Shilpika (Shilps) GautamFounder

United Kingdom - London, England

Shilpika Gautam is the Founder and CEO of Opna - a climate fintech company on a mission unlock the needed finance for every high quality climate project with speed, scale, and equity.
She is also a Guinness World Record-breaking climate advocate, an entrepreneur, a global keynote speaker, and a seasoned financial technology and capital markets executive.

Over a 15 years+ career spanning four continents, Shilpika has been lucky to co-create the rise of new technologies, markets, and asset classes. From building the infrastructure for modern-day global payments to designing innovative financial products that helped scale commodities (and nascent carbon markets) into liquid/robust asset classes, to scaling B2B/enterprise businesses for regulated markets.

She has deep experience working within and with financial institutions- From advising institutional investors such as Pension funds, asset managers, hedge funds, and SWF on asset allocation, to building global sales businesses for investment banks, to providing tech solutions for capital markets and financial crime to regulators, federal authorities and banks.

In 2017, Shilpika became the first-ever person to paddle the river Ganges in India from source to sea. The inspiration and motivation for this expedition was to tell the story of climate change from a human perspective- across caste, class, gender, faith, and political alignment and to highlight the need for equitable climate solutions.
This expedition is in the Guinness Book of World records for the longest ever stand-up paddle journey in history- This journey laid the foundation for global advisory and keynote speaking engagements on our climate crisis, was turned into a 100m+ viewership documentary for Discovery Channel and has helped inspire the origin story of SALT.

Shilpika holds a bachelor's degree in computer science & engineering and an MBA from IESE Business School in Barcelona & University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She currently lives in Berlin and is reachable on @shilpsgautam across all platforms.