Team, Advisers & Governance

This is a category where the team is the moat as much as the technology, because building the reference layer needs three things at once: the access to move governments, the credibility to raise institutional and catalytic capital, and the technical depth to build the measurement. The founder has spent her career assembling exactly that combination, and the senior team and scientific bench fill in around it. The company is early, and the formal governance is being put in place as part of this round.

The founder

Olga Sytnyk, Founder and Chief Executive. Olga has spent more than a decade at the intersection of forest governance, public-sector reform and entrepreneurship. In Ukraine she founded and led one of the country's largest grassroots anti-deforestation movements, whose investigations led to the dismissal of the head of the national forest agency and to changes in the law on illegal logging. She was then elected into regional government in the Carpathians, as Deputy Head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Council — a region roughly 60% protected forest — where she carried that forest reform into office; and in 2019 she advised the Office of the President of Ukraine on forestry-sector reform, auditing the State Forest Resources Agency. Earlier she trained as a lawyer, with a Master of Law with honours and summer studies at Oxford and Vienna, and built and scaled a company that put her on Forbes Ukraine's list of leading women entrepreneurs.

For the past six years she has built the AWAKEN group in the Peruvian Amazon from the ground up: assembling the forest concession, the government and scientific relationships, the research base near Iquitos, and the model behind CeibaQ. She represented Peru as an official government delegate to the COP30 climate summit. The founder-market fit is the rare part: she knows how to move government, private capital and technology in the same direction, and she has earned the Amazon access, trust and operating presence that this company is built on. The flip side — key-person dependence — is real and is named in the Risk Register.

The senior team

The leadership team is assembled, with the chief financial officer formally onboarded and the others agreed and engaged; the equity agreements are executed as part of this round.

• Luis Carlos Silva, Chief Financial Officer. Based in Brussels, with a background in structured finance, financial risk and institutional investment. Formally onboarded.
• Evgen Dykyi, Chief Scientific Advisor. A biologist and head of Ukraine's National Antarctic Program, who chairs the board of the science institute (TERI) that holds the reference model.
• Mariam Mamedli, Chief Product Officer. More than a decade in fintech and data intelligence.
• Olena Koval, Communications Lead. Seventeen years in communications, formerly head of communications for Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation and Ministry of Health.

The scientific bench

The science is anchored locally, not imported.

• Professor Cisco Ramírez, a forest engineer at the National University of the Peruvian Amazon (UNAP) and vice-president of the science institute, anchors the botanical and field science.
• Olena Marushevska, who led the Ukrainian component of one of Europe's largest river-survey programs, the Joint Danube Survey, serves on the science board.
• More than thirty specialists work at the research base in the Peruvian Amazon.

Advisers

The advisory bench is deliberately senior and Peru-anchored, because in this category the people who can open and validate institutions matter as much as the operating team.

• Carlos Loret de Mola de Lavalle, a former Minister of Environment of Peru and an architect of the country's environmental-governance reforms.
• Gustavo Suárez de Freitas, one of Peru's most prominent environmental leaders, a former Executive Director of Peru's National Forest Conservation Program for Climate Change Mitigation, an architect of the country's REDD+ framework, and a globally recognized authority on Amazon governance and sustainable development.
• Stefan Lees, a former senior advisor to the national environmental fund PROFONANPE, on conservation finance and governance.

Between them they bring direct standing with the institutions that have to accept and contract the work. The founder's own working relationships across the environment ministry, the forest service, the oversight body and the Loreto regional government underpin the institutional access the company runs on, and the partnerships and memoranda these relationships have produced are set out as evidence in Traction & Evidence.

Governance

The governance is built around keeping the data company clean and the verification neutral.

• The three-entity structure does the work. The data company (AWAKEN AI) is kept separate from the concession company (AWAKEN Management) and from the grant-funded science institute (TERI) that holds the reference model, so that what investors back is a clean data business and the verification layer stays conflict-free. The structure is set out in Corporate Structure.
• The science institute has a standing board. TERI, which holds the reference asset and receives the grant, has a founding board chaired by the chief scientific advisor, with the founder as its legal representative.
• The anchor investor receives a board-observer seat and full information rights, as set out in Capitalization.

What is still to be formalized, and is part of this round, is named plainly: the board of the data company itself, the shareholders' agreement covering the 31% non-controlling interest in the concession company (reserved matters, transfer, drag and tag), the option pool, the founder-loan agreement, and the intellectual-property assignments. These are the legal steps of the raise, not settled facts.

The priority hire

The single most important hire ahead is a Chief Technology Officer, and the option pool is reserved with that role first in line, alongside a chief operating officer and legal and advisory hires. The pre-seed team is deliberately lean — founder-led plus a first business-development hire; the larger team is funded by the growth round, after the rail is proven.

The honest read

The strength here is a founder with a rare combination of government access, capital credibility and a real Amazon operating base, around a senior team and a local scientific bench that are genuinely in place. The honest counterweights are equally plain: the company is closely identified with its founder, several of the senior roles are agreed rather than long-tenured, the technical leadership seat is still open, and the formal governance — the board, the shareholders' agreement and the equity and IP documents — is being executed now rather than already done. This is what an early company at the point of its first institutional round looks like, and the round is what formalizes it.