Chairwoman of Ækora | Corporate Trainer | Public Speaker | Leadership Developer | Custom Software Developer | Grant Writer | Program Coordinator
Most people who teach founders how to raise money have never had to tell a team the money is gone. Sibilla Strupule has. In 2025, after five and a half years, she shut down Material Mapper, the circular construction tool she had built in Oslo. She mentions it in the same breath as the wins, which tells you most of what you need to know about how she works.
Pitch Authority Is Not a Title She Handed Herself Lightly
Sibilla Strupule is a Pitch Authority for founders and leadership teams, chairwoman of the AI Autimations agency Ækora, and a mentor with the European Innovation Council. She has raised more than €7M for her own ventures and helped clients raise over €70M. What defines her is not the record, it is that she puts the failure next to it without being asked.
From a Yacht Startup in Venice to a Tool That Ran Out of Runway
She started in rooms where nobody was obliged to listen. After a BBA at EU Business School, she spent a year in the forex industry building relationships with traders across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America, learning early that the same sentence lands differently in every market. Back in Riga, she moved into due diligence and IT, working with large accounts including banks and insurance brokers, work that rewards precision over polish.
Then came Antlos in Venice, where she served as Chief Commercial Officer of a company describing itself as the Airbnb of the sea, and which was acquired by Sailogy in 2018. Selling a category that does not exist yet is a particular kind of training. You cannot lean on comparisons. You have to make people believe in something they cannot picture.
London followed, as CMO of a payments processing company operating across thirty EU markets. She held a shareholder and advisory position at Sailogy that ran until 2025, went through Antler in 2020, and moved to Norway two months before COVID began that same year. It was there that she co-founded Material Mapper, a forecasting tool built to help developers and municipalities hit the EU’s 70 percent construction reuse quota.”
For five years she pitched it, funded it, and pushed it into a slow-moving industry. In 2025 the market conditions did not move with her, and she closed it.
“I have been on both sides. I have raised, exited, and had a venture go bankrupt.”
That sentence is her entire credential. Alongside it sits the teaching work, mentoring entrepreneurship students at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, an advisory board seat at Impulse4Women, leading the Business Lab at SSE, and years as a lead jury member at pitch events, watching hundreds of founders lose rooms they should have won.
€70M, 500 Founders, and the Diagnosis Nobody Wants
Today her practice is deliberately narrow. She does not do general communication coaching. She works only where money or a decision is on the line, and she has moved delivery from individual founders to institutions, which is how one contract now reaches an entire cohort of an accelerator, a university programme, or an EU-backed agency.
The numbers behind that: 500-plus founders trained, more than 50 keynotes, over 20 international pitch competition wins, and work alongside organisations including the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, EIT and Visa. Forbes has featured her more than once. Her own award shelf includes Oslo Innovation Week, Startup Extreme, The Global Hack, and the Habitat for Humanity European Housing Awards.
What she has concluded from all of it is not what the industry sells.
“Across hundreds of rooms the failure point is almost never the content. It is state.”
She is talking about physiology, not skill. “Under pressure people speed up, shorten their breath, and get defensive in Q&A.” No amount of slide redesign touches that, which is why her work borrows from somewhere else entirely.
“Strength training is where I learned to sit inside discomfort without flinching.”
She prepares founders the way a coach prepares an athlete, and she measures them accordingly. Not on applause. On whether the meeting produces another meeting, and whether the founder can absorb a hostile Q&A without losing the room.
Consider the fintech AI analytics founder who came to her after six months of raising with nothing closed. Strong product, credible market, no movement. Sibilla Strupule’s read was that he could not explain his own company inside a minute, so every investor conversation began confused and never recovered. He was also selling intent rather than evidence, so she sent him back out to convert interest into signed LOIs and paid pilots before touching the narrative again.
He closed a $1M round in the second month of working together.
Her stated goal for any client is stranger than it sounds. “Boring is the goal. Boring means automatic.” She drills founders until their own answers stop feeling like a performance, because the room that decides your future is not the room where you want to be improvising.
What the Closure Bought Her
Material Mapper didn’t fail on the pitch. It failed because the demand it was built for, a construction industry pushed toward sustainability by EU regulation, never arrived on schedule, and the macro environment moved the other way. That’s not a room you lose. That’s a market that wasn’t going to move. Having lived the difference, she can tell a founder which one they’re actually in, and she’ll say it early, when it’s still cheap to hear.
That is the rarest thing she sells, and it is not on any slide. Plenty of people can teach a founder to sound certain. Sibilla Strupule prepares them for the moment they are not.
Sibilla Strupule is the founder of her eponymous coaching practice, based in Riga, Latvia, and working with clients globally. She prepares founders, executives and leadership teams for investor pitches, board presentations and keynotes, and mentors DeepTech startups through the European Innovation Council. To connect with Sibilla or learn more, visit www.sibillastrupule.com or her LinkedIn Profile
