Dr. Elsa Solaris
Elsa Solaris, PhD is a synthetic biologist turned venture capitalist, futurist, and science-fiction author who works at the intersection of deep technology, capital, and imagination. Known professionally as “The Biofuturist”, she is Managing Partner of Fraktal Ventures, a family office, and a globally touring keynote speaker represented by the Gordon Poole Agency.
Her career spans laboratory science, frontier-technology investing, and speculative storytelling, and she has built a reputation for translating complex science into vivid pictures of the near future. She conducted her scientific and venture-capital work under the name Elsa Sotiriadis and now writes and performs as Elsa Solaris, the identity she uses publicly today.
As a futurist and keynote speaker, Elsa helps leaders understand how emerging technologies — from artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to advanced energy systems — are reshaping business and society, delivering what she calls “McKinsey-meets-TEDx”-style keynotes for audiences at companies including Invesco, MSD, Gilead Sciences, and SBM Offshore. Her talks examine the governance of AI and democracy, the rise of the “agentic economy” in which a single person may direct fleets of autonomous AI agents, chip wars and AI-generated disinformation, the programmable future of healthcare, and the contested energy landscape of 2050.
A recurring thesis runs through her work: that biology is becoming the next great software revolution, and that once it is programmable, “DNA is no longer destiny but source code.” In 2026, she cofounded a Geneva-based venture at the intersection of artificial intelligence and premium storytelling, and she publishes blue signal / white noise, her Substack newsletter on the questions raised by accelerating technology.
Earlier in her career, Elsa was a venture capital investor at SOSV, the world’s most active deep-tech, pre-seed fund, where she helped finance, build, and launch roughly 25 deep-technology and life-sciences startups across the food, health, and technology industries. As Programme Director and Chief Futurist of RebelBio, SOSV’s life-sciences accelerator in Cork, she coached founders turning scientific breakthroughs into products and argued that biology was entering a moment as transformative as personal computing in the early 1980s. Read New generation of biotech start-ups to lift off at Cork’s RebelBio accelerator.
As a biofuturist, she advised a leading global technology company on its digital-biology strategy and consulted for a major Chinese technology company and the World Health Organization. Between 2018 and 2019, she was Account Director for Europe at the Carbon Trust in London, advising multinational corporations including Heineken on science-based climate targets and decarbonization strategy, and earlier she worked as an innovation consultant on emerging technologies at Pioneers in Vienna.
Elsa earned her international joint PhD in synthetic biology from Imperial College London and the University of Hong Kong, developing programmable DNA nanostructures designed to target and kill cancer cells — a “cancer moonshot” for which she received a merit-based scholarship from the Imperial International Office. At Imperial, she also earned a Master of Research in Synthetic and Systems Biology, and she completed a Mini-MBA at Imperial College Business School. She spent a summer term studying Environmental Management at Harvard University.
Silicon Republic named Elsa one of 15 women in biotech to follow, and her ideas have been featured by the BBC, New Statesman, de Volkskrant, Arab News, Times Radio, Red Bull Media, and TEDx. She has delivered keynotes and talks around the world, including at Øredev and a Possible Futures lecture at UCL’s Bartlett Faculty, as well as on stages across Riyadh, Jeddah, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, and Paris. She memorably became a “cyborg” live on stage at Hofburg Imperial Palace, Vienna, Pioneers Festival with her “Become a Cyborg” session by implanting an NFC microchip in her hand to trigger interactions by gesture. Watch SYN 3.0 – PIONEERS FESTIVAL – VIENNA – 2016.
Alongside her work in science and technology, Elsa is an Amazon-bestselling science-fiction author and poet. Her debut novella, Replicon, earned an honourable mention at the Writers of the Future competition in Hollywood, and her newer speculative fiction was longlisted for the Young Storyteller Award in Vienna. She contributed a companion talk — on whether artificial intelligence would run a country better than humans — to the BBC’s award-winning science-fiction podcast Forest 404.
Listen to Forest 404. She is one of twenty-three contributors to the anthology Brave New Human: Reflections on the Invisible, has written for Singularity Hub and O’Reilly’s BioCoder, and has published poetry in literary magazines and anthologies.
Berlin-born and of Swiss-Greek heritage, Elsa speaks five languages, has lived in nine countries, and is based in the Zürich area of Switzerland.
Visit her LinkedIn profile, homepage, her Biofuturist site, and her Speakers Associate profile. Follow her on Instagram and X.