How Can Other Species Directly Participate in our Economy and Why is it Important?

Biodiversity has an important impact in the world’s yield and productivity yet this is not factored in the current way the human economy works

Jonathan and Kaja will join Christian in a panel to discuss Tehanu.io, a project they are working on jointly to build the planet’s currency that will help protect our environment by reflecting the impact it has on our planet’s economy

Jonathan Ledgard has been the frontline foreign correspondent for The Economist leading stories from 50+ countries and many wars. He has written novels included Giraffe and Submergence. He is also a fellow and director at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and has been involved in promoting advanced technology in Africa, particularly around drones and fintech

Kaja Waisk is the founder Tehanu.io working on developing new methods on how to better represent biological diversity numerically and in our economy. She is also an adjunct professor at the J.Craig Venter Institute and a visiting scholar at Princeton University. Previously she co-founded Variant Bio to improve global health by studying the genes of people who are outliers for medically relevant traits and genetic architecture. She completed her PhD in molecular biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. After her PhD Kaja joined the New York Genome Center as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. There, she laid the foundation for her first company, Gencove, that introduced low-pass sequencing, together with cloud-based analysis and imputation software, as an alternative to genotyping arrays

Christian Teichmann is the founder and CEO of Burda Principal Investments – a long term growth equity fund that invests in fast growing digital technology companies in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. BPI is run by a dedicated team of investment professionals based in Munich, London, Berlin and Singapore. The fund’s investments to date include Etsy, Vinted, NordVPN, Bloom & Wild, Moneybox, Carsome and BillEase