42. How I Became a Startup Founder, Refugee, and Norwegian Woman of the Year, all at Once

Maria Amelie is the co-founder of Factiverse, an AI-startup that automates fact-checking and research with AI and NLP, which recently raised 1 million euro in private and soft funding.

Maria, who had to leave her home country of Russia in 2002, became the center of a political controversy when she was arrested after a speaking engagement and denied asylum, only a year after she was awarded “Norwegian of the Year.”

Her first book, which came out in 2010, led to a huge debate on refugees and contributed to a change in Norway’s immigration law. Since then, she has written five books on immigration, freedom of speech, and entrepreneurship and became Best Startup Journalist for her articles on growing innovation ecosystems in the Nordics.

She is on the board of Startup Migrants, a company she co-founded in 2018 with an aim to help cities build inclusive startup ecosystems.

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