Keynote SpeakersDr Elsa Solaris is a Swiss former venture capital investor who helped finance and launch over two dozen startups at SOSV, the world’s most active early-stage fund.
Her insights have been featured by TEDx, Times Radio, New Statesman, de Volkskrant, Arab News, and Silicon Republic, which has named her one of the top 20 leading voices in her field.
She has earned a dual PhD in synthetic biology from Imperial College London and the University of Hong Kong for developing cancer-fighting nano-bots at the intersection of code and biology.
Today, Elsa has skin in the game as managing partner at a family office. She delivers keynotes for leaders at Invesco, MSD, Gilead Sciences, and SBM Offshore, and has consulted for a leading Chinese ICT company and the WHO.
From Silicon Valley to Sci-Fi Storytelling…
To explore future worlds, she follows her creative passion – storytelling. Her literary work has hit the Amazon Bestseller list, earned recognition from Writers of the Future in L.A., and been featured in leading international magazines.
She has written for Singularity Hub and O’Reilly’s BioCoder and is a co-author of Brave New Human.
As a contributor to an award-winning BBC Sci-Fi Drama, she bridges the gap between business reality and the human questions that define our future.
What is a Bio-Futurist?
As a Bio-Futurist, Elsa helps others understand how emerging (bio)technologies will change our lives.
She uses her visionary science fiction mindset to accelerate disruptive business innovation.
The Biofuturist’s mission is to help companies use science fiction prototyping to create products that solve tomorrow’s problems.
Bio-Futurist Keynote Speaker:
Elsa is an experienced keynote speaker and innovation consultant on the disruption between biology and technology.
She delivers bespoke presentations and workshops for corporate and public events:
Elsa Solaris Speaking Titles:
Brave New World of AI: Who Controls the Future of Democracy?
Have we already made a Faustian bargain without even noticing?
We trade privacy for convenience, autonomy for personalisation, and fundamental rights for participation in the 21st-century society. But what once sounded like a fair deal has become the quietest power shift in history.
Nanny robots take over elderly care, and cars drive us. In the background, bot armies exploit metadata to find personal vulnerabilities to sell, and neuro-marketing doesn’t just read behaviour; it actively manipulates it. Anticipatory computing knows what you want before you know it yourself. When social credit systems like China’s can freeze your freedom of movement — and your bank account — at any moment, what is next?
We are moving onto the second half of the chessboard, where technology is advancing so rapidly that legislation can no longer keep pace.
Is AI a threat to democracy? Is it only a matter of time until an automated coup hijacks the country, until algorithms replace voting? And how do you govern a society whose infrastructure belongs to a tech corporation?
Dr Elsa Solaris asks the uncomfortable questions others avoid with the clarity of an insider and the unflinching boldness of a sci-fi author.
From Payroll to Compute: What’s Left for Humanity?
Technology once replaced muscle, now it’s replacing thought — a remarkable reversal.
A two-person billion-dollar company is no longer a thought experiment. The question is no longer whether AI will take over work, but how many sub-agents a single human will manage. The agentic economy is not a vision of the future — it is a process already well underway.
Elsa Solaris shows how every business is becoming an AI factory, whether it wants to or not: autonomous processes, self-directing agents, an operating system that never sleeps, never negotiates and never resigns.
Two-thirds of knowledge-based jobs are already on the edge. But what remains for us when intelligence itself becomes infrastructure? And will we truly need to merge with AI just to stay relevant?
Chip Wars: The Age of Distrust
What is still real — and who decides? Chips, supply chains, deepfakes, AI-generated disinformation, bioweapons by algorithm.
The world isn’t just becoming more digital; it’s becoming more unpredictable. Behind every technological breakthrough lies the same question: Who controls the infrastructure?
Elsa Solaris shows how technology is becoming a weapon: against markets, supply chains, against democracies, against reality itself. The GenAI gold rush has a dark side, and very few are talking about it.
Your best friend will soon be a subscription. A deepfake video could start the next war. And the politician you just listened to — do they actually exist? Who controls the truth in this world when everything becomes a commodity?
A keynote for audiences who want to understand not just the opportunities but the risks of the new technological world and want to think critically. Geopolitics meets technology meets the collapse of reality.
Energy 2050: Hydrogen, Climate Lockdowns and Data Centres on the Moon?
Sounds like science fiction, but it isn’t.
A massive energy trilemma is taking shape: cost, energy security and sustainability must be balanced simultaneously in the midst of a geopolitical landscape that is shifting dramatically right now.
The Iran crisis around the Strait of Hormuz has once again exposed the vulnerability of the global economy. Maritime chokepoints, market shockwaves, and at the centre of it all: an industry in upheaval.
Oil platforms, as complex as a spacecraft, are now fully recyclable. Rolls-Royce is experimenting with nuclear micro-batteries. China is betting on salt batteries. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are experiencing a global boom. Google and Microsoft are already solving their own energy needs independently, while energy companies quietly build out their hydrogen infrastructure.
But who wins the race and at what cost?
Can cleantech keep up when AI is now the fastest-growing energy consumer on the planet? The ICT sector could account for up to 21% of global electricity needs by 2030. Will entire communities lose their drinking water to cool data centres? Will servers migrate to the oceans or straight to the moon? Are we approaching the end of the always-on society?
Energy is not a question of the oil price. It reveals what a nation truly values.
Elsa Solaris takes her audience on a journey through the energy landscape of tomorrow — from fusion energy to blackout scenarios, from geopolitical risks to the quiet revolutions emerging in laboratories and on offshore platforms around the world.
Dr. Elsa Solaris brings first-class real-world experience: as a leader at the Carbon Trust in London, she advised multinational corporations including Heineken on their climate strategies — up close and personal with the questions keeping executives of companies large and small awake at night.
Future of Healthcare: An Industry Is Being Rewritten
Your health app tells you to stay home even though you have no symptoms yet, and when you skip the gym, the insurance locks you out of your fridge. Not an episode of Black Mirror but the future of healthcare.
When biology becomes programmable, DNA is no longer destiny but source code. But who will program it?
The next superpower won’t be a country, it will be a health-compute cluster: Nvidia meets Roche. 3,500 GPUs training the next life-saving algorithm, decoding exabytes of genomic data, turning living cells into intelligent factories.
Miniature electronics, embedded sensors, connected health data – we are becoming a cloud of data. Who owns this cloud, and what happens when it’s hacked? Medicine is learning to predict the future. Nobody asked if you wanted to know.
Elsa Solaris shows with humour and infectious curiosity how the convergence of AI, genomics and computing is ushering in a new era of medicine and what it means for companies, investors and society.
