, build, measure, and review.
He has experience in design, architect, build and running IT production solutions for software integrations in large enterprises like banks and supply chain customers.
Luca Ferrari
Luca started his career in the USA working as Project Engineer / Manager at S2NRG, a Dutch-American firm, for the development of various energy projects within industrial plants` (i.e. CHP, Solar PV, Wind, Storage, Waste Heat Recovery etc.).
In the US he also supported some of the activities of Spinnaker VP helping in the launch of Exakom Analytics USA and in the initial development of Accelerate Colombia.
He recently moved back to Italy where he started working as senior energy consultant for Optit, an AI firm, working directly on 2 European H2020 funded project, the execution of innovation projects for leading Italian utilities and supporting the strategic development of the energy department both at national and international level.
Francesca Pacetti
Francesca is a Strategic Communication student at IULM University in Milan. Her background in event management and account management informs her creative but competitive approach.
She is eager both to build on her academic foundations in languages and communication and to stay on top of the most innovative digital marketing strategies through regular professional updates. Francesca believes in values alignment and dependability as key characteristics for a successful team. She loves travelling, learning new languages and experimenting in the kitchen.
