Accelerator Mentors

The right mentor will not hand you a formula. They will help you see the decision you have been avoiding, the assumption that no longer holds and the opportunity hiding behind the numbers.

The Vest Ventures Accelerator brings founders together with an international group of entrepreneurs, investors, operators, legal experts, coaches and functional specialists who have built companies, led global teams, scaled revenue, negotiated investment rounds and helped startups move through the moments that define what happens next.

Build with people who have already faced the hard parts.

They come from different markets, disciplines and startup ecosystems. What connects them is practical experience and the ability to turn it into progress founders can use immediately.

A curriculum built around the start-up, not the classroom.

Our curriculum is designed to strengthen the entire business behind the product.

Across intensive workshops, focused mentoring and individual working sessions, founders challenge their positioning, sharpen product-market fit, build more predictable commercial systems, strengthen leadership, protect their intellectual property and prepare for investment.

Every mentor enters the program with a clear purpose: to help founders make better decisions, faster. The goal is not to leave with a notebook full of ideas. It is to leave with a stronger company.

Meet the mentors

Patrick Collins

Founder, Relationship of Sales

Sales built on trust, not pressure.

Patrick Collins helps sustainability-driven B2B startups create scalable revenue through relationship-led sales. With more than 13 years of experience in startup consulting, he brings a practical approach to commercial growth rooted in trust, relevance and long-term customer value.

A former professional footballer and the author of The Relationship of Sales, Patrick works with founders who want to build repeatable sales without reducing every interaction to another aggressive outbound sequence.

The Fundamentals of Sales

A practical workshop on building revenue through trust and value-first principles. Founders learn how to create stronger commercial relationships, understand what drives customer decisions and build a sales process that can scale without losing its human edge.

The group workshop is supported by individual sales reviews, helping each team examine its current approach and identify the highest-impact improvements.

Dan le Man

Pitch Coach and Stage Performer

Bring your pitch. Leave with your voice.

Dan is a pitch coach with 20 years of experience across stage, street and circus performance. He helps founders communicate with clarity, charisma and confidence without turning them into rehearsed copies of someone else.

His work goes far beyond editing slides. Dan focuses on how founders think, breathe, move, speak and respond under pressure, helping them develop a stage presence that feels credible, relaxed and entirely their own.

Pitch Coaching

A hands-on session that helps founders find the clearest and most compelling version of their story. The work covers storytelling, rhythm, timing, body language and deck structure, from what stays and what goes to how the whole pitch flows.

Stage Delivery

A practical exploration of presence, movement, breathing and the use of space. Founders learn how to earn the room’s trust, manage nerves and deliver confidently without sounding scripted or mechanical.

Q&A Preparation

A focused session for the part of the pitch founders cannot fully control. Teams learn how to navigate difficult questions, technical challenges and unexpected objections while staying composed, buying thinking time and using Q&A to build trust.

Gabriel Pana

Founder, Traction Keys

Revenue & Scale Operator, ex-UiPath

Turn early traction into a revenue system.

Gabriel Pana builds and scales repeatable revenue engines for technology companies, from the first signs of commercial traction to $10M, $100M and $1B+ in annual recurring revenue.

Having been part of UiPath’s journey from seed stage to IPO, Gabriel brings an operator’s understanding of what changes as a company grows: the process, the team, the metrics and the level of commercial discipline required.

His work helps founders move from founder-led selling and scattered opportunities toward a system that can be understood, measured and scaled.

Go-to-Market and Revenue

Founders examine how their positioning, sales motion, buyer journey and operating model work together to generate revenue.

Value-Based Sales

A practical approach to selling around customer outcomes and economic value rather than product features, internal effort or cost-based logic.

MEDDPIC and Sales Operations

Teams learn how to qualify complex B2B opportunities, understand decision-making structures and introduce greater visibility and discipline into their pipeline.

Inbound versus Outbound

A structured exploration of when each commercial motion works, what capabilities it requires and how to build the right balance for the company’s current stage.

Diana Karyan

Technology and Venture Capital Lawyer

Founder, Unicorn Legals

Build fast. Protect what makes the company valuable.

Diana Karyan is a technology and venture capital lawyer who has advised on hundreds of transactions involving startups and investment funds.

Her work spans the entire company-building journey, from incorporation and early funding to cross-border transactions, intellectual property, data protection, artificial intelligence regulation and Series A preparation.

Diana helps founders understand that legal foundations are not administrative baggage. They are part of the company’s ability to raise capital, enter partnerships and scale without carrying hidden liabilities.

The Founder’s IP Playbook

A practical guide to treating intellectual property as a business asset and competitive moat.

Founders explore copyright, trademarks, patents and trade secrets, learning when each form of protection matters. The workshop also tackles the ownership problems that can derail investment, including assignment gaps, university spinout terms, joint ownership, open-source contamination and poorly scoped pilot agreements.

The session helps teams audit their IP, repair red flags before investors discover them and keep their core assets defensible as they scale.

Building a GDPR Compliance Framework

Diana turns GDPR from a cloud of legal terminology into a practical operating framework.

The workshop covers personal data, special data categories, controller and processor roles, core compliance principles and the financial risks of getting them wrong. Using real case law, interactive exercises and practical examples, founders learn how to embed data protection into products and internal processes from the beginning.

The result is compliance that supports trust rather than slowing the company down.

Emanuel “Manu” Martonca

Founder and Pricing Engineer, Soft Fight

Capture a fair share of the value you create.

Emanuel Martonca has spent 14 years studying one persistent problem: why software businesses create significant customer value, yet fail to capture enough of it through their pricing.

