About Ekaterina Almasque

Ekaterina is a General Partner at OpenOcean, a venture capital firm founded by entrepreneurs behind MySQL. OpenOcean invests in enabling technologies for the data-driven future, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, data infrastructure and automation, with its main focus on B2B software in Europe. Ekaterina is on the board of IQM, the European leader for superconducting quantum computers, as well as several other companies. Before joining OpenOcean, she was a Managing Director of Samsung Catalyst Fund in Europe, Samsung’s Electronics $500M venture capital multistage investment fund focused on core technology areas including robotics, autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, digital health, data infrastructure and device level technologies. She led investments across Europe in companies such as GraphCore, Mapillary, AIMotive, Sentiance and Quobyte, as well as several venture funds. For over ten years prior to that, Ekaterina was part of several corporate and independent venture capital funds in Silicon Valley and Europe. Before becoming a venture capitalist, she was a software architect with focus on emerging distributed architectures. She launched new products, led standardisation of Java, and became entrepreneurs 17 years old. Ekaterina (Katya) has academic background in AI/ML and cutting edge software solutions for data and information processing.