AI is a multiplier.

Julia Krysztofiak-Szopa

Julia Krysztofiak-Szopa founded juliaszopa.com after spending 17 years watching companies — from Silicon Valley startups to Central European tech firms — struggle with the same problem: brilliant people, good intentions, and operations that couldn't keep up.

She studied Philosophy at the University of Warsaw and Artificial Intelligence at KU Leuven — an unusual combination that shaped how she approaches everything: start with the problem, not the solution. She came to technology with a humanist's instinct — to understand before building, and to question before adopting.

Her career took her from Blackbox Accelerator in Palo Alto, where she worked with non-US startups raising funding in Silicon Valley, to CEO of Startup Poland — the largest tech think tank in CEE — to COO of Appsilon, a global data science consultancy. Along the way she mentored startups through NCBiR and the Łukasiewicz Research Network, and taught at the AI Executive Academy. Since ChatGPT became a household name in 2023, she has been working with professionals and organisations across industries — helping them cut through the hype and figure out what AI actually changes about how they work.

She's based in Warsaw. She works with companies across Poland and internationally.

She is driven by two things that rarely go together: a deep curiosity about how things work — and an equally deep need to make them work better.

"I like seeing people become more like who they want to be — and knowing I helped them get there."