Opening of the Enterprise Estonia's Office to the EU

Throughout his career, H.E. Marten Kokk has been involved in various high-level diplomatic roles, contributing significantly to Estonia’s international presence and policy-making. He is a well-known advocate and spokesperson for public and digital diplomacy and administrative cooperation.

Sigrid Harjo is an experienced Member of the Management Board at the Enterprise Estonia (Estonian Business and Innovation Agency), where she drives initatives to foster innovation and support entrepreneurship. Focused on creating a thriving business environment, she helps businesses mitigate risks and seize new opportunities. Enterprise Estonia actively promotes and supports innovation, exports, tourism, foreign direct investments (FDIs), and talent attraction, playing a key role in enhancing the country´s economic and competitive landscape.

Dr Sigrid Rajalo is the Director of the Department of Innovation and Technology at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia. With over 10 years of experience in innovation policy design and research, she is highly skilled in innovation management, policy analysis, and international relations. Her PhD research focused on the key factors driving university-industry collaboration, a critical element in advancing Estonia´s innovation ecosystem.

As Deputy Director-General in the European Union’s industry department, Maive Rute focusses on green transition of industries, resilience of supply chains, availability of critical raw materials and promotion of investments. In June 2022, European Commission nominated her the first ever Chief Standardisation Officer. She is also member in the Horizon Europe research framework programme steering committee and supervises the Enterprise Europe Network as well as the European Clusters work.

Between 2005 – 2019, Maive Rute served as Director for Entrepreneurship and SMEs, and as Director and Deputy Director-General in the research and innovation field of the European Commission. She has previously worked as Deputy Governor of the central bank of Estonia and
CEO of KredEx, the Estonian business and export financing body.

Keith is heads the Unit in DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission responsible for European Innovation Council (EIC), including support to the EIC Board, preparing the EIC work programmes, and overseeing the EIC Fund. From 2015 to 2019, Keith was senior advisor to Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for research and innovation, on open science and open innovation, including Horizon Europe, scientific advice to policy, and the European Research Council. He was previously in the Cabinet of the Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and has worked in the European Commission on innovation policy, development and implementation of Framework Programmes, and public procurement of innovation.  He has previous experience in the UK government and a private company advising and investing in public private partnerships and spin-outs. Keith studied physics at Cambridge University and has a doctoral degree in innovation studies from the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the Sussex University.

Arnaud Castaignet is Vice President of Government Affairs & Strategic Partnerships at Skeleton Technologies, a European scale-up from Estonia, leader in high-power and fast-charging energy storage technology. Skeleton’s supercapacitors and high-power batteries decrease CO2 emissions, improve power quality, and enable the twin energy and digital transitions.

Skeleton has developed its own patented raw material, called “Curved Graphene”, for which it has been awarded the “European Inventor of The Year” Award in 2022 by the European Patent Office. Skeleton Technologies Group currently employs more than 300 people and has four main locations: its HQ in Tallinn (Estonia), its supercapacitor manufacturing in Saxony (Germany), its materials development in Saxony-Anhalt (Germany), and its testing and pilot production facility in Varkaus (Finland). In May 2024, the company announced its plans for expansion to France, with a future factory and R&D centre in Toulouse. Since its inception, Skeleton has raised over 300 M EUR from European and non-European leading industrial investors.

Arnaud represents Skeleton in various organizations such as Cleantech for Europe, Cleantech for Baltics, Clean Transition Dialogue on Cleantech, and the EU-Japan Business Roundtable. Arnaud has been working in government and public affairs for 15 years. In the past, he worked as a member of French President Francois Hollande’s communications team, and for the Estonian government as Head of Public Relations of the e-Residency programme.

Mari Savel is the Head of Grants at Stargate Hydrogen, with a background in material science and product design. She has vast experience in diverse RD&I fields, now focusing on developing novel electrolysis solutions for green hydrogen production. Mari’s expertise in smart, sustainable design and public funding coordination drives her passion for impactful innovations.

Stargate Hydrogen is an alkaline electrolyser OEM focused on commercialising novel electrode and stack technologies for green hydrogen production. Its core technology combines proven alkaline methods with breakthrough materials, called ‘Stardust,’ resulting in highly efficient ceramics-based electrolysers that reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. Despite being a young company, Stargate has grown to 60+ employees, secured over €42 million, patented key innovations, and is scaling from prototypes to MW-scale production. The company also participates in Clean Hydrogen Partnership and Horizon Europe projects and holds IPCEI (Important Project of Common European Interest) status.

Dr. Dan Bogdanov leads Cybernetica’s Information Security Research Institute and is the Head of the Standing Committee on Cybersecurity at the Estonian Academy of Sciences. Cybernetica has built secure and cryptography-based data exchange, digital identity and data analysis systems for governments in Estonia, Malaysia, Ukraine, Benin among others. Dr Bogdanov leads a research team that works on international cybersecurity research projects with US DARPA, US Office of Naval Research, European Defence Fund, Horizon Europe and Estonian agencies. He has worked on information security and cryptography standardisation in ISO/IEC committees and has co-edited standards on privacy-preserving system architecture and secret sharing. He is also a board member of the MPC Alliance, an industry organisation of companies developing and using secure multi-party computation technology.

Dr. Einar Karu holds a Ph.D. degree in Atmospheric Chemistry from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry from Mainz, Germany and has led the technology with UP Catalyst since beginning of 2021.  With current position of Vice President of Technology, he has played a key role in driving the company’s technology and innovation, particularly in the research and development of sustainable carbon nanomaterials and graphite from CO2 feedstock gas utilization. Einar has extensive experience managing technology teams and large-scale projects, including the EIT Raw Materials scale-up grant KAVA8 CO2Carbon project, where he led the development of the carbon nanomaterials with the generation 2 molten salt CO2 capture and electrochemical transformation reactor.

With his expertise in atmospheric chemistry and electro-transformation technology, Einar provides essential expertise to ongoing projects, technology scale-up and intellectual property rights protection, sharing valuable lessons and insights gained from his work as a critical reviewer. He also leads a highly skilled innovation team, ensuring that the entire department contributes to advancing UP Catalyst’s groundbreaking technologies, projects and business goals. His leadership and deep technical knowledge are central to the company’s mission of producing sustainable, high-value carbon materials from waste CO2 feedstock. Recently, he has undertaken more business development and partnership building endeavors.

In a nutshell, UP Catalyst is a deep tech / climate tech company which transforms CO2 feedstock gas into sustainable carbon nanotubes and graphite raw material with primary focus on energy storage market, e.g. battery manufacturing. UP Catalyst’s patented electrolyte salt CO2 capture and electrochemical transformation technology provides local sustainable alternative to heavily polluting fossil fuel based methods. The main consumables with UP Catalyst novel method are electricity and CO2 gas. The focus currently is at generation 3 reactor system scale-up activities at new production facility in Estonia, off-take agreement developments and preparations for Series A round investment. The head count is currently at 40. UP Catalyst’s mission is to empower 4M electric vehicles with green CNTs and graphite by 2030. The vision is to become number 1 sustainable battery carbon raw material supplier in Europe.