There's a question that sounds philosophical until you realize it's actually structural: who gets to build the future?

Susanne Najafi doesn't ask it to provoke. She asks it because the answer, right now, is too narrow — and that narrowness is costing us.

At the Epicenter Changemaker Award 2026, the Swedish investor and serial entrepreneur laid out a case that was part market thesis, part wake-up call. The thread running through all of it: we are systematically leaving value on the table, and calling it normal.

Crisis isn't the problem. Comfort is.

Najafi has lived through enough turbulence to have developed a working theory about it. Crisis, she argues, brings adrenaline — and with it, a kind of creative clarity that calmer periods rarely produce. Some of her best decisions, her biggest bets, came during moments that looked like they were going wrong.

Her message to founders wasn't the usual resilience talk. It was sharper than that: don't just survive the crisis. Use it. Ask what becomes possible precisely because things are in motion. The downside is visible to everyone. The opportunity usually isn't.

The arbitrage nobody wanted to name

The pivot in Najafi's investing career came when she looked at the numbers clearly. In Sweden, nearly half of all founders have immigrant backgrounds. A few percent of capital goes to them. The rest flows to a narrow demographic, concentrated in a handful of geographies and networks.

She didn't frame this as injustice — or at least, not only as that. She framed it as arbitrage. If capital systematically overlooks strong founders based on background rather than potential, returns are being left behind. That's not a values problem. That's a market problem.

BackingMinds was built on that logic. Find the blind spots. Invest there. Not out of charity — out of conviction that the best ideas don't sort themselves neatly into the existing networks of power.

Capital, she reminded the room, is power. Distributing it differently isn't just good ethics. It's a way of shaping which futures actually get built.

The outsider advantage

BackingMinds hunts for what Najafi calls impact unicorns — companies tackling large, structural problems with the ambition to scale globally. Global traceability platforms working with Adidas and Nike. Green ammonia replacing traditional fertilizers, with Bill Gates backing it. Fossil-free cement that could become a genuine climate tipping point.

What many of these companies share, she noted, is founders who came from outside the industry they disrupted. Entrepreneurial naïveté, she called it — and meant it as a compliment. When you don't know what's supposed to be impossible, you're more likely to attempt it.

The changemakers, in her experience, are often the ones who weren't invited to the table in the first place.

Algorithms aren't neutral. Neither is silence.

Najafi also pushed into territory that the tech industry still handles awkwardly: AI accountability. Algorithms, she was direct about this, are not neutral. They reflect the data they're trained on and the teams that build them. When those inputs are skewed — and they are — the outputs carry that skew into healthcare tools, financial systems, hiring decisions.

The numbers she cited aren't abstract: the percentage of women working in AI remains low. Training data skews toward high-income, English-language sources. The digital divide between wealthy and developing nations is growing, not shrinking.

Her call wasn't to slow AI down. It was to build it better — with traceability, with accountability, with genuine investment in the companies trying to solve these structural problems rather than paper over them.

Europe's window

She closed with something that felt less like inspiration and more like urgency. Digital infrastructure is concentrated in the US and China. Europe has received, in her words, a super wake-up call. Dependency, she argued, is a vulnerability — but it's also a forcing function.

The crisis creates the momentum. Build the infrastructure. Strengthen the ecosystems. Stop waiting for someone else to take the first move.

The future will be built by someone. The question Najafi left the audience with — and leaves with us — is whether Europe will be among those building it, or among those who had the chance and deliberated too long.

‍