UrbanZee is an exciting young startup focussing on making air quality measuring more widely available in cities around the world. It has developed several services to measure air quality of entire cites in detail and meaningfully involve citizens in a dialogue with governments to find immediate and long-term solutions.
It’s CEO, Aschwin van der Woude, explains: “we are ready to expand to and test other markets, and while working on closing our current funding round to achieve this, it became clear that we needed to expand our team and therefore decided to look for a CTO”.
Due to the corona period of self-isolation, finding and interviewing candidates was challenging and took a longer amount of time, but the UrbanZee team eventually narrowed down its candidates and decided to hire Dr. rer. nat. Joseph Pagaran, a multi-disciplined holistic thinker with a background in environmental physics and atmospheric science, with an avid interest in software engineering and using the latest tools to solve problems, such as using artificial intelligence.
“I first came across the UrbanZee team at Atmoshack at the end of 2018”, explains Dr. Pagaran, “they caught my eye not only because they won the pitching competition, but also because I recognised several shared interests”.
UrbanZee’s victory during AtmosHack qualified them for a ten month journey through the EU Copernicus accelerator programme, which further developed the ideas by using Space Data and the help of an experienced mentor. This programme prepared UrbanZee for its next steps.
“UrbanZee is an exciting young startup”, continues Dr. Pagaran, “I will be able to combine many of my skills in mathematics, data analysis, software development and data visualisation, but what gets me even more excited is that I can also execute many of my ideas, for instance, in predictive modelling of air quality, which I’d like to call chemical weather”.
The aim for UrbanZee is to close its current funding round by the end of Summer, and with this new addition to the team, UrbanZee aims to accelerate its development. “I always set my bar high filling any C-level positions and require a creative problem-solving mindset combined with a multi-disciplinary skill-set that is not easily found.”, explains CEO van der Woude with a serious tone, but then smiles broadly and concludes: “our new CTO hire positively surprised me in exceeding that expectation, and I look forward to working closely together in achieving our expansion goals”.
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