Ekaterina
Stambolieva

I am a serial impact entrepreneur, and a female space tech founder. I am a Swiss Army knife, and in 2019 I was the only woman in Portugal who lead and implemented a space tech project. I have extensive expertise in Machine Learning (9+ years of data science), Python (8+ years) and Satellite Image Analysis (2+ years). CTO & CEO of startups with experience in managing medium-sized teams. 0 to MVP in a sprint. 

PROJECT

For now, we helped verify that 100 villages, more than 2000 isolated properties and 143 886 ha are better protected against wildfires (e.g. surrounded by created defensible spaces) in 4 Portuguese municipalities. 

We aim at getting recommended by ANMP (the National Association of Municipalities) in Portugal to cover much larger parts of the country. 

Financially speaking, we would appreciate business mentorship – in the aspect of helping us build a stronger B2B business model – with a focus on the insurance industry. 

Thinking globally, we would like to expand this impact building on the connections to other C40 cities – especially in countries like the US, Canada, France and Australia. 

When we help governments mitigate wildfires, more trees live longer to capture greater quantities of CO2 so that we increase the ability of Earth to sequester CO2 instead of reduce it while losing vegetation mass, properties, crops, commercial forests and the quality of the air we all breathe. 

I had been working on social and environmental problems for 3 years. Then in 2017 Portugal caught fire. I was travelling around the countryside – camping and exploring – and suddenly I was afraid to be far away from a water body. This is a feeling I do not recommend to anymore. It is then when I decided I will work on helping wildfire mitigation. I started researching and saw the massive the problem is and how climate change accelerates its negative impact. 

MOTIVATION FOR AND COMMITMENT TO CREATING A BETTER AND MORE SUSTAINABLE PLANET

Humanity has 10 years to do something about climate change. Unless we act now and we do a lot – the world as we know seems to be headed to an end in the next 30 to 50 years. At some point I realised that this is in my lifetime and that I will give every single breath I have to work on preventing a catastrophe from happening. I hold myself accountable for that. 

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