A Fireside Chat with Charlie Graham, CO-Founder and CIO Seedstars

Paklaunch webinar with Charlie Graham-Brown (Co-Founder and CIO Seedstars). Seedstars is a global seed stage investment vehicle with 70 portfolio companies across the emerging markets with a goal to add another 140 companies to our portfolio in the next 5 years. Seedstars is sector agnostic but focuses on FinTech, AgTech, EdTech and HealthTech; and their Pakistani startup portfolio includes: Dastgyr, Oware Technologies, and Oraan.

GUEST’S BIO:
Charles Graham-Brown is Chief Investment Officer and Co-Founder at Seedstars. Charlie started out as a mechanical engineer working on projects such as A380 at Airbus. Seeking a faster paced career, he switched tracks through an MBA at the Collège des Ingénieurs in Paris, and subsequently moved to Geneva and into investment management. Charlie spent four year with BlueOrchard Finance, investing in high impact financial institutions in 20+ countries across Africa, Asia and MENA and became a CFA charterholder.

The entrepreneurial bug struck in 2013 when Charlie started his own venture before joining the founding team of Seedstars in early 2014. He has been instrumental in the growth of Seedstars from a team of just 6 people operating in 20 countries to a team of over 100 operating in more than 100 markets. Responsible for investments, he has accumulated deep knowledge of technology trends in emerging markets with a portfolio of over 67 startups in 31 countries.

MODERATOR’S BIO:
A Forbes Next 1k Entrepreneur, Clinton Global Honoree, Tedx speaker, winner of the Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch Show and Web Summit Qatar, Mariam Nusrat is a US-based Pakistani entrepreneur, with 11 years in the purposeful video games sector and 15 years of experience in the Edtech space, working at the World Bank across 22 different countries.

Mariam is the Founder of Breshna.io, a tech platform that empowers users to create, share and monetize their own purposeful video games with no code and at lightning speed, think Canva for games! The platform has 180k registered game makers, 160k+ games published and 2m+ game clicks. Mariam has raised $2.5m in seed funding for Breshna from investors including Paris Hilton and Randi Zuckerberg.

She also leads a gaming studio that creates low-cost mobile games for positive behavior change among the bottom billion. The team has created games for a wide range of development projects focusing on education, reproductive health, climate action and social cohesion.

Mariam is on a mission to empower the next 100m people to tell their stories through video games.