He has led more than 340 negotiations and over 72 commercial optimisation projects, helping software companies move beyond cost-based guesswork and develop pricing that reflects the outcomes they deliver.

Manu is the author of the Just Margins newsletter and, together with the Soft Fight team, is building an agentic AI platform for pricing.

Pricing and Commercial Value

Manu helps founders understand pricing as a strategic growth system rather than a number placed on a website.

The work examines how customers perceive value, how pricing influences positioning and negotiation, and how companies can move away from internally focused cost calculations toward models connected to real customer outcomes.

Founders learn how to recognise where value is being left on the table and how to build a more deliberate approach to packaging, pricing and commercial conversations.

Adrian Pica

Vice President of Product, Eurowag

Co-founder, PretulMeu.ro

Build the product the market needs, not the one the roadmap prefers.

Adrian Pica is a product leader with more than ten years of experience across startups and global technology companies in Europe, the United States and Asia.

He has held senior product leadership roles at Bolt, Getsafe and Potters Technologies and currently serves as Vice President of Product at Eurowag. He is also the co-founder of PretulMeu.ro, a Romanian comparison platform for insurance and financial products.

Adrian brings a rare combination of startup speed, global product experience and an understanding of what it takes to lead product teams through different stages of scale.

Product Development Strategy

A practical session on connecting product decisions to customer needs, company strategy and commercial priorities.

Founders examine how to define the right product problems, validate assumptions, prioritise effectively and avoid roadmaps driven by internal noise rather than market evidence.

The workshop helps teams build a clearer product strategy and create stronger alignment between founders, customers and development teams.

Rita Katona

Startup Partner and Mentor, Marketing & Growth

ZOLLHOF Tech Incubator

Turn “we build great technology” into “this is exactly who needs it.”

Rita Katona helps deep-tech founders translate complex products into clear market value.

Based in Europe and working closely with early-stage technology companies, she supports teams in identifying the right customers, sharpening their positioning and connecting marketing, pricing and sales into a go-to-market strategy that can actually be executed.

Her approach is structured, practical and built around the company’s current reality rather than a generic growth playbook.

Go-to-Market Strategy

A hands-on workshop in which founders build their go-to-market strategy pillar by pillar.

The session moves from customer definition and positioning to channels, pricing and sales execution, helping each startup create a practical plan it can begin implementing immediately.

Individual Go-to-Market Sessions

Focused 1:1 conversations tailored to the startup’s current stage, challenges and commercial priorities.

The sessions may cover positioning, marketing, customer acquisition, sales and the decisions required to build a more coherent route to market.

Karina Lapina

Co-founder, Enablers School

Startup Coach and Mentor

Clarity first. Progress follows.

Karina Lapina works with founders and startup teams to create greater clarity, alignment and momentum during the demanding early stages of company building.

As Co-founder of Enablers School, she supports entrepreneurs in transforming broad ambitions into focused priorities, practical goals and healthier ways of working together.

Her mentoring creates space for founders to step outside the urgency of daily execution, examine what is really happening inside the company and make more deliberate decisions about what comes next.

Goal Setting and Founder Alignment

Founders work on defining the priorities that matter most and translating them into clear, measurable goals.

The sessions help teams identify competing expectations, establish greater ownership and connect long-term ambition with the actions required now.

Team Culture and Execution

A practical exploration of how early-stage teams communicate, make decisions and maintain alignment under pressure.

Founders learn how to build a stronger operating rhythm, clarify roles and create a culture that supports both performance and long-term resilience.

Zane Bojāre

Co-founder, Enablers School

Startup Strategist and Mentor

A sharper story begins with sharper thinking.

Zane Bojāre helps early-stage founders bring greater clarity to their positioning, strategy and communication.

As Co-founder of Enablers School, she works with startups to challenge assumptions, identify what truly matters to customers and express the company’s value in a way that is both credible and memorable.

Her work connects strategic thinking with practical communication, helping founders move from broad claims and complex explanations toward a story the market can understand.

Positioning and Value Proposition

A practical workshop designed to help founders clarify who they serve, what problem they solve and why their approach matters.

Teams examine the assumptions behind their current positioning, refine their value proposition and develop language that reflects actual customer relevance rather than internal product vocabulary.

Startup Storytelling

Founders learn how to organise complexity into a clear and persuasive narrative.

The session helps teams communicate their product, market opportunity and ambition with greater precision across investor, customer and partner conversations.

Gilles De Clerck

B2B SaaS Growth Expert

Founder and Strategic Advisor

Make the company easier to understand, trust and buy from.

Gilles De Clerck works with B2B startups on the intersection of positioning, storytelling and commercial growth.

He helps founders transform complicated products and ambitious visions into a clear strategic narrative that supports customer acquisition, sales and fundraising.

His work challenges teams to move beyond polished language and identify the real insight at the centre of the company: the problem worth solving, the value worth paying for and the reason this team can win.

Strategic Storytelling

A practical workshop on shaping a company narrative that is clear, relevant and commercially useful.

Founders learn how to connect customer pain, product value and market opportunity into a story that works across pitches, websites, sales conversations and investor meetings.

Positioning for Growth

Teams examine how they are currently perceived, what differentiates them and where unclear language is weakening commercial traction.

The session helps startups sharpen their category, message and value proposition so that the company becomes easier for the market to understand and choose.

Vest Ventures Accelerator

Global experience. Directly applied to your start-up.

Inside the Vest Ventures Accelerator, mentors do not sit at the edge of the program. They work directly with founders, challenge the start-up and help turn ambition into measurable progress.

Bring the product, the traction and the questions you have not solved yet. We will bring the people who know where to look next.

Apply to the Vest Ventures Accelerator